My first weeks at CEI

Hi all. My name is Martin Nosek and I am from the Czech Republic. I joined the CEI team at the end of January as a Learning Technology Support Officer. This is my first ever blog!

I’ve lived across the Czech Republic and can recommend a visit to two very popular cities – Prague (the Capital and a very historic city) and less popular but very nice University City, Olomouc in the east part with the UNESCO Heritage monument. I’ve spent the last 8 years in Olomouc, at Palacky University and really enjoyed it.

I graduated from Charles University in Prague in 2006, studying teaching PE and Biology. Since my early career as a teacher at secondary schools in Prague, I’ve used learning technologies to enhance students motivation and to enrich learning and teaching. My passion for modern technologies and sport led to my next position at Palacky University in Olomouc in 2007. Firstly, I worked as an e-learning officer and later as a Learning Technologist, with many duties as we were a very small team. I was also the direct support for Faculty of Physical Culture and I was lecturing on some of the distance learning courses on Sport Coaching. During that time I attained many new experiences within Higher Education. Most part of my duties were providing training, workshops and 1-to-1 sessions on current VLE and other technologies used at Palacky University. Besides the academic support I’ve cooperated closely with students on system improvements in accordance to their needs. It was valuable as I got a great understanding from both sides. Another life experience for me came in 2010, visiting Valdosta State University in the USA with my PhD study. I was teaching Fitness and First Aid courses for one semester.
The decision to step into a different culture came from my partner. She was offered a position at Swansea University and after a week-long process of decision-making and investigating we decided to accept the challenge, as an opportunity for our little son Jachym to pick up another language, and for us to take the next step in our career. We moved in 2015 and since then we are still observing the beautiful places, nature and cultural heritage of Wales.

After my career break, I was really happy to get the opportunity to work in a similar environment as I’ve worked before, joining the CEI team at Cardiff University. I had already met some Cardiff Learning Technologists at the JISC conference in Swansea, and the fact they do a lot of interesting work with Learning Technologies encouraged me even more. The first three weeks were very busy with meetings – meeting many new people across the University. A big thanks to everyone I met for sharing their experiences and being very welcoming. Each meeting helped me to get a quick overview about possible gaps and improvements to provide excellent service to academics within Cardiff University.

I really look forward to the upcoming challenges and I’ll try to bring some new ideas to encourage/support academics in using available/new technologies in their lectures. Please do not hesitate to contact me any time to discuss or chat about any possible technology related questions.