Jiani Liu

Profile

I started working at the University of Leeds in 2014 as a learning developer. Since then, I have played a leading role in developing institutional initiatives to support student transition and success. I was the lead educator for the award-winning Critical Thinking at University MOOC and the Step Up to Masters programme, both of which have had significant institutional and sector-wide impact. These projects strengthened support for international and postgraduate cohorts and embedded inclusive approaches to academic literacies and digital assessment.

Since 2023, as a Lecturer in English for Academic Purposes, I have contributed to teaching, curriculum development and assessment design in transnational education contexts, particularly in the Leeds–SWJTU Joint School. My work has focused on aligning academic literacies with discipline-specific learning and embedding innovative, digitally enhanced approaches to teaching and assessment.

My research explores creative and inclusive pedagogy in higher education, with a particular interest in how well-designed digital resources and assessments can enhance student success. Recent projects have investigated game-based and simulation learning, including the use of educational escape rooms to foster engagement, collaboration and research literacy. I have also examined partnership working in in-sessional EAP, exploring how collaborative approaches to embedding academic literacies enhance the learning experience of taught postgraduate students, and conducted a LITE fellowship project on assessment literacy and student success.

Through these activities, I have made a sustained contribution to institutional capacity in digital education, academic literacies and student transition, helping to shape inclusive and innovative learning practices at Leeds.

My main accomplishments include:

• Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA)
• Fellow of Leeds Institute for Teaching Excellence (LITE) on assessment literacy and student success
• Award winner of Digital Award of Information Literacy 2020
• Lead educator for Step Up to Masters, an award winning resource
• Co-creator of Critical Thinking at University: An Introduction MOOC. One of the ‘Best Free Online Courses of All Time’ on Class Central
• Nominated for Journal of Information Literacy Ross Todd Award for Outstanding Research Paper and Research Project 2023
• Nominated for Leeds Partership Awards 2020
• Nominated for Digital Award of Information Literacy 2019

Research interests

• Escape room in EAP: I am collaborating with a University of York colleague on a research project exploring escape room style activities as a form of gamification to enhance engagement in EAP classrooms. In 2024/25, we piloted this approach with York Business School students, collecting feedback from both students and tutors through surveys and observations. We have presented our findings locally and nationally, and have also gathered data in the pre-sessional context at Leeds in summer 2025. We are currently contributing a case study to an edited Springer volume on creative pedagogy (forthcoming 2026). Building on these outcomes, we aim to secure external funding (e.g. LearnHigher) to scale up the project, adapt it to other learning contexts (e.g. TNE), and publish a research article based on comparative data analysis.

• Partnership Working in In-Sessional EAP: I served as the in-sessional co-lead for LCS programmes. In collaboration with Helen Sadig, we have been engaged in an evaluation project to assess the effectiveness of the partnership working approach

• I conducted a LITE project on assessment literacy and student success from 2022 to 2023. I presented the findings from this project at various national and local conferences and forums, including recent contributions to the Assessment Matters in LCS symposium, a podcast for LITE, and a presentation at the BALEAP TNE SIG EAP Assessment Literacy in TNE contexts conference. These engagements involved sharing insights from my LITE project and their relevance in the age of AI and within the TNE context. My future scholarship focus remains on assessment literacy and student success within these new contexts.

Qualifications

• HEA Senior Teaching Fellow (SFHEA)
• MSc Management
• BSc (Hons) Information Science

Professional memberships

• British Association of Lecturers in English for Academic Purposes (BALEAP)
• British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL)
• Association for Learning Development in Higher Education (ALDinHE)

Student education

I currently teach English for Academic Purposes to students in the SWJTU-Leeds Joint School Year 1 programme and the pre-sessional Language for Science and Engineering module. Previously, I worked as the Library learning advisor for LCS UG programmes, leading the academic literacies teaching in collaboration with module and programme leads across Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, East Asian Studies, German Studies, Classics, and Linguistics from 2014 to 2023. I also acted as the PGT in-sessional co-lead for Linguistics, MAPLIS, and Translation and Interpreting from 2021 to 2023, and taught various modules across these programmes.

Research groups and institutes

• Language Centre