The OpenCourseWare Consortium board elections were held in April, and we are pleased to welcome four institutional representatives and two organizational representatives to the OCWC board of directors. They are an accomplished and dedicated group who will drive open education forward to a new dimension.
We also bid farewell and extend sincere gratitude to the board members who completed their terms. They are Steve Carson, Philipp Schmidt, Joel Thierstein, and Yoshimi Fukuhara. Their service has led the Consortium to be the most respected and influential organization in the field of open education. We sure will miss them, but we also expect to see them as active contributors in the community.
Please join us in welcoming the new board members.
Institutional
Mary Y. Lee, Tufts University
Mary Y. Lee, Associate Provost for Tufts University, Boston, USA, has led Tufts’ many Open Educational Resource (OER) initiatives since the 1990’s, focusing on high quality content, open-source tools, and faculty development in innovative uses of technology. Dr. Lee stewards Tufts OpenCourseWare; Open.tufts.edu, a portal to major OERs at Tufts; Tufts Digital Repository; Tufts Open Access Fund supporting open access publication; and Tufts University Sciences Knowledgebase (TUSK), an open-source, enterprise curriculum and knowledge management system used on 4 continents.
Larry Cooperman (re-elected), UC Irvine
Larry Cooperman directs the University of California, Irvine’s OpenCourseWare project, winner of five awards in 2011. He serves on the boards of the African Virtual University and the UC-Haiti Initiative and has a wide variety of contacts with universities and government officials. He has introduced the OCWC to important audiences in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, including through a TEDx presentation. He has chaired the Technology Committee and led the OCWC’s last website redesign in 2009. He speaks English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.
Lee Wei-i, National Chiao Tung University
Prof. Lee is the major initiator of OCW movement in Taiwan and started the world’s first OCW site in Chinese run by an OCWC University member in 2007. With his persistent effort, more than 27 universities in Taiwan have joined Taiwan OCWC and the number is still increasing, making the OCW movement in Taiwan one of the most successful ones. Prof. Lee has also worked very hard in promoting communication among Asian OCW communities. He has been one of the major initiators and members in organizing Asia Regional OpenCourseWare and OpenEducation Conference, the AROOC, from 2009-2011.
Haruo Takemura, Japan OCW Consortium
Professor Haruo Takemura is a professor at the Cybermedia Center of the Osaka University and also is the newly elected Secretary General of the Japan OCW Consortium. His interests include sustainability of OER, virtual reality and mixed reality applications, and paragliding(!).
Organizational
Ignasi Labastida (re-elected), Creative Commons
PhD in Physics in 2000, he has been working in different projects related with openness from several units at the UB: opencourseware, open access (repositories and journals). He is the public leader of Creative Commons in Spain and currently is a member of the Board of directors of the Open Courseware Consortium. He is also a member of Communia, the European Association for the Public Domain. He participates in the opencourseware.eu project funded by the EU.
Catherine Ngugi, OER Africa
Catherine Ngugi is the Project Director of OER Africa, a Saide Initiative. Prior to holding this post, she established the African Virtual University’s Research & Innovation Facility (RIF) in January 2005 and managed it until September 2007. During this period, the RIF hosted two OER projects and launched a Pan-African pilot study on the use of OER in African universities. Catherine holds an MA from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). Catherine began her career in the private sector, working for a multinational manufacturer. In 1997, she relocated to Dakar, Senegal to work with CODESRIA (the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa), where she initiated and coordinated a grants management system and designed the CODESRIA Endowment Plan. Upon joining Oxfam GB, she conducted regional training sessions (Senegal, Mali, and Mauritania) in project sustainability across the organization’s regional group and facilitated the funding by SIDA (Swedish International Donor Agency) of the Oxfam GB West Africa Regional Girls Education Program. A Rockefeller Associate of the African Gender Institute, University of Cape Town, Catherine has worked as a consultant in higher education and the Arts to various international organizations headquartered in Nairobi.