Dr Chrissi Nerantzi

National Teaching Fellow 2015

Chrissi Nerantzi used to be a translator of children’s literature and taught Modern Foreign Languages for many years, before moving into academic development. She is a passionate and creative academic developer. Her approach is playful and experimental and underpinned by scholarship and research. A colleague from MMU said about her: “Chrissi is a force of life and one of the most amazing and creative people I have ever met.”

In 2017 Chrissi completed her doctoral studie in the area of open cross-institutional academic development and developed a framework for cross-boundary collaborative open learning. She has initiated many successful creative and open pedagogical innovations that are influencing academic development and teaching practices in her own institution but also nationally and internationally. FLEX, the practice-based CPD programme with formal and non-formal pathways, the Greenhouse, a community of and for creative practitioners as well as the open cross-institutional courses - Flexible Distance and Online Learning (FDOL), Bring Your Own Device for Learning (BYOD4L), Flexible, Social and Open Learning (FOS), the webinar series Teaching and Learning Conversations (TLC), the open community Creativity for Learning in Higher Education (#creativeHE) and the Learning and Teaching in Higher Education chat (#lthechat) - are some of her ideas. These projects are all collaborative and have brought practitioners from different disciplines, institutions and countries together and foster development beyond boundaries, through creativity, sharing and collaboration.

Chrissi has inspired many colleagues and students over the years. A colleague developer from Salford wrote: “Chrissi’s passion and enthusiasm for teaching and learning is both inspiring and infectious. Her commitment to excellence is exemplary.” Chrissi was awarded the Vice-Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award at the University of Salford in 2013 and, in 2014, won with her students the Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association (UCISA) Best Case Study Award in the UK for her work around mobile learning. The cross-institutional collaborative project BYOD4L was shortlisted for an Association for Learning Technology (ALT) Team’s Award in 2014 and in 2017 Chrissi was awarded the ALT Learning Technologist of the Year.

Chrissi’s curiosity and passion for creative and open educational practices are leading her to new explorations. Her more recent projects include, the Open Facilitator Project with the Open Knowledge Foundation and colleagues in the US as well as the Pedagogic Innovators (#pin) project through which she studies the individuals behind innovations in learning and teaching and explore with colleagues how we can seed, support and spread the bug of innovation in higher education.