The spotlight is on Chris Powell, Bedford College, United Kingdom.

Chris Powell recently retired from Bedford College in early 2026 after 25 years of teaching. The college is part of The Bedford College Group, a family of colleges serving the United Kingdom’s South East Midlands region, with 19,000 students and a staff of 2,000. It provides further vocational education, equipping students with Higher National Certificates (HNCs), Higher National Diplomas (HNDs), and Business and Technology Education Council diplomas (BTEC), all work-related or vocational higher education qualifications in the United Kingdom.

The college group works closely with over 1,000 local businesses across the counties of Bedfordshire and Northamptonshire to match industry needs to its curriculum. Its mission is to bridge the gap between education and employment.

Chris Powell served as course manager for Higher Education Computing, overseeing a group of computer science tutors across Bedford College. His teaching life began at Barnfield College in Luton, during which time he learned how to use Oracle Academy curriculum and resources in teaching.

Over the course of his tenure at Bedford and previous colleges, he taught database design, applications development, object-oriented programming, game design, and cybersecurity. In addition, stemming from initial training as an architectural technologist, he taught computer-aided design as part of a solid modeling course.

He constructed his courses by leveraging Oracle Academy’s database and Java curriculum. He is now passing the Oracle Academy banner to colleagues who will continue working with the program.

Oracle Academy: A well-earned retirement from full-time teaching! How did you get involved with Oracle Academy in the first place?

Chris Powell: Back in 2002, I had the privilege of joining an Oracle Academy teacher training in the United States, held at UCLA. It was a two-week course in Database Design and Programming. Our cohort numbered several dozen from various parts of the UK, including two others from Barnfield College, Luton, where I was teaching at the time.

The following year I went back to California to learn Java Fundamentals, and in 2004 Oracle Academy asked me to be an adjunct instructor in the UK for a year. This entailed online training a group of teachers up and down the country and in-person meetings once or twice a month. I then travelled to UCLA to support them in the classroom for the two-week institute on Database Design and Programming with SQL.

I spent the next seven years at Barnfield delivering Oracle Academy courses to support various levels of teaching, including adult learners in evening sessions. I joined Bedford College in 2017, bringing Oracle Academy with me.

Oracle Academy: Please tell us how you used the resources.

Chris Powell: I taught students in the Database Design and Development unit, Advanced Databases unit, Applications development unit, and related modules such as Cyber Security. In all of these I used Oracle Academy’s Database Foundations, Database Design, Database Programming with SQL, Database Programming with PL/SQL, Java Foundations and Oracle APEX.

Oracle Academy: What diplomas were students aiming at?

Chris Powell: In the UK, we have HNC, HND and BTEC Diplomas in Computing, well-recognized vocational qualifications that can lead to entry-level IT jobs, apprenticeships, or university bachelor’s degrees in Computer Science, IT, or Software Engineering.

Oracle Academy: How are the job prospects?

Chris Powell: We are only 12 miles from Milton Keynes, home to the Open University, attended by hundreds of thousands of distance learners, and also a large area for technology companies. So, there are many opportunities there and elsewhere in the South East Midlands in software programming, cybersecurity, networking, IT systems, support, and many other roles.

Oracle Academy: What do you consider the strengths and benefits of using Oracle Academy curriculum and resources to support your courses?

Chris Powell: All of the Oracle Academy lesson content, practical exercises, quizzes, and exams are well constructed, comprehensive, easy to use, and accessible to the students at any time. They are up to date and challenging, and a bonus for instructors because they save time in not having to build one’s own lessons and case studies. I have used many exercises devised by Oracle Academy, such as building a healthcare database, managing the Oracle baseball league, or a case study on maintaining membership of the International Oracle Users Group. All of these are pathways for students to learn discovery, understand business needs, create entity relationship diagrams (ERDs), and implement databases.

Oracle Academy: In what ways did you use Oracle APEX?

