Dr Blair Williams

My work for the University of Western Australia Maths Department first started in 1995 (with the latest stint starting in July 2018), and has involved a variety of roles, including:

• Lecturing (to as many as 150 students) - this was in Feb-April 2025, when I was chosen ahead of many others to cover for a lecturer who had to spend time overseas.
• Running maths workshops for classes of around 30 students (usually involving interactively helping students while they worked on maths on whiteboards, and though usually with a co-worker, quite often the classroom experience was as a 'solo teacher'). During the pandemic, the workshops were online via Zoom.
• Marking students' assignments, tests and exams.
• Providing back-end support to lecturers by marking online assignments and answering student email queries.

Tutoring maths to primary, secondary and tertiary students both in-person and online. Tutoring environments included houses, libraries, and (increasingly in more recent years) online. Much student success was achieved !

Tutored USA students online in a range of maths topics, including college linear algebra / pre-calculus, but also some high school students, in eg Algebra 2.

Tutored USA students online on an 'on-demand' basis, in units such as Algebra 1 and 2, Pre-Algebra and Calculus. This was invaluable experience with the USA maths curriculum and it went very well (when I left my tutor rating was 4.86 out of 5)

Online maths tutor for Tutoring Australasia (who provisioned online tutoring to schools and libraries around Australia), covering Year 3 - 12 maths. This included a period from Sep 2008 - June 2010 as a 'mentor', which included extra duties of reviewing tutors' work, and providing maths assistance to tutors in an online chat-room.

Worked on-and-off on a casual basis for the Maths Department at UWA. Duties included marking assignments and exams, assisting students in their computer-based learning, and tutoring classes of 10-20 students in calculus, linear algebra and discrete maths.

Lectured maths to a small class of students at the School of Indigenous Studies at the University of Western Australia, as part of the students' 'bridging' year into mainstream studies. There I also tutored students 1-1 in maths from July 2002 - March 2005, under ATAS (Aboriginal Tutorial Assistance Scheme). This was all invaluable experience at working with a disadvantaged / unique sub-strata of students.

Postdoctoral position at Royal Holloway College (University of London), working on an information security project funded by British Telecom. I wrote a report entitled 'Beyond the PKI' (which examined Public Key Infrastructures).

Trainee Stockbroker position at JB Were & Son in Perth. Duties included administrative work, placing buy and sell orders, and taking customer phone calls.

Worked full-time on a WWW based teaching, tutoring, assessment and administration project, again at UWA. This innovative project sought to utilise the Web in student assessment, and to cross-link the course material of complementing subjects (particularly engineering and mathematics), amongst other things. My contributions were the development of online course material for students (including a set of revision maths problems, programmed via Java applets), and the supervision of an online teaching system.