Dr Tarsem Singh Cooner

Tarsem is a Senior Lecturer in Social Work and Programme Director for the MA in Social Work programme. His recent research has been funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. Tarsem has been part of a team working on a project entitled ‘Organisations, staff support and the dynamics and quality of social work practice: A qualitative longitudinal study of child protection work’. As part of this study, Tarsem has led on the creation of a set of 360-degree immersive video apps to disseminate the research findings, these can be downloaded and used by anyone with a mobile phone from the Apple and Google app stores. Tarsem has also been instrumental in helping practitioners, managers, educators and students explore some of the ethical issues of using Facebook in child protection practices by creating freely accessible learning resources such as this trigger video entitled ‘Facebook: An unethical practice or an effective tool in child protection practice?’

For social work Tarsem has been instrumental in developing innovative digital learning approaches such as his mobile phone/tablet app to help social workers explore how to navigate the ethical issues of using social media in social work. Also, this short film outlines a learning design he developed using Facebook to help students develop the skills and knowledge required to use social media as social work practitioners. Further details of these can be found in his publications listed below.

Tarsem was been awarded a Birmingham University Teaching Fellowship in recognition of his wide ranging and significant interventions in learning and teaching across the institution. In this work he has served on the Board of the Valuing Teaching at Birmingham initiative, the University Learning Environment Group and the University Massive Online Open Courses (MOOC) Steering Group. As part of his responsibilities at the Centre of Excellence in Interdisciplinary Mental Health Tarsem was also instrumental in developing the Designing for Enquiry-based Blended Learning (DiBL) for cross University staff development training programmes. Tarsem has also represented the College of Social Sciences on the University's Learning Environment Group and the Information and Technology Infrastructure Group.  He was also responsible for co-writing the College of Medical and Dental Sciences e-Learning strategy.