Dr Amara Atif is a Lecturer (equivalent to an Assistant Professor in the American system & Junior Professor in the German system) in the School of Computer Science within the Faculty of Engineering and IT, University of Technology Sydney, Australia. She is a conscientious, ambitious and highly motivated teacher. She teaches many UG and PG subjects, including studios. At UTS, Amara has developed an undergraduate subject, “Business Intelligence,” including FEIT’s Indigenous Graduate Attribute of historically and culturally informed about Indigenous knowledge systems. She loves interacting with students with diverse backgrounds, cultures, skills and languages. She always enjoys creativity, stepping outside her comfort zone, and experimenting with her teaching methodology and educational tools.

She is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy UK (AFHEA), certified in UTS Teaching for Learning. Futures program and is an active FEIT Pedagogy Community and Club Studio member. She enjoys storytelling, writing blog posts for the “Futures blog”, and contributing to resources for the UTS LX lab. Her L&T talks and blog posts are available under “Teaching and Supervision”. Amara is interested in creating and publishing Open Educational Resources (OER) as sustainable learning and teaching material that can help academics and add value to the existing curriculum. She published “Scaffolding as a teaching strategy” in 2022 as an Open Educational Resource under Creative Commons Licence Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International.

Amara has received the following teaching and learning awards:

- UTS (2022) UTS Learning and Teaching (Individual teaching) Citation for “Effective assessment practices that bring about improvements in student learning, including practices that engage students in authentic assessment, improve feedback to students or foster academic integrity.”

- UTS (2021) UTS Strengthening the UTS Model of Learning (Team) Award for “For transforming learning in the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology through studios.

- Macquarie University (2017) Vice Chancellor’s Teaching and Learning award for Outstanding Contribution to Student Learning for “Innovative learning analytics solution that enhances the learning and teaching student experience”.

She is an ECR and completed her PhD in Learning Analytics from Macquarie University. Her thesis pursued an empirical investigation of students’ and teachers’ perceptions of using learning analytics tools to identify disengaged (or at-risk) students and/or suggest intervention(s) using a prototype early alert system that utilises data from the institutional LMS. She works at the confluence of educational technology, student engagement and transition, learning analytics/educational data science, student feedback literacy to inform and trigger automated feedback, Pedagogical Conversational Agents, and technology acceptance/adoption of information systems.

Amara has completed the following personal and professional development training at UTS: Unconcious Bias; Aboriginal cultural awareness; International collaboration and engagement; Cultivating mindfulness every day; Stress & Resilience; Thriving through uncertainty; Preventing bullying in the workplace; and many other mental health and wellbeing pieces of training.

As an experienced academic and a competent researcher, she prides herself on her skills such as adaptability, organisation & time management, teamwork, digital literacy, emotional intelligence, taking the initiative, being proactive, and resilience.

- In her other roles at UTS, Amara is a mentor for the UTS Apple Foundation program; Major Coordinator, Business Information Systems Management (BISM) for the Undergraduate-Information Technology degree courses; and academic staff ambassador of FEIT’s Women in Engineering and IT (WiEIT).

- She is actively engaged as a peer-reviewer and special issue editor for service to the research community.

Amara is a member of the Australian Computer Society (ACS) and the Association for Information Systems (AIS).