It's about what they learn, not what we teach.

Q: What are you committed to?Įducation is all about the students, not us. But oh! when we can get some taste of this into the hearts and minds of our students, what a difference it can make. All too easily, this can become a dry collection of facts and theories to be rote learned and then forgotten. Q: What motivates and inspires you?Īs a university, we are custodians of an incredible body of human wisdom and knowledge, acquired over thousands of years. I'm hoping that the prestige of this role can help us help you - if you see something that needs to change or be re-thought, but you can't make headway, talk to us and maybe we can use the leverage given by this position to open doors or help persuade those in positions of power.

Q&A Q: What does it mean to you to be an ANU Distinguished Educator?ĭamned if I know! It is a great honour, but we are all trying to define what this role means, and how we can use it to advance education across campus. He has won a wide range of prizes for education and science communication, including the 2016 Australian Award for University Teaching. He has been involved in many educational innovations, including using role-plays to teach astrophysics, developing the ANU's first MOOCs, which have currently been taken by over 300,000 students from 178 countries around the world, and for teaching the large 1 st year physics classes without any lectures. He is infamous amongst his students for talking much too fast in an incomprehensible pommie accent, and for his dubious taste in waistcoats. Since then, he has focussed on teaching large classes, both in-person and online. Paul is an astrophysicist, who focussed his research on galaxies and black holes in the early universe, before catching a bad case of the teaching bug.

Pommie paul