Day 1 Speakers
Dr. Camille Karlson serves as the College Director for the Center for Innovative Pedagogy at Suffolk County Community College. She has a Ph.D. in Information Studies from Long Island University, C.W. Post Campus, and has been involved in online and distance learning since 2003. She is an alumna of the Online Learning Consortium (OLC) Institute for Emerging Leaders in Online Learning (IELOL) and has had the privilege of serving as the co-chair of the Faculty Development and Support track for the OLC Accelerate Conference for the past two years. She enjoys spending time with family, reading, and rooting for the March Madness “Cinderella Team.”
Team Building Activity: Marshmallows and Spaghetti
Open SUNY Effective Practices Recognition and Panel
Day 2 Speakers
Dr. Eric E. Fredericksen is the associate vice president of online learning at the University of Rochester and associate professor in educational leadership at the Warner School of Education. A national leader in online education, Fredericksen provides leadership for the exploration of online learning initiatives across the University. Previously, he was the associate vice provost at the University, where he provided leadership and services that supported the academic and research missions of the University.
Prior to the University of Rochester, Fredericksen served as the director of academic technology and media services at Cornell University. As a senior manager in Cornell Information Technologies, he helped craft Cornell’s presence and direction in the use of contemporary technologies to support research, outreach, and teaching & learning both in and out of the classroom.
Before Cornell, Fredericksen was the assistant provost for advanced learning technology in the Office of the Provost in the State University of New York System Administration, where he provided leadership and direction for all of SUNY’s system-wide programs focused on the innovative use of technology to support teaching and learning. This included the nationally-recognized SUNY Learning Network – winner of the EDUCAUSE Award for Systemic Progress in Teaching and Learning and Sloan-C Awards for Excellence in Faculty Development and Excellence in Institution-wide Online Programming. It also included the SUNY Teaching Learning and Technology program and Project MERLOT, which were designed to complement the classroom with technology-supported instruction.
Fredericksen was also a co-principal investigator and administrative officer for three multi-year, multi-million dollar grants on Asynchronous Learning Networks (ALN) from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He was responsible for the fiscal management, strategic planning, policy development, faculty development, marketing & promotion, technical support center for faculty and students, and operations and technology infrastructure. He managed a distributed statewide staff of IT, administrative, instructional design, and faculty support professionals. Under his leadership, the program grew from two campuses offering eight courses to 119 enrollments to 53 campuses offering 2,500 courses to more than 40,000 enrollments in just seven years. He has also designed, developed, and taught online courses for the Department of Educational Theory and Practice in the Graduate School of Education at the University at Albany for the past 12 years.
Fredericksen is active in national efforts, including EDUCAUSE, the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative and the Online Learning Consortium. He was chair of the Sloan-C International Conference on Online Learning and previously served as chair of the Sloan-C Awards Program for Excellence in Online Teaching and Learning. In 2012, Fredericksen was elected to the board of directors for the Sloan Consortium and currently serves as President of the Board of OLC. He was honored as a Sloan-C Fellow in 2013.
Presentation: Online Learning Leadership in US Higher Education
Karen Swan is the James J. Stukel Distinguished Professor of Educational Leadership and a Research Associate in the Center for Online Learning, Research, & Service (COLRS) at the University of Illinois Springfield. Karen’s research has been in the general area of electronic media and learning for the 25 years since she received her doctorate from Teachers College, Columbia University. Her current research interests center on online learning Karen has authored over 125 journal articles and book chapters, produced several hypermedia programs, and co-edited two books on educational technology topics. She has directed projects funded by the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Education and the New York City Board of Education, as well as several corporate foundations, and is currently involved in WCET’s Predictive Analytics Reporting Project and ACE’s MOOCs as Game Changers Projects. Karen is the Special Issues Editor for the Journal of Educational Computing Research, and serves on the review boards and/or steering committees for many educational technology journals and conferences, and is the Chair of the American Educational Research Association’s Special Interest Group on Online Teaching and Learning. She is on the OLC Board of Directors and the steering committees for the Blended Learning and Online Learning conferences. Karen was awarded the OLC award for Most Outstanding Achievement in Online Learning by an Individual in 2006 and was inducted into the inaugural group of OLC Fellows in 2010. In 2010 she also was given the Distinguished Alumni award by her alma mater.
Presentation: Social presence in online learning: what’s the big deal?
