Profile
Olu Popoola is a member of the Education & Recognition team within the Queen Mary Academy which provides strategic, developmental, practical, project and consultancy support for the development and enhancement of learning and teaching across QMUL. Olu is an educational linguist interested in the use of writing analytics, natural language processing and corpus methods to inform educational strategy.
Prior to joining Queen Mary Academy, Olu was a Teaching Fellow (Learning Development) at Aston University, with responsibilities for peer mentor and university transition programmes as well as faculty-based learning development provision. Olu has also taught Academic English, English Language and Linguistics at UAL, Coventry and Birmingham universities. During a 1.5-year stint at QMUL Library, Olu established a university-wide academic writing workshop programme for taught postgraduate students. Olu came to HE after a 10-year career in advertising and consumer research
Olu is an active member of the European Network of Academic Integrity and is current chair of the London and South East Academic Integrity Contract Cheating Working Group. He enjoys boating, art and online radio.
Teaching
Olu is module convener for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (ADP7216) and Academic Integrity Lead on the Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice and Certificate in Learning and Teaching programmes. Olu also runs the Teach Your First Session workshop programme.
Research
Research Interests:
Broadly speaking, the application of forensic and investigative linguistic techniques to education strategy, policy and delivery. Specific areas of interest:
- Writing analytics
- Feedback language
- Taxonomies of learning in practice
- Data-driven pedagogy
- Academic fraud detection
Publications
CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS AND PROCEEDINGS
Popoola, O., Ranauta, A., Gautam, P. & Mohankumar, S. (2021) Student reflections on peer feedback. Paper presented at Advance HE Assessment and Feedback Symposium, 5 November, 2021
Popoola, O. (2021) Marker detection of contract cheating: an investigative corpus linguistic approach. In Proceedings of the European Conference on Academic Integrity and Plagiarism, 2021 (p. 131)
Popoola, O. (2018) How do you Bloom? Comparing the use of Bloom’s Taxonomy in Learning Development and EAP practice. Workshop at BALEAP/ALDinHE Joint One-day Conference (PIM) Academic Literacies and EAP: Same or different? University of Essex, 24 November,2018
Popoola, O., Woods, G., Flynn, H. & Petkov, L. (2018) Towards a grounded theory of mentoring: a comparative analysis of writing and maths mentor schemes
Paper presented at Researching, Advancing and Inspiring Student Engagement (RAISE) Conference, 5 September, 2018
Popoola, O. & Grieve, J. (2018) Dimensions of deception: Using multi-dimensional analysis to detect fake online reviews. Paper presented at ICAME 39, Tampere, Finland, June 3, 2018.
Popoola, O., (2017) Using Rhetorical Structure Theory for detection of fake online reviews. In Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Recent Advances in RST and Related Formalisms (p. 58).
Popoola, O. (2017) Using anomaly detection to separate truth from deception in a mixed veracity text Paper presented at Decepticon 2017: International Conference on Deceptive Behavior| Stanford University, August 22, 2017
INVITED TALKS AND KEYNOTES
Webster, H. & Popoola, O. Decolonisation and Learning Development: Are We the Bad Guys? Association for Learning Development in Higher Education Conference 7 April, 2021
Popoola, O. Detecting deception by linguistic means English Language Research Seminars University of Birmingham, 27 November, 2018
Popoola, O. “It’s the story, stupid!”. How MARV (Multivariate Analysis of Register Variation) can save the world from fake news Forensic Linguistics Research Group, Lancaster University, 14 March, 2019
MEDIA
Popoola, O. (2021) Detecting Contract Cheating Using Investigative Linguistics Paper presented at International Centre for Academic Integrity Conference, 1 March, 2021[VIDEO]
Outliar™ - The Deception Blog [BLOG] https://outliar.blog/
