A role-playing world map

November 24, 2022, by Helen Whitehead

Five minutes with… Doug Buck

What is your job role?

Team leader for the Learning Systems Team

What 3 words describe you?

Technical, Progressive, knowledgeable.

Tell us something ‘unusual’ about yourself

I spent around 20 years working in industry, mostly IT, before joining the university.
Or a less work thing, I’m big into world building for my tabletop roleplay gaming and have been using the same world for probably the best part of thirty years.

What excites you about learning technology?

The possibility it presents to improve the inclusivity and effectiveness for our colleagues and students through the creation of intuitive and joined-up technical solutions built around pedagogic best practices.

Do you have any top tips for our users?

If you are stuck or struggling with how best to leverage one of our systems in teaching, talk with Faculty and School Support, they are a fantastic, knowledgeable, and helpful bunch of people.

What do you think will be the most important thing in learning technology at the University of Nottingham in the coming academic year?

Not losing the increased inclusivity reported by disabled students, that the pandemic created by circumstance and working that into a deliberate model driven by pedagogic research rather than environmental pressures

What have you learned recently?

I’ve spent the last few months deep diving into Kanban, Lean Software development, ITIL, and DevOps practices researching ways to improve the flow of work, and development processes my team use to improve our capability to respond quickly to requests while maintaining multiple software systems without compromising the regular upgrades, security patching and general maintenance that we have to do with a small team to keep these systems running

 

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