Let's Meet... Bradley Desborough

Tell us a bit about yourself and your role.

I'm a Learning Technologist at the Unit of Psychological Medicine, Centre for Psychiatry and Mental Health. I'm here to support the students and the staff with the QMplus interface. It's a sort of in-between role of a Learning Technologist and a Designer. There's a lot of updating of existing materials to be more suitable for students across all our courses, and there's a lot of just general day-to-day support as well.

What did you do before joining QM?

I did an apprenticeship a long time ago as a Teaching Assistant in a Primary School. I then took on a TA's role at a different primary school for a few years. From that oddly, I jumped to a Learning Technologies Manager role at a Secondary School, which I did for about four years. A lot of that was sort of the springboard into this position.

What are you currently working on?

I’m currently working on restructuring or recreating from scratch new home pages for all the course modules so they're more suitable for students and staff to use. At the moment if a student is on two different courses they'll get two very different experiences, which can be quite jarring. I'm doing a standardisation and just a revival of navigation around the courses, it's a lot of restructuring and recreating courses.

What are your favourite digital tools to use?

One thing that I'm keen on and really enjoy at the moment is H5P, I find it's a really interesting tool.

There's engagement through interaction, there's videos, and there's custom things that can pop up, all that kind of stuff that makes the IT experience for the learner much better. So, I'm very much a fan of H5P tools.

What are your hobbies or interests outside of work?

I play drums, piano and also a little guitar. I've been to four countries this year so far and I'm heading out to Australia soon, so music and travel.

Quick-fire round!

What is your go to comfort food?

Arayes, it’s like a piece of bread stuffed with spiced beef, very easy to make and very nice.

Would you rather live in a haunted house or a house with no Internet?

Oh, haunted house, it would be entertaining, and I'd like that. The other thing is I kind of need the Internet for my job, so if I have a choice between being haunted and having no money, I'll take being haunted, I guess.

If money was no object, where would you go on holiday?

Japan, I'd like to go there. It seems like a very cool place; it's a very interesting blend of very modern cities right next to temples from who knows how long ago. It's a great country and looks interesting.

What's the most interesting thing you've read or watched recently?

There was a documentary I watched recently, it was about the history of Jorvik, which is York, back when it was a Viking settlement. Essentially it was all about the people who came, and all the changes in history that took place. So, there's, for instance things like York Minster the massive cathedral, there's a Roman wall from thousands of years ago still under it, which is technically bearing weight. There was a quite interesting part that showed all the different layers and different sections of it, it's very cool. I quite enjoy Viking history and historical events.

That's the final question, thank you very much!

That's great, happy to participate, have a good day!