Phillip John, Executive Chair SCHOLAR and eAA Board Member, in Queen’s birthday honours list

Phillip John OBE, BSc, PhD, DSc is Professor of Chemistry and former Senior Dean at Heriot-Watt University. He has over 180 research publications, managed over fifty research grants, supervised over thirty PhD students and given numerous invited lectures at national and international conferences.

Apart from his teaching, research and administrative duties he has, since the inception of SCHOLAR in 1999 headed the academic development team devising the pedagogical design and, since 2003, been Executive Chair of SCHOLAR  which currently provides innovative online courses to all 32 Education Authorities, 5 Regional FE colleges and 33 independent schools in Scotland. Recently SCHOLAR has completed a major multi-million pound enhancement to 33 courses at National 5, Higher and Advanced Higher level in STEM, Languages and Business subjects. A complete suite of National 5, Higher and Advanced Higher English courses was published in August 2016 to complement the Mathematics offering at all three SCQF levels. SCHOLAR is attracting international attention as one of the world’s largest e-learning programmes for schools. Led by the Australian Council of Educational Research, SCHOLAR is contributing to the Scottish National Standardised Assessment Programme through our responsibility for providing training and professional development to teachers and other stakeholders across Scotland. Twig World Ltd is the third partner commissioned by the Scottish Government to provide this major new programme.

He is currently a Board member, and former Chair, of the international e-Assessment Association which has over 1400 individual members and 16 corporate members.

The e-Assessment Association is absolutely delighted to learn that Phillip was awarded an OBE for ‘services to education in Scotland’ in the 2018 Queen’s Birthday Honours.