Our People

Prof Rhona Sharpe

Fellow, Ordinary Fellow

Director, Centre for Teaching and Learning

MBA (UCL), PGDE (Pymouth), PhD & BSc (Reading)

Professor Rhona Sharpe is a higher education manager currently holding the position of Director of the Centre for Teaching Learning. She works across the collegiate University to initiate, support and evaluate educational enhancement initiatives. Rhona has steered many projects throughout her career and has developed approaches which foreground student experiences and academic practices in order to lead to sustainable organisational change. She was previously Head of the Department of Technology Enhanced Learning at the University of Surrey, where she led the team in focusing on the development of technologically enabled approaches supporting the university’s research-led teaching ethos.

Rhona writes and talks about digital education, digital literacies and educational leadership. She has directed a number of projects investigating learners’ experiences of technology which received national recognition in pioneering research methods and techniques for eliciting students’ expectations and experiences of using technology in their learning. The culmination of these projects was the ALT-ELESIG community which aims to build capacity for undertaking and using learner experience research across all education sectors.

Having worked as an educational developer in higher education for over 20 years, Rhona is a Senior Fellow of the Staff and Educational Development Association, a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a National Teaching Fellow.

Rhona has maintained her teaching interests throughout her career and currently teaches on the MA in Open and Distance Education at the UK Open University.