UoB Online - University of Birmingham

It is an exciting time to join the University of Birmingham. The University has a well-earned reputation for its ambition, innovation, and success, its financial power to invest, and its sector leadership.

Introduction

At Birmingham, we have an ambitious 2030 strategy to double our research income and break into the top 50 universities globally. In the last decade, we have made substantial progress in the quality, ambition, and impact of our research. Outstanding global education is also core to our mission, and we continue to build a distinctive, exciting, and innovative approach that reflects our global ambitions, equipping our diverse student community to be the leaders, innovators, problem-solvers, and citizens of the future. Our educational offer is becoming increasingly flexible and accessible, supported by an enhanced digital approach, and facilitated by an ongoing investment into our online capabilities that include our distance-learning framework.

Whilst our learning and research frontiers are global, we are rooted in our region and focused on the common good, we are the UK’s exemplary civic University, remaining firmly committed to our foundations in the highly diverse communities, people, and economy of the city of Birmingham and the West Midlands.

The inaugural appointment to the Dean of UoB Online is a testament to this vision and our commitment to truly innovative learning and teaching. Building on our well-regarded distance learning programmes, we seek to form an offer that is broader, more accessible, and is designed to set the standard for online learning. Covering the Sciences, Education, Law and Business, our current online courses are built from the ground up and offer Masters, Certificates and Short Course formats.

These include the world’s first fully online, AMBA-accredited MBA; the LLM in Energy and Environmental Law providing students with the necessary legal framework to tackle the most pressing environmental challenges of our time; and the MSc in Bioinformatics driving new discoveries for data-driven health and life science industries by understanding and deriving meaning from complex data sets.

With endorsement from the University Executive Board, UoB Online has been created to support the University’s online learning vision. UoB Online is an ambitious team within the University, comprised of both academic and professional services staff. The team supports the development and delivery of a portfolio of online programmes that make our world-leading teaching and research accessible to lifelong learners across the globe. We are looking to recruit ambitious, collaborative and innovative individuals who can significantly contribute to realising the University’s strategic goals.

With some 3,400 students currently studying in our online programmes, the team are focused on building upon existing foundations and developing a new raft of high-quality online distance-learning programmes that reach a wider global audience and ensure the University of Birmingham is regarded as the high-water mark in digital learning and distance programmes.

We are looking for values-driven candidates to join our dynamic team during this exciting phase.

We hope to see your application.

How to apply

If you are interested in joining our dynamic, growing UoB Online team we would love to hear from you. Our current vacancies will be regularly updated below and can also be viewed on our vacancies webpage:

Head of Portfolio Development – advert closes on 30/09/2024
Learning Designer – advert closes on 30/09/2024

The University is committed to building a fully inclusive and diverse community at all levels. We welcome and encourage applications from candidates from all backgrounds with the qualifications and experience to undertake this role, including under-represented groups.

If you have any questions, please get in touch with us at uobonline.ops@contacts.bham.ac.uk.

The University of Birmingham is already one of the UK’s largest providers of distance learning ranking well within the top ten of the Russell Group. We currently have over 3,000 students studying remotely on our existing portfolio of online degrees.

We were a founding contributor to the FutureLearn platform and one of the first Universities within the UK to partner with an OPM services provider. Our Online MBA was the World’s first 100% online MBA to have been accredited by the Association of MBA’s (AMBA).

We recognise the considerable global potential for online learning and are investing in a significant expansion of online learning. Our ambition is to have 6,500 online learners studying with us at postgraduate level by 2030, which will require the development of around 20 new online master’s degrees.

Our team works across portfolio development, learning design, education operations and administration to ensure the successful growth and delivery of our online programmes, working in close partnership with colleagues across the University and our external partners. We are values driven and are looking for individuals who embody our core University values: ambitious, open, collaborative, innovative and responsible. As part of our ambitious business plan, we have several opportunities to join our growing team and to be part of the evolution of online learning at the University.

From a practical perspective, our team is based on our Edgbaston campus and works on a hybrid basis. UoB Online is part of the External Relations division at the University. In addition to the University-wide benefits on offer, External Relations has several staff networks, all staff events, values recognition awards and career development initiatives.

Birmingham has encouraged independent thinking and provided academic programmes that stretch and challenge for more than a century. Our stunning Edgbaston campus is a distinctive element of the experience we offer to our students. In recent years, this has been enhanced even further by major investments in a new main library, the Collaborative Teaching Laboratory, a Teaching and Learning Building, and a major sports centre.

Centred around the Green Heart, one of the largest open green spaces of any UK university, our 672 acre campus also includes The Vale student accommodation village, set around a lake in its own beautiful parkland. Our research enhances and reinforces our teaching, and we value and reward teaching quality. Experiences learnt during the Covid pandemic have allowed us to enhance our in-person teaching with enhanced digital learning.

Our student experience is enriched by a huge range of extra-curricular opportunities from sport and music to volunteering.

We are pleased with our high rates of graduate employment, and our students are the most frequently targeted of any university by the country’s top employers looking for graduate recruits.

Our student population has increased by over 4,000 since 2009-10, and we now have a total student population of over 25,000 undergraduate and 13,000 postgraduate students. We are a global community, with nearly 11,000 international students studying either at Edgbaston or overseas (at our Dubai campus, through our partnership with Jinan University, and on distance learning courses). We have over 3,000 students undertaking distance learning courses.