The OEGlobal 2024 Board Election Results

The Open Education Global (OEGlobal) Board of Directors is pleased to announce the results of the election of the 2024 Elections. The top five candidates were elected/re-elected to the Board for the 2024-2027 term.

  1. Votes: 38, Perrine de Coetlogon, France
  2. Votes: 38, Glenda Cox, South Africa
  3. Votes: 35, Takaya Yamazato, Japan
  4. Votes: 34, Maria Soledad Ramirez-Montoya, Mexico
  5. Votes: 27, Robert Lawson, Canada

Congratulations to these Board members!
The rest of the voting results are as follows:

  1. Votes: 18, Nawaraj Ghimire, Nepal
  2. Votes: 18, Beatrice Canales, USA
  3. Votes: 17, Jim Ross-Nazzal, USA
  4. Votes: 10, Muhammad Hassan, USA

Forty-seven organizations participated in the elections out of 216 eligible. This amounted to a participation rate of 22% of the OEGlobal Institutional Membership.

The OEGlobal staff and board deeply appreciate Katsusuke Shigeta, the outgoing Board member, for his invaluable input in guiding OEGlobal forward. OEGlobal looks forward to working with newly elected Board members and all members of the open community on advancing open education around the world

Meet The New Board Members

Associate Professor Glenda Cox works in the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching (CILT) at the University of Cape Town. Her portfolio includes postgraduate teaching, Curriculum change projects, Open Education, and Staff development. She holds the UNESCO chair in Open Education and Social Justice (2021-2025) and is a member of the UNITWIN network on Open Education (2024-2028). She is on the editorial board of the International Journal of Students as Partners (joined in 2022). She is passionate about the role of Open Education in the changing world of Higher Education. Associate Professor Cox is currently the Principal Investigator in the Digital Open Textbooks for Development (DOT4D) initiative. Her current research includes analysing the role of open textbooks for social justice.

Dr. Takaya Yamazato is a professor and Deputy Director at the Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Nagoya University in Japan. He earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Electrical Engineering at Keio University in Yokohama, Japan, in 1993. From 1993 to 1998, he served as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Information Electronics at Nagoya University. During 1997 to 1998, he was a visiting researcher at the Research Group for RF Communications at the University of Kaiserslautern. In 2006, he received the IEEE Communication Society’s Best Tutorial Paper Award. Dr. Yamazato initiated the Nagoya University OCW in 2005 and has been involved in its management and operation since then. He has been a board member of JOCW since 2005 and is currently a board member of OEJ. From 2016 to 2017, he was a member of the Board of Governors (BoG) of the IEEE Communication Society and served as the Director of the Asia/Pacific Board. Additionally, from 2009 to 2011, he was the editor-in-chief of the Japanese Section of IEICE Transactions on Communications. He also chaired the IEICE Communication Society editorial board from 2020 to 2021. Dr. Yamazato’s research interests encompass visible light communication (VLC), intelligent transport systems (ITS), stochastic resonance (SR), and open educational resources (OER).

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Robert Lawson is an Educational Developer at NorQuest College in Edmonton, where he has been promoting open education since joining the institution in 2016. His early efforts focused on encouraging faculty to integrate open images into their online courses. In 2020, Robert led the Reimagine Higher Education initiative, which envisions NorQuest as a largely textbook-free institution by 2030. The college now has an active textbook publishing program that is producing three open textbooks a year.

Beyond NorQuest, Robert is a prominent advocate for open education, both nationally and globally. In 2019, he organized the Alberta Open Education Spring Summit, bringing together open educators and advocates from across the province. Currently, he is co-director of the Open Education Alberta textbook publishing consortium steering committee. In 2023, he served as program co-chair for the 2023 Open Education Global Conference in Edmonton.

As a member of the Board of Directors, he is excited to have the opportunity to support OEG’s mission of building connections that advance open education on a global basis.

Meet the Reappointed Board Members

Perrine de Coëtlogon (France)works on Open Education and Digital Identity at the Directorate for Pedagogical Innovation of the University of Lille. She represents the French authorities in the European Blockchain Partnership and leads a public transformation project to gather an eWallet diploma and micro-credentials. She is also in charge of developing open education activities and policies. She has participated in OEGlobal since 2016, when she co-hosted the Open Education Leadership Summit in Paris. She has been a board member of OEGlobal since 2020 when she launched the OEGlobal Francophone online conference and network.

Perrine holds a Master of Law from the University of Paris Saclay (France) and an LLM from the University of Potsdam (Germany). She was a lawyer at the Paris Bar from 2002 to 2009 and the General Secretary of a public interest grouping promoting open education resources in health and sports sciences from 2009 to 2015. Perrine was then a digital expert (Europe and International) at the Ministry for Higher Education, Research and Innovation from 2015 to 2018. She joined the University of Lille in 2018 on Blockchain and Open Education.

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María Soledad Ramírez-Montoya (Marisol) is a senior researcher at the Institute for the Future of Education, Tecnológico de Monterrey (Mexico). She focuses her activities on dynamizing education initiatives through innovation, research, and global sense as a means of social transformation and impact for lifelong learning and sustainable development.

As Chair of the UNESCO Chair: “Open Educational Movement for Latin America”, Marisol (her short name) mobilizes training, production and research initiatives for open education. As Chair of the International Council for Open of Distance Education (ICDE) “OER Latin America”, she promotes activities with research teams to enrich access practices in distance education.

In her academic activities, Dr. Ramirez-Montoya forms talent for education with an emphasis on innovation, educational entrepreneurship, and multidisciplinary research. She leads research groups, establishing rich experiences for the generation of knowledge inspired by teamwork. She coordinates actions for innovation and globalization and generates innovation and research initiatives with national and international networks.

