Curriculum Vitaes
Susan D'Antoni is responsible for the UNESCO Education Sector project on Open Educational Resources. The current activity builds on a project she initiated on the virtual university and e-learning while heading the Virtual Institute of the UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning. UNESCO currently supports a large international community and a series of “virtual seminars” aimed at information sharing and capacity building to advance the OER movement. Planning is under way to launch an OER Network to promote and support OER development and use at the local level.
Susan began her career as Director of the Correspondence Education Project of the Canadian Association for Adult Education, and subsequently joined Ryerson University in Toronto as Co-ordinator of Distance Education Programmes. She was seconded to Statistics Canada, where she worked as Chief of Projections and Analysis in the Education Division, and then joined Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada as Director of the Division of Research, Policy and Planning.
Gráinne Conole is Professor of E-Learning in the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University in the UK. Previously she was Professor of Educational Innovation in Post-Compulsory Education at the University of Southampton and before that Director of the Institute for Learning and Research Technology at the University of Bristol. Her research interests include the use, integration and evaluation of Information and Communication Technologies and e-learning and the impact of technologies on organisational change. Two of her current areas of interest are focusing on the evaluation of students’ experiences of and perceptions of technologies and how learning design can help in creating more engaging learning activities. Updates on current research and reflections on e-learning research generally can be found on her blog www.e4innovation.com.
She has extensive research, development and project management experience across the educational and technical domains; funding sources have included the EU, HEFCE, ESRC, JISC and commercial sponsors). She serves on and chairs a number of national and international advisory boards, steering groups, committees and international conference programmes. She has published and presented over 300 conference proceedings, workshops and articles, including over 50 journal publications on a range of topics, including the use and evaluation of learning technologies. She is co-editor of the recently published RoutledgeFalmer book ‘Contemporary perspectives on e-learning research’.
Sugata Mitra is Professor of Educational Technology at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences, Newcastle University, UK.
Prof. Mitra works in the areas of Cognitive Science, Information Science and Educational Technology. He has been working on these areas as well as on Physics and Energy for more than 30 years. He has keen interest in engineering and software development.
His contributions include a number of inventions and first-time applications. Among other applications, he is credited with having started the database publishing industry (particularly the Yellow Page industry) in India and Bangladesh, as well as having implemented the first applications of digital multimedia and Internet based education in India. His experiments (often referred to as “The Hole In The Wall” experiments) with children and the Internet have been reported worldwide since 1999. The recent oscar winning film 'Slumdog Millionaire' was inspired by his work.
His current research interests include technologies for remote and rural education, distance education, instructional robotics, self organizing systems, and collaborative systems on the Internet.
Morten Flate Paulsen is Professor of Online Education at the Norwegian School of Information Technology (NITH) and Director of Development at NKI Distance Education in Norway. He is on the Executive Committee for the European Distance and E-Learning Network (EDEN) and on the European Association for Distance Learning (EADL) R&D committee. He is regional editor for IRRODL (The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning) and EURODL (The European Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning). He is also on the Editorial Board of seminar.net.
Morten has worked with online education since he designed NKI’s first Learning Management System in 1986 and published many books, reports and articles about the topic. Many of his publications and presentations are available at his personal homepage at http://home.nettskolen.com/~morten/. His book Online Education and Learning Management Systems is available via http://www.studymentor.com.
Morten was the founder of The Distance Education Online Symposium (DEOS) in 1990, when he worked with the American Center for the Study of Distance Education at The Pennsylvania State University. He was the founding editor of DEOSNEWS and the first moderator of DEOS-L. Paulsen's dissertation is on "Teaching Techniques for Computer-mediated Communication". This research included a survey of 150 online teachers in 30 countries.
He is a Doctor of Education from the Pennsylvania State University, Department of Adult Education and Instructional Systems (1998), and Master of Science in Engineering from the Norwegian Institute of Technology (The University of Trondheim), Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (1980. He was appointed Adjunct Professor, at the Athabasca University, Centre for Distance Education in 1999. In 2003, he was re-appointed Adjunct Professor for a new three year period.