Catherine Casserly
Catherine M. Casserly, Ph.D. is passionate about learning eco-systems that support high quality education experiences for all. Cathy is a pracademic, working at the nexus of research and practice as catalyst for openness, innovation and leadership.
Currently, Casserly is a Research Affiliate with the Institute for the Future. She is a Senior Advisor for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. For the Lumina Foundation she is analyzing the risks and benefits of whether the organization should establish a presence in Silicon Valley to leverage its technological innovation, thought leadership and capital to increase the proportion of Americans with high quality degrees, certificates and other credentials. She is a member of the Advisory Council for the National Science Foundation, Directorate of Education and Human Resources, chairing its subcommittee on Open Licensing.
Previously, Casserly was a Fellow with the Aspen Institute. She was Vice President of Learning Networks at EdCast, a Stanford StartX company that advances life long social collaborative learning at scale. She was CEO of Creative Commons, a global nonprofit dedicated to sharing educational, scientific, data and cultural assets. A founding architect of the open educational resources (OER) field, Casserly managed a complex 100M global portfolio for The William & Flora Hewlett Foundation as the Director of the OER Initiative. Early in her career, Casserly taught mathematics in Kingston, Jamaica.
Casserly was a member of the Technical Working Group for the development of the 2015 National Education Technology Plan. She was a founding advisory board member for MIT OpenCourseWare and University of the People. Casserly earned her Ph.D. in the economics of education from Stanford University, BA in mathematics from Boston College, and was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Open University UK.
Sir John Daniel
Sir John Daniel was educated at Christ’s Hospital and pursued his full-time university studies in Metallurgy at the universities of Oxford and Paris. Later he demonstrated his commitment to lifelong learning by taking 25 years to complete a part-time Master’s degree in Educational Technology at Concordia University. The internship for that programme, which took him to the UK Open University in 1972, was a life-changing experience. He saw the future of higher education and wanted to be part of it.
This quest took him on an international odyssey with appointments at the École Polytechnique, Université de Montréal (professeur assistant/agrégé, 1969-73); Télé-université, Université du Québec (Directeur des Études, 1973-77); Athabasca University (Vice-President for Learning Services, 1978-80); Concordia University (Vice-Rector, Academic, 1980-84); Laurentian University (President/Recteur, 1984-90); The Open University (Vice-Chancellor, 1990-2001); UNESCO (Assistant Director-General for Education, 2001-04); and the Commonwealth of Learning (President, 2004-12).
His non-executive appointments have included the presidencies of the International Council for Open and Distance Education, the Canadian Association for Distance Education and the Canadian Society for the Study of Higher Education. He also served as Vice-President of the International Baccalaureate Organisation. He now works on various international projects: as Education Master in the Beijing DeTao Masters Academy, China; Senior Advisor to Academic Partnerships International; and Chair, pro bono, of the UWC (United World Colleges) International Board.
Among Sir John’s 370 publications are his books Mega-Universities and Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education (Kogan Page, 1996) and Mega-Schools, Technology and Teachers:
Sir John is an Honorary Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford University (1990), the College of Preceptors (1997) and the Commonwealth of Learning (2002). He won the Symons Medal of the Association of Commonwealth Universities in 2008 and his 32 honorary degrees are from universities in 17 countries.
The three countries where he has lived and worked have each recognised his contributions with national honours: France – Ordre des Palmes Académiques : Chevalier ‘pour services rendus à la culture française en Ontario’ (1986); Officier : ‘pour services rendus à la culture française au Royaume-Uni’ (1991); United Kingdom – Knight Bachelor ‘for services to higher education’ (1994); Canada – Officer of the Order of Canada ‘for his advancement of open learning and distance education in Canada and around the world’ (2013).
Stamenka Uvalić-Trumbić
Former Chief of the Higher Education Section of the United Nations Organization for Education, Science and Culture (UNESCO), Ms. Uvalić-Trumbić is an international leader in education reform, innovation, quality assurance and accreditation with more than 20 years of higher education experience.
Ms. Uvalić-Trumbić’s first senior role in higher education was as Secretary-General of the Association of Universities in Yugoslavia. In the early 1990s, she joined UNESCO’s European Centre for Higher Education in Bucharest with the goal of enhancing the quality of higher education throughout a more integrated Europe. Ms. Uvalić-Trumbić was quickly promoted to lead the unit managing higher education at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. Her major achievements include developing the 2005 UNESCO-OECD Guidelines for Quality Provision in Cross-Border Higher Education, launching the Global Forum on International Quality Assurance, Accreditation and the Recognition of Qualifications and initiating the UNESCO-World Bank partnership for capacity-building in quality assurance for developing countries.
