Associate Professor Carol Ann Oliver

A/Prof Carol Oliver is a nationally and internationally known expert in evidence-based science communication, with a strong interest in education innovation in online learning and teaching and interests in astrobiology and space science.

She is an Associate Professor within the School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences (BEES) in the Faculty of Science. She supervised seven PhD students, all but two as a primary supervisor. Four have graduated. Carol also has considerable industry experience as a journalist in print, radio, and television in the first third career. Carol is currently Online Learning Lead and Postgraduate Coursework Coordinator in BEES and co-Lead of the UNSW Online Learning and Innovation Community of Practice. 

She began her academic career in 2008. Between 2010 and 2015, she won a total of $5.5m in three grants for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). Two grants raised the Mars Lab project at the Museum of Arts and Applied Sciences in two stages as an education project for high school students and a research facility, forming a living lab in the museum. The Mars Lab was a self-funding national and international project in which students could plan Mars missions and drive experimental Mars rovers in the Mars Yard from their classrooms. The third grant helped to transfer technology-enabled adaptive e-learning from the university environment into the high school environment. She is currently a Chief Investigator on an Australian Research Council Linkage grant between a small group of UNSW researchers - led by Prof Dennis Del Favero - and the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney.

Carol concentrates on creating and delivering fully online courses at UNSW to explore the medium to reimagine online learning and teaching approaches - the latter of which has been reinforced in new approaches to online learning in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Her four fully online courses (all electives) are BEES2741 Introduction to Astrobiology; BEES2680 Introduction to Science Communication; BEES6741 Astrobiology: Life in the Universe; and BEES6800 The Science of Science Communication. All four courses aim to engage students in the learning process, eliminating rote learning, and none have a final exam. 

Technology in education development is also an interest. Carol has been involved in Virtual Field Trip (VFT) development since 2004 and pioneered the first astrobiology VFT in partnership with NASA Learning Technologies in 2007 and worked with Arizona State University and later MIT between 2008 and 2011 on all the Australian VFTs at <vft.asu.edu>. In 2016, she worked within UNSW on a large internal grant to develop three VFTs, utilising one as an assessment in her third level astrobiology course since 2017. She is now leading a team of nine  - developers, learning designers and academics - that has produced a tool that makes VFT development as easy as PowerPoint. It opens the door to further development in Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality in innovative learning and teaching.

Carol is a PLuS Alliance Fellow, in which she engages with colleagues at Arizona State University and King's College London to explore reimagining online education. She also has an Education-Focussed role. Externally, Carol is an elected member of the Australian Academy of Sciences' National Committee on Space and Radio Science. In addition, she was nominated for, and elected to, full membership of the International Academy of Astronautics in 2006 and is co-chair of the International SETI Permanent Committee.