I’m the Head of Online Learning at Nottingham Trent University. I write about higher education, learning design, productivity, and strength and conditioning. I am particularly interested in how to develop expertise and what can be learned from elite performers across multiple fields, then applying this in a university setting.
I started this blog after reading Attempts by Dan John and The Practice by Seth Godin. I aim to develop a practice of writing and sharing my ideas so that people can benefit from them.
This page provides an overview of my favourite content and the most popular posts, and a bit of my background to get you started with the blog.
Contact me
If you enjoy my blog or want to start a conversation about anything I write about, please contact me via Twitter: https://twitter.com/samueljtanner. I will respond to all messages.
Content to get you started
On Learning Design
- The SAMR Learning Model
- Capabilities Maturity Model and online learning development process design
- Using Abbibing’s brand model to develop a service offer
- Initial Mapping of Learning Designer Competencies
On Running:
- How Charlie Spedding helped me run a faster half marathon time trial
- 10 things I learned running 2000 miles in a year
- Creating a running programme
- Change through challenge: the university course in running a marathon
On Strength and conditioning
- How not to get fat
- The best kettlebell programme
- Project W/kg: Strength phase complete
- Ultra-amateurism
Other popular posts
- Make useful videos publish them once or twice per week, and do this for two years
- Elon Musk’s semantic trees
- Point A to Point B
- Project management basics
Some of my less read favourites
- You should write a book
- How do you define wealthy
- 1000 true fans and the portfolio life
- The New Journalism
- We have a human capital problem; we should all become engineers
My Bio
For those that are interested, here is a brief overview of my journey so far.
I graduated from the London School of Economics in 2017, earning a BSc in Information Systems and Management. I studied part-time while working full-time in educational technology. Before that and after leaving school, I gained an HND in Music Production from the Academy of Contemporary Music and then a Professional Diploma in Teaching and went on to teach music production in a further education college for nine years.
My teaching career exposed me to students from all backgrounds. It helped develop my ideas around education as a tool for social mobility and developing an individual’s expertise to create opportunities. In my final two years of teaching, I was the Curriculum Manager of a Creative Arts and Computing department. This role let me see how the politics of education and management of educators interact to create the experience students get in the classroom.
For the last three years, I have been building a team from scratch to transform higher education, making it hyper-flexible to provide access and personalisation to a broader group of people and using technology to redefine how students learn at university. My team comprises Learning Designers who are experts in Learning Design, and multimedia-technology and production. We work with academics to co-design online and blended learning courses and provide the technology to support their delivery.
I publish a blog post here daily, focusing on my work on weekdays and non-work-related ideas on the weekend. I am currently working on Project 4W/kg to get my Cycling Functional Threshold power, the power I can hold for an hour, to 4 w/kg.
I currently live in Loughborough, England.
Affiliate links
I publish this blog as I enjoy that people from around the world get value from reading it. Links to books and other products on Amazon tend to be affiliate links. I get paid a small percentage if you buy the product via my link. If you want to support my blog and you are going to purchase the item, you can use the links I provide.
All ideas and views in this blog are my own unless a reference is provided.
SamuelJTanner 