Chris Powell: By giving each student an Oracle APEX account, we give them the opportunity to test their SQL skills by working directly inside an Oracle database. They get to design, implement, create, and populate a database from scratch and then make some comprehensive queries within that database.

One great thing about APEX is it allows immediate visual output. What started out as ERDs, entities and attributes ends up as a real-life database with tables, columns, primary keys, foreign keys, and relationships. There’s this sudden switch in their head which says “I know where that came from”. Their abstract ERD is now, for instance, a working order management system. APEX has been an excellent platform that I have used in its various guises right from the beginning of my teaching career.

It is worth mentioning that I have also used APEX Application Development Foundations to teach the college’s Applications Development Unit; it is very powerful as a low-code development tool.

Oracle Academy: How do the students take to the Oracle Academy learning resources?

Chris Powell: I think they really appreciate that it’s not reliant on slide decks. I have not found any of the individual lessons within the sections too long. A 20-30 PDF slide deck holds their attention for 10-15 minutes, because they know it will be followed by hands-on exercises.

Students see value in the Oracle Academy resources, as they know they are designed by industry experts. They realize the importance of mastering the building blocks needed for creating a database to support a business system.

Another point is that the courses allow students to learn at their own pace. If certain individuals finish lessons ahead of the rest and want to stretch themselves, they can go ahead to the next lesson under their own steam. All they need is an internet connection, because they all have Oracle Academy accounts.

If we take the SQL class as an example, available time might not let us get through the whole curriculum, perhaps halting us at number four of the twelve practice questions in a particular chapter—Joins, let’s say. But for those who want the full set of questions, knowing that an exam is coming next, they can make use of the rich content on the Student Hub. They use the Oracle Academy Education Bytes, and Oracle Academy Workshops to take them deeper into specific concepts. There is a large pool of resources there on the Hub. Such students usually fly high later.

Oracle Academy: And on the Java front?

Chris Powell: In their second-year, students have an object-oriented programming unit for which we use Java Programming and Java Fundamentals curriculum.

There is also a game design unit, where we introduce Greenfoot through Oracle Academy’s Creating Java Programs with Greenfoot programming environment. It’s great fun, as 17- to 18-year-olds get to grips with features such as a robot game and a car racing contest.

Oracle Academy: What would you say to a college looking to develop students’ database skills?

Chris Powell: I would definitely recommend Oracle Academy. In the world of work today, if you’ve never seen a front-end database, there’s always going to be something in the background and it’s very, very useful to know something about database design and SQL. The more you know the better, and Oracle Academy’s free software gives a teacher everything they need for skilling up a class in database design, SQL programming, Java programming, and apps development.

There’s also the collaborative aspect, sharing knowledge, assessing what’s available. To get up-to-speed, Oracle Academy is always there to guide. And there are many webinars and tutorials available through a system known as Office Hours, where instructors can book sessions according to their timetable and time zone. After the initiation, anyone can hit the ground running.

Let me add that the support provided by Oracle Academy is first-class. If ever anything goes wrong, it is easy to get access through the help function or the nearest Oracle Academy contact point. There is no long wait; all issues get resolved even if those helping out are not in the same time zone. I have only strong and positive things to say about Oracle Academy.

Oracle Academy: Good to know. So, Chris Powell, what comes next?

Chris Powell: Well, apart from getting my hand in with more golf than I’ve previously had time for, I may carry out some architectural drawing work a couple of days a week. I did that before teaching technology, and it’s a skill that doesn’t go away. In fact, over the last two years, I have used AutoCad 2D and 3D in the Bedford College Solid Modelling unit.

College has been good career-wise, but I have worked full time from age 16, and for now, I’m having a change. I will be keeping in touch with the teachers who take over from me. It’s highly likely that they will use Oracle Cloud and adopt courses such as Artificial Intelligence with Machine Learning in Java. There are various units within the computing courses that are related to those two areas, so they must move forward.

Thank you, Chris Powell, for your passion for Oracle Academy and for preparing your students to make a positive impact.