Inspired by her work with innovative providers of higher education in a world of huge unmet demand, Ms. Uvalić-Trumbić collaborated on the A Tectonic Shift in Higher Education paper with Sir John Daniel and Asha Kanwar.
Ms. Uvalić-Trumbić was voted International Higher Education Professional of the Year 2009 by her peers in the International Community of Higher Education. That same year, she was centrally involved in the organization of UNESCO’s 2009 World Conference on Higher Education as Executive Secretary. Over 2,000 ministers, officials and institutions from countries all over the world attended the conference.
Ms. Uvalić-Trumbić continues to be a consultant to UNESCO on issues related to the Recognition of Degrees and Qualifications in Higher Education. In the past year, she was a Senior Consultant to the Commonwealth of Learning in a project that resulted in the 2012 UNESCO Paris Declaration on Open Educational Resources adopted by acclamation. She is the Education Master with the DeTao Masters Academy in China and was recently named Senior Consultant to the U.S. Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) for the creation of its International quality group. She joined Academic Partnerships as a senior advisor in February 2013.
Ms. Uvalić-Trumbić studied at the Universities of Belgrade and the Sorbonne.
Joseph Press
Dr. Joseph Press is Global Innovator and Strategic Advisor to the CEO at the Center for Creative Leadership, Zürich, Switzerland. Collaborating with leadership across CCL globally, he champions innovation, digital transformation and creative leadership with our clients, in support of delivering engaging and innovative experiences that accelerate personal and organizational impact. As an experienced business consultant and passionate digital innovator, he is deeply committed to co-creating meaningful experiences that transform people, organizations and society. His creative mindset helps unleash client creativity to co-design innovative business models, products, and services in design thinking-inspired workshops. With over five years of online teaching experience, He also design and deliver high-impact developmental experiences in synchronous and asynchronous virtual environments.
He was previously the Director of Deloitte Digital Switzerland, capping a 16 year career as a digital transformation consultant. Working with global clients, he was responsible for consulting companies on digital transformation and innovation initiatives to achieve business results and accelerate organizational evolution. He was also responsible for designing the Deloitte Switzerland Greenhouse, an innovation space for exploring business challenges with clients. This work leveraged his prior career as an architectural designer. For 10 years, he designed workplaces in France, Germany, Israel and the U.S.
Joseph completed his B.S. in Managerial Economics at Carnegie Mellon, and SMArchS + Ph.D. in Design Technology at MIT. He is a guest lecturer at IMD, Parsons The New School For Design in the Strategic Design & Management Masters Program, and the Design Thinking program at St. Gallen, where he teaches graduate courses on design, digital business models and innovation. He previously held teaching and research positions at MIT, Delft Technical University, and Bezalel Design Academy.
Brian Magerko
Dr. Brian Magerko is an Associate Professor of Digital Media and computational media scholar who studies creativity as a formal sociocognitive phenomenon and how it can influence and be expressed through computational media. The philosophy behind Magerko’s work is that an authentic combination of technical and artistic / creative research can yield results that are greater than the sum of their parts and characteristically different than if one field were privileged over the other. This research trajectory has yielded nearly $12 million in research funding, an online computer science learning environment (called EarSketch) that has over 85,000 individual users and has been adopted as part of the national high school computer science curricular guidelines for AP courses; a 2016 White House press release concerning how EarSketch (co-founded by Magerko) has influenced federal education policy as a cornerstone of contemporary CS education efforts; and tech/arts experiences that have been showcased at conferences, learning institutions, galleries, and museums around the world.
Outputs of Dr. Magerko's research and studio work with students has yielded outputs such as: AI-based interactive artwork, interactive narrative and digital game experiences, educational digital media used worldwide, and empirically-based sociocognitive theories of creativity
Magerko earned his B.S. in Cognitive Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1999 with a senior thesis on studying cognition in jazz expertise with Dr. Herbert A. Simon. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering in 2006 from the University of Michigan, advised by Dr. John Laird, where he conducted research on employing predictive models in interactive narratives. Since joining the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2008, Dr. Magerko 's research has been published via conferences affiliated with major organizations such as ACM, AAAI, and IEEE yielding over 1500 citations. He has authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications in computational media, cognition, and learning sciences-related conferences, books and journals. His computational media work has been featured in museums, science centers, and news outlets such as CNN, The New Yorker, USA Today, and Digital Trends.