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Professor Antonio Martínez-Arboleda

Professor Antonio Martínez-Arboleda

  • Position: Professor of Open and Digital Education
  • Areas of expertise: Open Educational Resources and Practice; Student Podcasting; Critical Digital Pedagogies; AI; Spanish Language and Politics; Undergraduate Skills; Poetry and Translation
  • Email: A.Martinez-Arboleda@leeds.ac.uk
  • Phone: +44(0)113 343 3529
  • Location: 2.37 Michael Sadler Building
  • Website: | LinkedIn | ORCID

Profile

I obtained a Law degree at the ‘Universidad de Murcia’ in Spain while being actively involved in my university's Student Union as Head Delegate and working in my family’s business. I continued my studies in the Faculty of Law at the University of Leeds, where I completed my MA in Business Law in 1998. 

I began my career in language teaching at the Instituto Cervantes and the University of Leeds in 1998. One year later I introduced my module on Spanish Politics (‘Spain: Political Decentralisation -El Estado de las Autonomías- and Integration into Europe’) and started to teach Spanish in an Economic and Business context.

In 2002 I designed the Autonomous Learning Portfolio currently used in Spanish at the University of Leeds and took charge of the overall reform and co-ordination of the Spanish Language programme until 2011. I initiated and ran for two years the Language Forum of the School of Modern Languages and Cultures and was one of the founding editors of the Leeds Language Scholar in 2016/17. Over the years I have created a range of learning and assessment materials for the development of academic skills through professional simulations, often using e-learning and group activities.

In 2009 I commenced my work on Open Educational Resources as part of the HumBox Team. In 2011 I was awarded a SCORE fellowship to work on OER review by employers and became co-researcher of the JISC funded project OpenLIVES on Digitised Life Stories. In 2012 I became a member of the Steering Group of Jorum and acted as Chair in 2015. I have been Blended Learning Champion at the University of Leeds 2015–2017. I have led institutional initiatives on OER and Podcasting and in 2022 I became Academic Lead for Open Educational Practice of the University of Leeds, based at the Library, and in 2023 Senior Lead for the Knowledge Equity Network (KEN).

I have been involved in a variety of artistic activities including poetry (Transforming with Poetry, 100,000 Poets for Change and Poesía Indignada), poetry translation and music. I am the author of 2 books of poems Los viajes de Diosa (The Travels of Goddess) (2015, Diego Marín) and Goddess Summons The Nation (2018, Amazon). I have directed the video collection of Spanish poetry Las flechas de Artemis (The Arrows of Artemis) in 2016 and administer its Youtube Channel. I am the UK Delegate for Crátera Revista de Crítica y Poesía Contemporánea.

I am regular contributor at different levels with the national exam board AQA (Modern Languages and Cultures) since 2000.

Responsibilities

  • Knowledge Equity Network (KEN) Senior Lead
  • Academic Lead for Open Educational Practice of the University of Leeds
  • Academic Lead for the Open and Digital Education Incubator at LITE

Research interests

My scholarship focuses on OER (Open Educational Resources), including student Open Research, Digital Education and Critical Pedagogy. Since 2022, my academic activities t expanded to the areas of Knowledge Equity and Open Educational Practice, both at KEN (the Knowledge Equity Network) and the Library at Leeds. I have delivered invited lectures in Mexico (2023 and 2025), Greece (2021), Japan (August 2019) and Brasil (August 2018), amongst others, on these topics and participated in symposia and conferences.

I have been active part of the UNESCO-ICDE Chair of the Open Education Movement for Latin-America since 2023, participated in the 2024 Leadership Summit of ICDE (International Council for Open and Distance Education=, the Technology Innovation Network (TIN) of ICDE since its inception, the Network of Open Organisation since 2023, and co-organised activities with the Institute for the Future of Education (Europe) since 2023, notably the  Research4Challenges bootcamps in Spain.     . 

