Kate James

MIT OpenCourse Ware: Senior Manager, User Experience

ocw.mit.edu

Kate James is the senior manager, user experience for MIT OpenCourseWare,MIT's initiative to publish the basic teaching materials for virtually all of its courses openly and freely online. James leads the production team,which is responsible for all technical, accessibility and usability aspects of OCW's publication process, including video production, CMS support and enhancements, site UI, and publication standards. She came to MIT in 2007.

Prior to this, James held web communications positions at Textron, Brown University and Smith College. Her M.A. (University of Massachusetts Amherst) and B.A. (Illinois State University) are in English (fiction writing).

Ken Udas

UMass Online-Chief Executive Officer

umassonline.net

Dr. Ken Udas, whose background includes a diverse set of executive management and teaching roles in Slovakia, Austria, Kazakhstan, Central Asia and New Zealand as well as in the US, became the Chief Executive Officer of UMassOnline in September, 2009.

Prior to UMassOnline, Dr. Udas was the Executive Director of Penn State World Campus where he led the development of the organization's vision with responsibility for prioritizing and resourcing initiatives, staffing plans, and capital and operational investments. His management of operations included educational technology, student services, academic advising, student retention, marketing, program development, faculty development, learning design and course development.

Youlanda Gibbons

Georgetown University

georgetown.edu

Youlanda Michelle Gibbons completed her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in May 2003. A native of Georgia, she attended Mercer University in Macon earning a BA degree in English. During her graduate studies in Massachusetts, she earned masters degrees from Boston University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst in Psychology, Public Health, Education Policy and Sociology.

A professor of Sociology and Liberal Studies at Georgetown, Youlanda published her first book The Business of Diversity: A View from the Corporate Suite this past year with Cognella Academic Press and her current research activities focuses on professional women’s experiences in the workplace. At NASA Headquarters in Washington DC, Youlanda is a senior consultant serving in the areas of conflict resolution and diversity and inclusion management.

Norman Bier

Open Learning Initiative

Open Learning Initiative Homepage

Norman Bier is the Associate Director of the Open Learning Initiative (OLI) at Carnegie Mellon University. OLI is dedicated to the development of freely available “stand-alone” college-level online courses and web-based learning environments informed by the best current research from the cognitive and learning sciences.  OLI uses Prior to joining OLI, he was Director of Training and Development at iCarnegie Inc., a CMU subsidiary chartered to deliver software development education through international partnering institutions. Using technology and faculty support, iCarnegie reaches thousands of students who would not have had access to a CMU-level education.  His principal responsibilities at iCarnegie included course, curricula and program development; faculty support and training; and business development.  He has taught computer science courses as an adjunct faculty member at the Community College of Allegheny County and served as a founding committee member for the Robert E. Cook Honors College.

Elisa Lanzi

Director of the Imaging Center at Smith College

& Five Colleges Intellectual Property Policies for Shared Media Committee

Smith College Imaging Center & Visual Communication Center

Elisa Lanzi is a visual arts information specialist working with image archives, museums, and digital libraries. Her focus is digital practice and policy. As Director of the Imaging Center at Smith College she is involved in building digital repositories and implementing tools for teaching and learning. Her commitment to sharable metadata resulted in the Cataloging Cultural Objects: A Guide to Describing Works and their Images (CCO) project and publication.  

Lanzi’s current interests are with preservation and copyright.  She is chair of the Five Colleges Intellectual Property Policies for Shared Media Committee and she serves on the new Five Colleges Digital Preservation Task Force.  Lanzi holds a Masters in Library Science from the University at Albany; her undergraduate work is in English and Art. 

Charlie Schweik

Co-Director and founder, UMass Amherst Open Source Laboratory

UMass Amherst Open Source Lab Homepage

Charles M. Schweik is an Associate Professor in the Dept. of Environmental Conservation and the Center for Public Policy and Administration at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA (since 2006) and has been a faculty at UMass since 2001. He also is the Associate Director of the National Center for Digital Government at UMass Amherst (http://www.ncdg.org). He has a PhD in Public Policy from Indiana University, a Masters in Public Administration from Syracuse University, and has an undergraduate degree in Computer Science. A primary research interest is in the use and management of public information technology. For more than six years, between his undergraduate degree and his MPA, he was a programmer with IBM. His research focus is on environmental management and policy, public-sector information technology, and the intersection of those domains. Some of his past work was connecting GIS and remote sensing with social science methods to study landscape change (e.g., deforestation in Nepal). More recently, Schweik has completed a book manuscript (forthcoming, MIT Press) tentatively entitled Understanding Collaboration in the Internet Era: A Study of the Success and Abandonment of Open Source Software Commons that looks at collaborative principles in open source software projects. He teaches mostly in the area of information technology in the Environmental Conservation and Public Policy and Administration programs at UMass Amherst.