Carol Presenting to Wolverhampton University via Video Conference

Formerly from the UK, Carol Cooper-Taylor now calls New Zealand home, living in the beautiful Hawkes Bay.

Carol has had what she describes as a “career less ordinary”, having worked in the health and education sectors. She has been in junior through to management positions, from student to teacher to staff developer, in the private and state sectors.

She holds a Bachelors Degree in Education (majors in Music, Religious Education and Teaching), a Registered General Nurse qualification, a Master of Philosophy Degree (looking at “Gender differences in nurse teachers’ attitudes to IT”) and Certificates/postgraduate certificates in education and elearning/eteaching. She has won awards for computer assisted learning, published numerous articles and a book, presented at conferences and been invited to give key note presentations. She has served on numerous committees including being Chair of the British Computer Society Nursing Specialist Group, Campus Representative for ASCILITE and President of the Distance Education Association of New Zealand.

Her interest in computers in education began back when the Commodore 64 was state-of-the-art and she had to write her own programs to use in class, take her own computer into school and hook it up to the TV. Her colleagues said “nurses will never need computer skills, why are you bothering?”, but the students were enthralled so it was all worth it.

In 1994 she had her first glimpse of the web on a visit to University of Texas, Galveston. She immediately saw its potential for learning and teaching and went back to Manchester with a vision which enabled Nursing to be one of the first handful of Schools at the University to have a web site. This led to making student handouts, self assessment activities and a discussion board available on her own website (a fledgling learning management site), and publishing the first online book on the use of IT in nursing.

It was a natural progression to manage the roll out of Blackboard at the University of Wales Institute Cardiff, with over 1/3 of the students using it in the first year of deployment.

With the move to New Zealand Carol has had the opportunity to work on “flexible-ising” curricula at the University of Auckland Medical School. Before establishing Cooper-Taylor Training she was the Manager of Teaching and Learning Services at Lincoln University.

Her passion is engaging, interactive learning and teaching, and this spills over into creating business sites and teaching business women and men to manage their own applications.