Apereo Board Candidates 2016

2016 Apereo Board Candidates

Three board positions are open. The duties and responsibilities of board members, together with rules governing their election are set out in the Apereo by-laws at - http://www.apereo.org/content/bylaws#article-5 . If you have any questions regarding these duties and responsibilities, please contact the Apereo Foundation Board Chair, Jim Helwig - jim.helwig[at]apereo.org or Executive Director Ian Dolphin at ian.dolphin[at]apereo.org. 

Voting will be completed at the Apereo Foundation Annual General Meeting at Open Apereo 2016, which takes place this year at NYU in New York City, 22nd-25th May.

Cheryl Brown - University of Cape Town

I am an educational technologist and researcher who has been working in the area of e-learning for the past 20 years both in Australia and South Africa.
 
My research interests are around access to ICTs and how they facilitate or inhibit students’ participation in learning. Whether it has been how e- learning can be better designed for students with disabilities, issues around difference in gendered use of ICTS or acknowledging that digital literacy is not homogenous amongst students and young people just because they are born into a digital generation. In the past few years I have looked more closely at the role technological devices (for example cellphones and laptops) play in students learning in a developing context. I have published over 45 academic articles around educational technology.
 
I am an Lecturer and convener of postgraduate courses in Educational Technology at the University of Cape Town. I have been  a member of the TWSIA committee since 2014 before taking on the role of co-Chair of the Apereo Teaching and Learning Innovation Awards (ATLAS) in 2016.  I am an active participant in South Africa's Apereo Community and would like to see how we can better collaborate and encourage collaboration with other African educational institutions. I routinely use a broad range of Apereo tools including Sakai CLE, OpenCast and OAE. I am excited that we have recently deployed Xerte and intended to make use of it for content authoring in our upcoming Masters in Educational technology course

I believe my perspective as an active user of Apereo for teaching along with my research and understanding of students learning challenges and opportunities from a developing context would add a useful perspective and dimension to the Apereo Board.

Doug Johnson - Unversity of Florida

Doug Johnson has worked for the University of Florida since 2000. With an extensive background in K-20 teaching, including teaching graduate courses in Education, Doug was originally hired by UF as an instructional designer with ancillary responsibility for UF's initial experiments with course management systems. Rapid adoption of the CMS as well as online teaching and learning required a transition to full-time LMS responsibilities including building an effective support team (technical and user support) spanning multiple central and distributed IT teams, evaluation and adoption of a collection of teaching and learning technologies, and constant planning for, and navigating change. He is also now leading the learning analytics effort for UF, with plans soon to deploy the Apereo LAI framework.

For Sakai and Apereo, Doug organized and coordinated the initial effort to mobile-enable Sakai working with an international team of programmers (Project Keitai) and has served on the Apereo Board since 2012 and as Board Secretary since 2014. 

"I have served on the Board during an important time of transition. At the same time, I believe we are still in transition, both as an organization and collection of projects that are growing and maturing. I also believe we are entering a time in which the teaching and learning technology space is itself poised for substantial, perhaps disruptive change. Having successfully managed this kind of change at UF, I am excited by, and believe I have the knowledge and experience to engage the challenges of managing change in an increasingly effective and influential organization as is Apereo."

Shoji Kajita - Kyoto University

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.

Based on his background and interests, Shoji Kajita’s main priority for the Apereo Foundation is to construct an international infrastructure to facilitate collaborative development and operations among institutions of higher education throughout the world from both a technical and an organizational perspective. In his second term as a board member, he is willing to put more energy to promote and actualize the direction.

Boeta Pretorius - North West University South-Africa

Boeta Pretorius has worked for the North-West University as the Director of Academic Support (including Teaching and Learning) before his promotion to Chief Director Information Technology in 2015.   In his new role he is responsible for the ICT of the staff and students (76,000) at the North-West University.  Boeta holds a Masters in Computer Science and his mission is to enable core business through technology (product leadership in Teaching and Learning).

The NWU makes extensive use of Apereo products, Sakai, Matterhorn and CAS to support their strategy of embracing Open/community source software, and IT is involved in a number of these communities.  Boeta co-established the Sakai SA community in partnership with Joseph Hardin, Anthony White, Stephen Marquard and Deon van der Merwe (currently the partnership is 10 years old) and headed the development of numerous Sakai products.  Boeta also serves on several NWU Committees (Senate; Extended management committees of campuses; Institutional committee for teaching and learning; Institutional committee for research and innovation; and the Steering committee for the transformation of teaching and learning) as well as National Boards an Committees (OpenCollab Board – a Commercial company developing open source software for Higher Education, Sakai and Matterhorn;  Steering committee of the African Research Cloud - Co-founder; and Oversight committee for the Institute of Data Intensive Astronomy).

Internationally Boeta is on the Executive Steering team of Kuali Student.  Boeta is extremely interested in the new era of next generation learning systems and how the product/project portfolio and approaches/strategy of Apereo will change in the next few years.

Bill Thompson - Lafayette College

I am the Director of Digital Infrastructure at Lafayette College, leading teams responsible for network, systems, identity and access management, and information security. Prior to joining Lafayette, I was leading Unicon’s Identity and Access Management practice, helping institutions deploy Apereo CAS, Shibboleth, and Grouper.

I have been active in higher education open source projects for well over 10 years. In 2003, I led the deployment of a university-wide web portal based on uPortal and CAS at Rutgers University. In 2004, I spearheaded bringing the CAS project to Jasig and led the architecture and design of CAS 3.0. I have served in a variety of roles over the years in Jasig, uPortal, and CAS, and I am currently serving on the CAS PMC.

Lafayette College is an investing partner in Internet2’s Trust and Identity in Education and Research (TIER) initiative. I am leading a TIER deployment with CAS integration, and participate in a number of TIER working groups. This vantage point provides a unique opportunity to foster collaboration between TIER and CAS as well as among other Apereo projects that have identity and access management needs. I am also interested in building and supporting key relationships with other international communities such as the Open Source Identity Ecosystem.