OEG Voices – Latest Podcasts

OE Global Voices

Welcome to the home of podcasts produced by Open Education Global. These shows bring you insight and connection to the application of open education practices from around the world. Listen at podcast.oeglobal.org

OEG Voices 074: Tony Bates and A Personal History of Open Education

Join us for a wide ranging conversation with Tony Bates covering his long and on ongoing span of being active in open and distance education. We start from his being part of the very first days of the Open University through his years based in Canada but working globally being integral to the development of online learning through the web. He has long been publishing open textbooks and sharing his perspectives on his own website. We go right up to present day where Tony is active in exploring the role of artificial intelligence.

We were inspired to have these conversation having seen where Tony has been publishing on his blog his “personal history” now up to it’s 26th installment:

I am writing an autobiography, mainly for my family, but it does cover some key moments in the development of open and online learning. I thought I would share these as there seems to be a growing interest in the history of educational technology.

Note that these posts are NOT meant to be deeply researched historical accounts, but how I saw and encountered developments in my personal life.

Tony Bates blog

In the OEGlobal Voices studio with Tony Bates (left) and Alan Levine (right)

Listen in for Tony’s insightful energy, critical perspective, and humor as well as his lived stories of experience through a long era of online and open education. Plus, you will find a surprising bit of extra history on how he might have influenced some other students he knew in primary school who went on to be famous.

In This Episode

FYI: For the sake of experimentation and the spirit of transparency, this set of show notes alone was generated by AI Actions in the Descript editor we use to produce OEGlobal Voices.

Podcast Show Notes: OE Global Voices Episode 74: Tony Bates

In this enlightening episode of OE Global Voices, host Alan Levine is joined by the remarkable Dr. Tony Bates, an influential figure in the realm of open education.

Episode Highlights:

  • Introduction to Tony Bates: Discover the journey of a legend in open education, from his beginnings in England to key contributions at the Open University and beyond.
  • Open Education Insight: Tony discusses the limitations and potential of open education resources today, sharing insights rooted in his extensive experience.
  • Founding of the Open University: Gain behind-the-scenes knowledge of how the Open University was envisioned and established, expanding access to higher education with innovative methods such as integrating print, radio, and TV.
  • Role in Online Learning: Learn about Tony’s pioneering role in developing online learning approaches and his transition from traditional educational systems to digital landscapes.
  • Publishing and Open Resources: Tony candidly shares why he embraced open publishing, emphasizing accessibility and the benefits of keeping educational resources current.
  • Reflections on Artificial Intelligence: Tony offers a balanced view of AI’s potential and risks, particularly concerning big tech companies’ influence.

About Tony Bates:
Tony Bates has been a transformative presence in education, contributing through teaching, leadership, research, and writing. He’s known for his candid take on the state of education, often sharing personal anecdotes from his storied career.

Get Engaged:
Listen as Tony Bates reflects on a career filled with innovation, humor, and lasting impact. Follow up on our discussions about educational technology and AI.

This episode is accompanied by the musical track “Distance” by Anitek, fittingly chosen to reflect the expansive themes of Tony’s work. Visit OEGlobal Voices for more episodes and join our community discussions at OEG Connect.

Don’t miss this journey through impactful education landscapes with Tony Bates. Subscribe and engage with us for future insights and conversations.

(end of AI generated show notes)

Additional Links and Quotes for Episode 74

What happened was that I actually saw the internet for the first time in Vancouver when I was visiting a friend. I thought this is the best way to use computers in education, not this, programmed learning stuff, which I didn’t really like because it wasn’t in my view, achieving the higher level cognitive skills that you’d want from university students. It’s all about memorization and so on.

So I thought, yes, we can use computers for communication between students and between students and instructors, that’s great. And a colleague, Tony Kay and I we tried this out on a social science second level course called DT 200.

Tony Bates on early vision for online education

From very interesting things like audio, we found that generally, you know, this is a generalization, doesn’t apply to everybody. But most people that we researched found audio more personal, that they felt they got closer to the lecturer through listening to an audio, a radio broadcaster or an audio cassette. The other thing was that we found that cassettes, actually changed the design principles because students could stop and start. You could build that into the design of a cassette. And then the learning effectiveness went right up.

We had a perfect laboratory situation where we had exactly the same program in audio and radio and exactly the same as a recording. Then we could look at what students learn as a result. We could then change the design of the cassettes and see what happened then and look at the results. Because we had such large numbers of students, we got very statistically significant results.

Tony Bates on early research on use of audio for learning

My take on it, I’m fairly pessimistic. Mainly because my real concern these days is about the power of the big tech companies. I fear it will be taken over by the big tech companies. We’ll see their share prices and stocks go up and the money will go to the venture capitalists. And we’ll all be worse off as a result.

That’s the negative part about it. Now on the positive side, I think yes, in medical research, in legal affairs, it will be very good. I met a colleague, a good friend of mine actually, who’s trying to do research on whether AI can actually improve on the instructional design process.

Tony Bates on Artificial Intelligence

We are counting on more blog posts from you, Tony!


Our open licensed music for this episode is a track called Distance by Anitek licensed under a Creative CommonsAttribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Like most of our podcast music, it was found at the Free Music Archive (see our full FMA playlist).

This was another episode we are recording on the web in Squadcast. This is part of the Descript platform for AI enabled transcribing and editing audio in text– this has greatly enhanced our ability to produce our showsWe have been exploring some of the other AI features in Descriptbut our posts remain human authored unless indicated otherwise.