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Course Facilitators

Course Facilitators

The course instructors are listed below with short bios. We will be active throughout the course, including participating in discussion forums, on Twitter, and on blogs. We have a large number of participants, so we can't guarantee  that we will be able to reply to all emails or questions. We encourage you to use the Help/Suggestion Forum for questions or concerns. 

Simon Buckingham Shum (Open University UK)

sbsDr. Simon Buckingham Shum researches, teaches, and consults on learning analytics, social learning media, collective intelligence, and dialogue/argument visualization. He is based at The Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute in the U.K., where he is Senior Lecturer in Knowledge Media and Associate Director (Technology), and leads the Hypermedia Discourse group. He is also a Visiting Fellow at University of Bristol Graduate School of Education. He has a background in Psychology (B.Sc., York), Ergonomics (M.Sc., UCL), and Human-Computer Interaction (Ph.D., York/Rank Xerox EuroPARC), bringing a human-centered computing perspective to the challenge of building analytics, collective intelligence, and sensemaking tools, informed by a longstanding interest in discourse modeling and argument visualization.

He is a founding member of the Compendium Institute and LearningEmergence.net Links to an external site., was Co-Founder and General Editor of the Journal of Interactive Media in Education, one of the early open, Web-native e-journals. He was one of the Investigators of the OpenLearn program, which published thousands of hours of Open University courses as Creative Commons open educational resources, was Director of the OU’s SocialLearn project (2009), and now leads its research. In a schools (K-12) context he is Chair of Governors at Bushfield School.

Shane Dawson (University of South Australia)

sdShane Dawson is the Deputy Director of Academic Learning Services in the Learning and Teaching Unit at the University of South Australia. Shane's research focuses on the use of social network analysis and learner ICT interaction data to inform and benchmark teaching and learning quality. Shane is a founding executive member of the Society for Learning Analytics Research and past conference chair of the International Learning Analytics and Knowledge conference. He is co-developer of SNAPP an open source social network visualization tool designed for teaching staff to better understand, identify, and evaluate student learning, engagement, academic performance, and creative capacity.

 

Erik Duval (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven)

edErik Duval is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Belgium’s Catholic University of Leuven (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) where he chairs the university’s research unit on human-computer interaction. His research interests and frequent presentation topics are focused on massive hyper-personalization (The Snowflake Effect), learning analytics, openness, and abundance. He serves as chair of the IEEE LTSC working group on learning object metadata; as a member of the executive committee of the Society for Learning Analytics Research; as a fellow of the AACE; as a member of ACM; as a member of the informatics section of the Academia Europaea; and as a member of the editorial boards of the International Journal on E-Learning, the IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies (TLT), and the Journal of Universal Computer Science. He also co-founded two spin-offs, aristomusic and @mire, which apply research results for access to music and scientific output, as well as the not-for-profit ARIADNE Foundation that promotes sharing and reusing learning material.

 

Dragan Gašević (Athabasca University)

dgDragan Gašević is a Canada Research Chair in Semantic Technologies and an Associate Professor in the School of Computing and Information Systems at Athabasca University. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University and an associated research member of the GOOD OLD AI Research Network at the University of Belgrade. He is a recipient of Alberta Ingenuity's 2008 New Faculty Award. His research interests include semantic technologies, software language engineering, technology-enhanced learning, and service-oriented architectures. He has (co-)authored more than 200 research papers. He has been serving on editorial boards of three international journals and has edited special issues in journals such as IET Software and IEEE TSE. He has been the organizer, chair, and member of program committees of many international conferences.

 

George Siemens (Athabasca University)

 

gsGeorge Siemens is an educator and researcher on learning, technology, networks, analytics, and openness in education. He is the author of the Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning and Knowing Knowledge, an exploration of how the context and characteristics of knowledge have changed and what it means to organizations today. Knowing Knowledge has been translated into Mandarin, Spanish, Italian, Persian, and Hungarian. Dr. Siemens is Associate Director of the Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute at Athabasca University, where he leads the learning analytics research team.

He has delivered keynote addresses in more than 30 countries on the influence of technology and media on education, organizations, and society. His work has been profiled in provincial, national, and international newspapers (including The New York Times), radio, and television. His research has received numerous national and international awards, including an honorary doctorate from Universidad de San Martin de Porres for his pioneering work in learning, technology, and networks.

Dr. Siemens is a founding member of the Society for Learning Analytics Research Links to an external site.. He has served as a member of the Steering Committee for AACE's ED-MEDIA conference since 2008. He is on the editorial board of numerous journals, including MERLOT's JOLT and JIME. He pioneered massive open online courses (sometimes referred to as MOOCs) that have included over 20,000 participants.

Fridolin Wild: The R tutorial (Open University UK)

Fridolin Wild is a research associate at the Knowledge Media Institute of the Open University of the UK. His relevant experience as Principal Investigator includes the TELL-ME project (the learning models work package) and the LTfLL project (coordinating the infrastructure work package). Since May 2009 he has been the deputy coordinator of the European network of excellence STELLAR. He shadows the lead of the work package on community building and sustains this in the ROLE project and a European policy project on TEL Futures, TEL-Map.

Fridolin is the voted treasurer of the European Association of Technology Enhanced Learning (EATEL). He studied information science in Regensburg, Hildesheim, and Munich (all Germany). He founded axon-e interactive media in 1998, and managed numerous commercial and governmental projects there until he left the company in 2003. In 2004 he graduated as magister artium in information science and politology.

Between 2004 and 2009, Fridolin worked as a scientist at the Vienna University of Economics and Business in Austria within the European projects PROLEARN, iCAMP, LTfLL, and ROLE thereby serving as the overall technical manager with an additional work package lead in interoperability of social software learning tools in iCamp, leading the work package ‘infrastructure’ within LTfLL, and leading a work package on community building and sustaining in the ROLE project.