Open SUNY Online Teaching Ambassadors Recognition
FEATURED PANEL: The Future of Online Education
Michael Feldstein is a Partner at MindWires Consulting, Co-Publisher of e-Literate, and Co-Producer of e-Literate TV. Previously, he has been the Senior Program Manager of MindTap at Cengage Learning and Principal Product Strategy Manager for Academic Enterprise Solutions (formerly Academic Enterprise Initiative, or AEI) at Oracle Corporation. Prior to to that, Michael was an Assistant Director at the SUNY Learning Network, where he oversaw blended learning faculty development and was part of the leadership team for the LMS platform migration efforts of this 40-campus program. Before SUNY, he was co-founder and CEO of a company that provided e-learning and knowledge management products and services to Fortune 500 corporations, with a special emphasis on software simulations. He has also been the interim CLO at The Otter Group, a Senior Partner at Christensen/Roberts Solutions, and a Senior Instructional Designer at Raymond Karsan Associates. In previous lives, Michael has been a freelance writer, an English PhD student, a middle school and high school teacher, a tire wrangler at a Yokohama Tire warehouse, and a professional loafer at Schooley’s Mountain County Park.
Michael has been a member of the Sakai Foundation Board of Directors, a participant in the IMS, and a member of eLearn Magazine’s Editorial Advisory Board. He is a frequent invited speaker on a range of e-learning-related topics having been invited to speak on topics including e-learning usability, the future of the LMS, ePortfolios, and edupatents for organizations ranging from the eLearning Guild to the Postsecondary Electronic Standards Council, and has been interviewed as an e-learning expert by a variety of media outlets, including The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Associated Press, and U.S. News and World Report.
Michael was a very early participant in Open Source Learning Management Systems projects, having been one of the early participants (and the only non-technologist participant at the time) of the OpenACS community in early 2000—the community that would eventually spawn the GPL-licensed dotLRN Learning Management System.
Presentation: Everything Old is New Again: What You Taught the OPM Companies
Day 3 Speakers
Dr. Nelson Baker, is Dean of Professional Education at the Georgia Institute of Technology and associate professor in the university’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, leads a multifaceted operation at Georgia Tech Professional Education. The division is comprised of the Global Learning Center, Georgia Tech-Savannah, the Language Institute, and an extensive program of professional education courses in science, technology, engineering, and math, with online professional master’s degrees, as well as an array of distance learning courses, both credit and noncredit.
Baker particularly seeks to create and assess ways in which technology impacts the learning of engineering students. His award-winning work has generated projects such as multi-lingual web-based intelligent simulations for problem solving; intelligent tutors; student models; an online faculty assistant tool for creating course objectives; and a variety of technology-based assessments and virtual reality interfaces for education.In addition to his role as dean, Baker serves as the U.S. principal investigator for a FIPSE Atlantis programme grant (P116J090074), an international activity exploring quality management and benchmarking of continuing engineering education programs; and also as a co-principal investigator on a five-year NASA project, Electronic Professional Development Network (ePDN), which develops and delivers STEM content to high school teachers.
In February 2012, Baker was appointed by Chancellor Huckaby to serve on the University System of Georgia’s (USG) Distance Education Task Force to create a framework to better coordinate and guide the future use of distance education for the 35 colleges and universities within the USG system. He currently serves as the Secretary General of the International Association for Continuing Engineering Education (IACEE), and is past-chair of the Georgia Board of Regents Administrative Committee on Public Service and Continuing Education. Baker is also President-elect of the University Professional and Continuing Education Association, and an active member of ASEE and ASCE.
Dr. Yakut Gazi is the Associate Dean of Learning Systems at the Georgia Institute of Technology and has worked at higher education institutions in the United States, Qatar, Turkey, and Spain as an instructional designer, media specialist, IT consultant, faculty member, and technology leader since 1993. Prior to joining Georgia Tech Professional Education, she was the assistant vice chancellor for engineering remote education at Texas A&M University.
In this role, she provided collaborative institutional leadership, working with faculty and academic leaders to develop innovative, strategic solutions for online, blended, distance, and open programs and courses. Among her successes is her leadership of the evaluation, adoption, and implementation of a predictive analytics project tying together learner data sources from the student information system, learning management system, and student affairs systems to focus on and support the learner.
She was instrumental in shaping a continuing education system, which featured a learner record with federated identity management across a common education portal for the entire A&M System and its multiple campuses.
Dr. Gazi also led the distributed learning and classroom technology operations at Texas A&M University-Central Texas. Under her leadership, the institution’s online semester credit hours grew to 40% and the institution was awarded the 2013 Quality Matters Making a Difference for Students Award for online educational quality.
She has lived at Texas A&M’s campus in Doha, Qatar, where she made a significant contribution as a staff member. In addition to these roles, she has taught courses in educational technology, foundations of distance learning, psychology of learning, theories of learning, and predictive analytics in higher education.
She is on the editorial review board of the Journal of Social Media in Society, Educational Technology, Research, and Development (ETR&D), and the MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching. She presented at regional, national, and international conferences and is the author or co-author of book chapters, journal articles, and proceedings. She is the co-author of a book titled, “Discourse Indicators of Culture in Online Courses: Designing Learning Environments for Global Success.”
Dr. Gazi has her Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from Texas A&M University, and an M.A. in Educational Sciences and a B.S. in Teaching Chemistry, both from Bogazici University in Turkey.
Workshop: Affordable Degrees at Scale: What Does it Really Take?