To support OER innovation and expansion, ISKME names Cisco General Manger Jason Goecke as chair of its board and higher education data expert Nicole Melander as newest board member.
To support OER innovation and expansion, ISKME names Cisco General Manger Jason Goecke as chair of its board and higher education data expert Nicole Melander as newest board member.
HALF MOON BAY—June 18, 2018—As the open educational resources (OER) movement to advance equitable access to high quality education gains a stronger foothold in states, schools, and colleges, the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) is helping shape the infrastructure and engagement to make this possible. ISKME manages OER Commons, the nation’s digital library of record for OER, partnering with states and education institutions in both K-12 and higher education to develop their own collections of openly licensed teaching and learning materials tied to standards, curated by teams of teachers, librarians, and curriculum specialists. ISKME trains educators in the practice of open education, and is leading the way in developing needed infrastructure for OER expansion through metadata sharing and development of authoring tools to support communities of practice in schools, colleges, and library systems.
To strengthen ISKME’s thought leadership and its capacity to take on key challenges in inspiring and convening educators and learners to embrace the practice of open education, the ISKME board of directors today named entrepreneur and Cisco General Manager Jason Goecke, as its board chair, and Dr. Nicole Melander, vice president, strategic initiatives for the education technology company Campus Labs, as a new board member.
ISKME’s new chair, Jason Goecke, is vice president and GM at Cisco responsible for Webex Teams. He joined Cisco with the 2015 acquisition of Tropo, where he was CEO and co-founder. With more than 20 years of experience in cloud telecommunications and open source application development, he was previously VP of Innovation at Voxeo Labs, where he spearheaded the company into innovating communications solutions. Prior to Voxeo Labs, Goecke was co-founder of the Adhearsion open source telephony framework.
“ISKME is well positioned to take advantage of new opportunities to support the field of OER. By tapping into the expertise of OER developers and open source technology we will maximize the use of metadata within emerging communities of practice to strengthen the quality and reach of OER,” says Jason Goecke.
New board member Nicole Melander’s work is focused on helping empower higher education to make more strategic use of data. She previously served as a vice president at Civitas Learning where she was also a faculty member of the Next Generation Leadership Academy (NGLA), a program dedicated to grounding rising educational leaders in continuous improvement through data use. She also has served as executive vice president and chief customer officer at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and as chief technology officer of Achieving the Dream (ATD), a national reform network dedicated to community college student success and completion. In addition, Nicole has held education and technology leadership positions at Deloitte Consulting, Microsoft and Oracle Corporation.
“Higher education has made progress in supporting use of OER in classrooms and developing degree programs around OER content,” says Lisa Petrides, president and founder of ISKME, “But more rapid expansion into two- and four-year higher education institutions will depend on helping educators become more comfortable using openly licensed quality curated materials that they themselves can improve and share.
“The OER field is maturing, and the plans we initiated over the last several years to develop OER hubs and large-scale metadata exchange across systems and platforms is beginning to take place,” says Petrides, who leads ISKME’s efforts to develop OER Commons, conducts research, and hosts the Big Ideas Fest, an annual convening of innovators in education around the globe.
“Now is the time for us to implement ISKME’s vision for open content that is not siloed in single platforms but put in the hands of educators and learners who want to collaborate, improve, and share it,” says Melander.
During the last two years, ISKME has grown its services that provide custom digital curriculum libraries and supports, as well as continuously advancing its freely available public digital library, OER Commons, its curated collections and collaborative features that support a global community of users.
“Working with ISKME, state departments of education and higher education and state library systems, as well as schools and colleges, are creating more effective systems for identifying, developing, curating and sharing content and supporting exemplary practice using OER,” Petrides says. “The new chair and board member will help ISKME advance our thought leadership, launch new technology, and establish networks and infrastructure that support broader use of OER through communities of practice.”
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The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (www.iskme.org), located in Half Moon Bay, CA, is a global leader in research and practice around open education in education. An independent nonprofit organization established in 2002, ISKME is well-known for its OER initiatives, as well as its OER Commons public library (www.oercommons.org), and its award-winning research on information and knowledge use in the education sector.