Archives: People
Paul Marca is principal at Parallax Global Advisors, LLC a firm which provides strategic consulting for those seeking to transform education through technology. He also currently serves the International Association for Continuing Engineering Education (IACEE) as a council member and first vice president. Paul advises universities, corporations, and governmental organizations on how to develop and extend education as a means to sustain organizational vitality and innovation. Previously, he spent 32 years in senior leadership roles at Stanford where he was instrumental in developing and implementing an international coursework portfolio. He also developed a number of innovative university-industry and university-university partnerships to extend Stanford’s educational reach with effective ‘go-to-market strategies.’ He has presented keynote speeches and workshops around the globe on connecting innovation, strategy, and education.
First as an undergraduate in Western Australia, and then as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, Dave Sherwood had a pressing question: why are textbooks so unintuitive? Co-founding BibliU six years ago, Dave and his team have since signed over 2,000 academic publishers and 140 universities across the globe with this simple message: when it comes to learning, there has to be a better, more affordable, and more accessible way of doing things.
Michelle Weise is the author of Long-Life Learning: Preparing for Jobs that Don’t Even Exist Yet. She is a senior advisor at Imaginable Futures, a venture of The Omidyar Group. Her work over the last decade has concentrated on preparing working-age adults for the jobs of today and tomorrow. She was the chief innovation officer of Strada Education Network and founded Strada Institute for the Future of Work. Michelle was also the chief innovation officer at Southern New Hampshire University and designed and led Sandbox Collaborative, the innovation center of SNHU. With Clayton Christensen, she coauthored Hire Education: Mastery, Modularization, and the Workforce Revolution (2014) while leading the higher education practice at Christensen’s Institute for Disruptive Innovation.
As director of digital innovations for the University Design Institute at Arizona State University, Dale Johnson works with university leaders to develop and implement digital solutions to enable student success. Those efforts have earned him the 2016 Sally M. Johnstone Award from WCET recognizing his thought leadership, excellence in practice, and demonstrated leadership capabilities. In 2018, Dale was honored by the IMS Global Learning Consortium with an outstanding service award for his leadership of the adaptive courseware community of practice. He has spoken on the topic of digital innovation in higher education at more than 20 conferences in the USA, Rwanda, Brazil, South Korea, Germany, Mexico, Russia, and Vietnam, and has led workshops on the subject at numerous universities.
Professor Dr. Sadia Afroze Sultana joined Bangladesh Open University (BOU) in 1998. She served as dean of Open School, BOU from 2012 to 2016 and elected vice chairperson of Commonwealth Open Schooling Association (COMOSA) from 2014 to 2016. Sadia has been involved in the Commonwealth of Learning-sponsored projects regarding women empowerment, ODL, and OER movement in Bangladesh and contributed to the development of OER and Quality Assurance Policy for BOU. She is a global network member of Creative Commons, USA and a Creative Commons facilitator. She regularly writes in different journals on ODL, OER, women empowerment, and nuclear physics.
Paul Stacey is a global education leader with over 40 years’ experience. Since 2018, he has served as executive director for Open Education Global. Previously he worked at Creative Commons where he helped organizations and creators around the world adopt open licensing practices, led support for the $1.9 billion Open Educational Resources Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) grant program of the US Department of Labor, and led creation of the Creative Commons Certificate program. Prior to Creative Commons, Paul helped found BCcampus for British Columbia’s Ministry of Advanced Education and led an Open Education Resources development program, which provided grants to British Columbia’s universities and colleges to create for credit courses and degrees with open shareable resources.
Mojca Drevenšek is an energy literacy enthusiast, an experienced communications consultant, and a passionate connector, working to motivate natural science, social science, and engineering experts to openly share their knowledge and raise awareness about energy issues among key stakeholders. She consults with energy sector corporate clients and leads communication activities for international research projects like the European Horizon2020 project NEWCOMERS. Mojca is passionate about Open Education and is currently enrolled in the Master’s program Leadership in Open Education at the University of Nova Gorica, Slovenia. She is part of the Open Education for a Better World (OE4BW) both as a developer and as a Hub Coordinator, supporting the achievement of Energy, Biodiversity, and Sustainable Living related goals.
Paola Corti has been working in distance learning since 1998. She is a passionate advocate for Open Education and has advocated for OER adoption in her university, Politecnico di Milano. As OE Community Manager at SPARC Europe, she works with the European Network of Open Education Librarians, passionate professionals who work toward implementing the UNESCO OER Recommendation by facilitating access to OER and encouraging their production and dissemination. A member of the CC OpenEdu Community since its inception, Paola strongly believes in the link between social justice and Open Education and its ability to contribute to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4, “Quality Education for All.”
Neil Butcher is based in South Africa, from where he has provided policy and technical advice and support to a range of national and international clients regarding educational planning, uses of educational technology, and distance education. He has worked with various educational institutions (including UNESCO and the Commonwealth of Learning), assisting with transformation and research efforts that focus on effectively harnessing the potential of distance education methods, educational technology, and OER. Neil works with OER Africa as the project’s OER Strategist and is also currently consulting to the World Bank on a range of project activities across several African countries and in Asia.