Leadership

Inge Donkervoort lives in the Netherlands (Europe) and has been trained as a teacher. After a few years she started working as a consultant for the government and in businesses. She became interested in applying ICT for online communication, collaboration and online learning with schools, governments, health care institutions and companies and in 2010 she started her own business in online learning. Inge is director/owner of DLearning. She develops online learning materials for companies and institutions she works with and teaches them how to use Xerte and other tools considering their goals and target group. 

Since 2009 Inge has been involved in the Xerte project working on various elements including the translation tool - the internationalization part. Since two year now Inge is working also on learning analytics and adaptive learning connected to Xerte. 

Her vision and mission is "open source unless there is no other option". One of the great values of, for example, Xerte / open source is the share and reuse principle. So many beautiful online learning resources are being made that can be (re)used by others. Why reinvent the wheel when you don't have to? Within the Apereo Board she would like to further develop this principle and also play a role in the involvement of the various projects.

Shoji Kajita is currently a Professor of Kyoto University in Japan with two appointments, one in the IT Planning Office, a part of the Institute of Information Management and Communication, and the other in the Academic Center for Computing and Media Studies. Professor Kajita received his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in Information Engineering from Nagoya University in Japan in 1990, 1992, and 1998 respectively. At Nagoya University, he served as a Research Associate in the Graduate School of Engineering from 1995 to 1997 and an Assistant Professor in the Center for Information Media Studies (CIMS) from 1998 to 2001. During his work at CIMS, he localized WebCT into Japanese and took the role of WebCT evangelist in Japan as a means of promoting the use of ICT for teaching and learning. From 2002 to 2008, he was an Associate Professor at the Nagoya University Information Technology Center, where he developed the Nagoya University Portal and a next-generation Course Management System for Japanese universities. These works were contributed to the Jasig and Sakai communities for use with uPortal, CAS and the Sakai CLE. His contributions to Jasig and Sakai reflected on the participation in annual (formally semi-annual) Jasig Conferences since 2002 and Sakai Conferences since 2004. Before joining Kyoto University in 2011, his most recent position at Nagoya University was that of an Associate Professor in the Information Strategy Office, a part of the university's Information and Communications Headquarters.

I have worked at the University of Cape Town (Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching) for the past six years: starting as a Senior Learning Technologies Consultant and moving into my current role as Learning Technologies Operations Manager. I recently was Acting Learning Technologies Co-ordinator (Jan - Sept 2020) for our cluster in the department. Our team maintains and supports the learning management system Vula (Sakai-based), lecture recording system (Opencast-based) and various other educational technologies. There are a number of other Apereo tools that we have adopted as pilots or in production, including Tsugi, OnTask, Xerte and previously OAE.  On an individual basis, I have also served in the Apereo Incubation Working Group (2019) and was fortunate to attend a training series by OSS Watch. 

I have a diverse background having completed a Masters in Environmental and Geographical Science (2013), and worked in the field of Geographical Information Systems. My passion has always been open source, and I have previous experience working with FOSS GIS and Open Educational Resources. I feel that collaboration is vital for adaptation and growth. Open source allows for more equality and is key in upskilling and capacity building. It is particularly important in a developing world context.

I believe in ongoing development and growth, and since my Masters, I’ve completed a PG Dip in Educational Technology and am currently busy with a postgraduate course in Information Systems. My role in providing support for educational technologies has allowed me to listen and understand the user, and communicate this feedback to the technical team and vice versa. I believe in the values that Apereo supports and the unifying role it provides in a turbulent Higher Education environment of the 21st century.

I’ve worked in Higher Education and at the University of Manchester for some time now, including roles in eLearning, Digital Learning, Dev-Ops and IT Management. For the previous nine years I’ve worked on a variety of open source projects and the most significant of these has been deploying and running one of the world’s largest lecture capture systems, operating entirely on open source software. This has provided me with a wide range of experience in terms of commissioning open source projects, funding their development, acting as a product owner and a keen community member.
 
I’ve found working with open source software to be a transformative experience. Open source frequently comes from the world of higher education and I feel the two worlds are strongly interconnected. The sharing of knowledge, experience and expertise is often a key aspect of what makes open source products so strong, their communities are the driving force behind their prosperity and something that I have not found to exist in the closed source world. Collaboration within and between open source communities is something I am enthusiastic to develop and promote, knowing how much it has benefited myself and the institutions I have worked for.

Chair of the Apereo Board
 

Anne-Marie Scott is the Deputy Director of the Learning, Teaching and Web Services Directorate at the University of Edinburgh. She has been at the University of Edinburgh since 2002 and was responsible for the selection and development of uPortal as the University enterprise portal platform in 2004. She is an expert in enterprise systems – in addition to implementing uPortal, she led a multi-year project to replace the University Identity Management system, moving operations to a real-time SOA based architecture. The solution delivered was a blend of open source solutions (Grouper, OpenLDAP) and bespoke development.

Since 2011 she has been focused on the University’s learning technology provision, developing strategy and leading large institutional change projects that enhance the student learning experience. She is responsible for the provision of all the centrally provided VLE, eAssessment, ePortfolio and media services in the institution. She has a keen interest in learning analytics, developing policy, undertaking some of the early analysis of data from MOOC platforms, and more recently supporting the inclusion of OnTask into the Apereo Incubation process. Current projects include the rollout of lecture recording into 400 teaching spaces; the adoption of WordPress as an institutional blogging platform, including a Domain of One’s Own service; and a pilot of Jupyter Notebooks to support computational learning.

She is passionate about student co-creation of educational technology services through high value internship opportunities. She has a commitment to open source and open practices more generally – including championing the adoption of open source solutions, open licenses and working closely with the University Wikimedian in Residence.

She holds and MA in English and Scottish Literature and a PG Dip in e-Learning, both from Edinburgh. She volunteers for Girl Geek Scotland as part of the leadership team, supporting women in tech roles within the Scottish IT sector, and has more than a decade of board experience as a Trustee of a building preservation trust.