I am a contributor to and co-editor of the internationally crowdsourced open books on AI “Towards AI literacy: 101+ creative and critical practices, perspectives, and purposes” and “101 creative ideas to use Artificial Intelligence in Education” and I have delivered a guest lecture on this topic in the UK, in an event supported by the Alan Turing Institute at the University of Leeds, in a two-hour workshop on ChatGPT for education in UNAM, Mexico, in 2023, and in 3rd Debate on the Future of Education organised by Metropolitan College, in Greece, with a lecture entitled “The Futures of Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” in 2024. I lead the International Strategic Fund Project Lingua Connect for language learning (English, Spanish, and Portuguese), a Collaborative Online Interinstitutional Learning (COIL) initiative with OER, podcasting and AI, involving the Universities of Leeds, Federal of Minas Gerais (Brazil) and Tec de Monterrey (Mexico) 

Past leadership experience includes:

  • Chair of the University of Leeds Podcasting Working Group (2019-2020)
  • Co-director of the Centre for Research in Digital Education (2019-2022)
  • Chair of the Leeds to JORUM OER Window (2013-2015)
  • Spanish Language Departmental Coordinator (2006-2011)
  • Instituto Cervantes Liaison Officer (2001-2011)

I led a LITE (Leeds Institute for Teaching Excellence) Teaching Enhancement Project on Desktop Capture Feedback during 2018. In relation to this topic, and more widely on the question of feedback in the digital age, I have published the following:

In 2017 I was awarded a Hispanex grant by the Ministry of Education of Spain for my project on poetry digitisation Ártemis, which currently hosts the Spanish Poetry Translation Publication “La Crátera de Artemis”, involving universities across the World in collaboration with Revista Crátera and the Instituto Cervantes in Leeds and Manchester:  

During 2009/2010 I was HumBox Institutional Partner for the Faculty of Arts of the University of Leeds and in the Spring of 2011 I was awarded a Fellowship by SCORE, the Support Centre for Open Educational Resources, funded by HEFCE and based at the Open University. As part of this fellowship, I led the research project ‘Review and Endorsement of Open Educational Resources by Graduate-Recruiting Employers’. The project was completed in July 2012.  

  • ‘Review and Endorsement of OERs by Graduate-Recruiting Employers’. November 2011. 
  • SCORE Fellowship Final Report
  • Participation in Case Studies from OER practitioners at the University of Leeds. HEA 2012
  • Martínez-Arboleda, A. (2012) ‘Modelling educational dialogue with employers around curricular employability in HE through OER’. Journal of Interactive Media in Education (JIME) 2012: JIME Cambridge OER 2012 special issue. 
  • Atkinson, S., Coughlan, T. and Martínez-Arboleda, A. (2012) ‘Open Educational Practice (OEP) Approaches to External Collaboration: The Arts, Charities and Businesses’. Higher Education Academy Commissioned work by SCORE Fellows.
  • Martínez-Arboleda, A. (2012) ‘Employers' Curricular Collaboration in HE through OER’, Proceedings of Cambridge 2012: Innovation and Impact – Openly Collaborating to Enhance Education, OCW Consortium and SCORE, Cambridge, UK, April 16–18 2012, Milton Keynes, The Open University, pp.336–345.

In Summer 2011, the project OpenLIVES was awarded funding from JISC under OER-3 (Digital Capital). The project, led by the University of Southampton, finalised in 2013.  I was co-investigator in OpenLIVES and my responsibilities included creating a new course on Oral History and Migration, currently taught at the University of Leeds (SPPO 3640: ‘Discovering Spanish Voices Abroad in a Digital World’), and designing repurposable learning activities based on the OpenLIVES research data. These resources, alongside any subsequent resources produced by students, have been published as OER in the HumBox. One of the outcomes of this educational experience is the OpenLIVES Pedagogy, which has been discussed and disseminated in various papers and publications:

In connection with my teaching of Spanish Politics, I have published an article on Podemos:

Qualifications

  • Licenciado en Derecho (Universidad de Murcia) 1995
  • MA in Business Law (University of Leeds) 1998

Professional memberships

  • Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

Student education

I teach Spanish in an Economic and Business Context and promote OER, translation and poetry for language learners. I run webinar sessions on Digital Cultures and OER. 

Research groups and institutes

  • Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American
  • Language pedagogy
  • Centre for World Literatures