Let's Meet... Jade Mills

Tell us a bit about yourself and your role

I’m Jade and I currently work as the Digital Learning Technical Advisor at the School of  Mathematical Sciences. I also work a little bit with the science and Engineering Foundation team. My role is mainly supporting academics and staff within QM, plus any other learning technologies, and providing workshops when needed. 

When did you start your current role?

Oh, that’s a good question, I think it was a while ago. nearly three years ago, maybe. So I think October 2021.

What was your previous role?

I worked for a membership organisation called the Energy Institute for a few years as an Additional Training Officer. I worked with Moodle, and I was the main site Administrator which was quite fun. I would help with bugs amongst other stuff, and it was quite interesting.

Previously I was a student here at QM and I was also working as an E-Learning Assistant, and then when I graduated I became an E-Learning Officer at the Law School. I came back to Queen Mary because I really love the atmosphere here. 

What do you think the differences are between your current role and your previous role, both in terms of the team work and the kind of work that you do? 

I’d say it’s quite different, in my last role I was the lead System Administrator for Moodle, so I would say it was more about trying to work with the whole organisation and try and help with any technical issues. I prefer this role to be honest because I have more contact with students and academics to support teaching. In my last role I didn’t really get to do that, and it was more technical. 

What are you currently working on? 

Mainly on Accessibility. I’ve been working on trying to make our maths module pages more accessible and I’ve been looking at the Brickfields accessibility tool. I’ve also been helping on online assessments. With the summer assessments, we had quite a few online exams, so I was helping set that up. I’ve also been doing some testing for the new Moodle site, but for now it’s mainly helping with Accessibility because for maths we have a lot of content that’s been written in Latex, so we need to make sure that it’s accessible for everyone in E readers. 

Have you had a chance to have a more in depth look at Brickfield, or go on any of the training courses that are available? 

At the moment I’m going through the online self-directed course, but I really do want to go on one of the workshops because Accessibility is a little bit different compared to other subjects.

During the community of practice event recently that TELT organised, I asked the team about Accessibility for us, and they contacted Brickfield on our behalf which was great. So now we understand what we need to do to make sure all our files are accessible. 

Is there anything you're really interested in learning more about? 

I think Virtual Reality. At the moment it’s not set in stone, but one of the projects that our school is looking into is Virtual Reality learning for some of our maths modules. So the idea is we want to engage our students to understand mathematical formulas in a different way. There are some learning tools where you can put VR sets on and see a mathematical formula in a 3D format. We want to look into that, and I think that’s quite interesting. 

Quick-fire round!

Pizza or pasta? 

Pizza, I just to love order Margarita pizzas and be quite basic. So Margarita or vegetarian pizzas, I usually buy a lot of that. 

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

Haunted house, because I think that would be more interesting, especially if you actually meet a ghost or something like that. So, I think that would be more of an interesting story to tell people. 

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

Japan, I’ve been wanting to go to Japan for a long time, but it’s obviously it’s so expensive with the plane tickets and accommodation, but I would really love to. I love the culture there, and they have quite a lot of different islands and I’ve always wanted to go to this island called ‘Rabbit Island’ where they’ve just got rabbits everywhere. 

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

I’m reading Animal Farm, it’s quite like a small book, I think it’s interesting, I’ve never read a book like it. It’s really good and relevant, especially during the elections. I think it’s quite a good one.