The AAUT or the Australian Award for University Teaching is a national award for quality in tertiary education. And the reason I applied was, there's a couple of reasons, there's a pragmatic reason. One was for going for promotion and for recognition, maybe a little bit of ego chucked in there, but, but some, but what I got from it from the application process was really getting a good understanding of what my strengths were as an educator and what areas that I needed to improve and that type of thing. We are definitely entering a new world of tertiary education and we need creative educators. So I think an award like the AAUT is really good to ground yourself in what skills you have and how you can develop your skillset to become the best educator you can be.

So winning the citation last year was great recognition for the efforts I've put in. A million years ago, back in, I think 2002, I won the Australia New Zealand Marketing Educator of the Year award. And I have always had at my core quality education, how can we get the best outcomes for the students?

So the process of going for an AAUT award at the University of Wollongong was brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. I could not speak higher of LTC. They were fantastic. I worked with a, a great group of people down there. They helped me, they guided me. I went without getting, going for an OCTAL award, which I say, don't do. I say, go get the OCTAL award first. And then, because of the way they've structured, it is very much in line. Well, I think it's definitely in line with the AAUT awards.

So once you've got the OCTAL it's actually quite simple to jump across to the AAUT awards. So I would say work with them. They're just a fantastic crew down there, and I've enjoyed every minute of working with them and learnt a lot too from them.

Yeah, so there's a few tips I could give you on, actually going and trying to put one of these, these awards in, and one of them is to consider your referees. So consider who you're going to use and how they can add to your case. And that takes a lot of thinking and a lot of time and a lot of approaching people and big favours on their part. So think about that. The other thing is collect evidence. Now this is the same for promotion, too. Collect evidence from students, qualitative and quantitative evidence from awards you have won.

What I do is I have a separate folder in my emails, and I just, any awards that any emails that I can use as evidence I put into that. The crew down at LTC are very good with information about how to wordsmith and how to develop to put your best foot forward. So if you're not great, which I wasn't in that area, there's some real expertise down there that can help you.

So if you've got a passion for teaching and you've got a passion for really enhancing student learning outcomes, I would strongly suggest you go for one of these national awards. I think there really there's a range of different awards you can go for. There's citations there's program awards, there's the teacher, and then there's a big kahuna, the big Teacher of Australia Award.

I would suggest you talk to LTC and, and go for one of those awards. Because as I've said, we are, we need creative academics that have at their heart, their core value of quality education in a creative way that delivers learning outcomes for the students. And I think by undertaking one of these, these awards, or at least putting the process in it really puts you in a good position to improve and enhance your own practice. So go for it.