Apereo Board of Directors Welcomes Five Members

Members Joining the Apereo Board in 2022

The Apereo Foundation welcomed five members to the board during the July 2022 meeting. Apereo Foundation held annual elections for open positions on its Board of Directors in June 2022. The duties and responsibilities of board members, together with rules governing their election are set out in Article 5 of the Apereo by-laws. 

Welcome to our new and returning board members! Thank you for your time and commitment to the Apereo Foundation!
 

Treasurer, Ex-Officio Member

Theresa Rowe

Treasurer of the Apereo Foundation

Theresa Rowe is an experienced Chief Information Officer and consultant. She is also an independent strategic IT consultant and leadership coach. She is especially interested in strategic IT planning, leadership professional development, and the building of a successful and strategic IT organization. She received the Educause Community Leadership Award 2014 and served as the coordinator for the Educause CIO Constituent Group from 2006 to 2015. She previously served on the board of Merit Network and the Apereo Foundation.

Rowe was named a Top 30 Technologists, Transformers, & Trailblazers by the Center for Digital Education in 2015. She was named a 2017 Premier 100 Technology Leader by Computerworld. Leadership experience includes creating evergreen strategic plans, leading successful governance models, developing and executing network plans, upgrading data-center facilities, implementing ERP systems, and implementing open-source solutions. Rowe spent 28+ years at Oakland University before entering the consulting world full-time. 

Apereo Individual Member Seat

Wes Turner - Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Wes Turner has been elected for a first term of the Individual Member seat.

Wes Turner has a long association with Open Source Software beginning in 2001 when he joined GE Global Research in the Visualization and Computer Vision Group (VCV). VCV researchers had been the originators of the open-source Visualization Toolkit (VTK) and soon after became part of the original developer group for the open-source Insight Toolkit for Segmentation and Registration (ITK). At GE, Dr. Turner embraced these efforts and became part of the team applying open-source software to varied fields such as creating virtual environments for industrial planning, cancer detection, lesion sizing, and even forensic facial reconstruction. On leaving GE, he continued to work in and contribute to these open-source toolkits from within Kitware, a small business which was a major user of and which eventually became the primary maintainer of these same frameworks. While at Kitware, Dr. Turner focused on medical applications, primarily cancer detection and characterization, but also worked in the areas of informatics. He was the PI on multiple NIH grants including the open-source Visomics project for performing biological research in genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics and metabolomics. Around 2010 the Veterans Administration recognized the need to open source their Electronic Health Record (EHR) software, forming an entity, OSEHRA, as the custodian of the effort. Kitware was one of the primary architects and Dr. Turner played a significant role in building the community, becoming the Director of Open Source Operations in 2013. On leaving Kitware, Dr. Turner joined Simquest, the originator of the open-source OpenSurgSim where he worked to add algorithms for supporting suturing.

Since 2016, Dr. Turner has been a Senior Lecturer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Computer Science at RPI has a hybrid student led/academic center called the Rensselaer Center for Open Source (RCOS). RCOS is dedicated to promoting Open Source on campus and both advocates for and teaches courses in that area. Dr Turner has been associated with the RCOS since joining RPI and among the courses he teaches are the studio course CSCI-2960/2961 RCOS and CSCI-4470 Open Source Software. These courses give students instruction and practical experience in the development and application of open source and are very popular among the students. RCOS alone has a yearly enrollment of 350+ students all contributing to open source. In June 2018, Dr. Turner became Director of RCOS, a position he continues to hold.

First-term Apereo Board Director
Individual Member Seat
Current term, July 1, 2022 – June 30, 2025

Apereo Organizational Member Seats

Thierry Koscielniak - Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers

Thierry Koscielniak has been elected for a second term for an Organizational Member seat.

Thierry is the Chief Digital Officer at the Conservatoire national des Arts et Métiers in Paris (Le Cnam)

Le Cnam is the only public higher education institution in France dedicated to life long learning and thus continuous learning with a strong activity in distance online courses. The Cnam National Digital Office is in charge of the implementation of courses digitalisation and MOOC production.

During his career Thierry has always been deeply involved in the use and promotion of open source EdTech : Moodle, Sakai, uPortal, Karuta, Mahara, Pod, H5P and others. He believes and is committed in strong international networking and was a presenter at several conferences: JASIG, MoodleMoot, EDUCAUSE, Online Educa Berlin, Integrated System Europe. He is presently the European member of the EDUCAUSE 2019 annual conference Program Committee and member of Karuta Open Source Portfolio Governing Board.

As expert in EdTech in higher education, he performs an active watch and research on digital learning and presently the pedagogical uses of virtual reality and augmented reality. On behalf of Cnam, he is founder of France Immersive Learning skills centre and vice-president of 3FOD, the French forum for digital learning stakeholders.

He is also involved in two associations of digital professionals in higher education: President of CSIESR, a French association, and Secretary of the Board of EUNIS, a European association. He steers a project using Karuta to provide Cnam lifelong learner with an E-portfolio for professional development based on competencies management. 

Thierry holds a Ph.D. in chemistry and bioinformatics from Sorbonne University.

Second-term Apereo Board Director
Organizational Member Seat
First elected, June 2019
Current term, July 1, 2022 – June 30, 2025

Clint Lalonde - BCcampus

Clint Lalonde has been elected for a first term for an Organizational Member seat.

My name is Clint Lalonde and I am running for a position on the Apereo Board of Directors. I am an educational technologist and advocate for the use of open educational resources and open education practices in higher education. I have a great interest in both open education and, specifically, open-source technologies and their wider use in higher education to support open education projects and initiatives. I have experience working in multi-institutional collaboratives & non-profits and am interested in getting more involved with the Apereo community.

I have worked in the British Columbia post-secondary system for 25 years and am currently an Open Education Project Manager with BCcampus, a non-profit provincial consortium that provides leadership and support to the 25 publicly funded post-secondary institutions in the province of British Columbia. BCcampus works with institutions on collaborative projects in the areas of open education, education technology, online & bended learning, and teaching & learning practices in higher education.

In my 10 years with BCcampus, I have worked on numerous multi-institutional collaborative open technology initiatives. I administer open education project grants for the BC post-secondary system, and currently act as the Product Owner in an Agile development project to rebuild our provincial open textbook repository. I am also a founding member of the BC Open EdTech Collaborative, a network of post-secondary educators who provide open-source software support to post-secondary educators interested in using open-source technologies in their teaching & learning practices. I am also an Associate Professor in the School of Education & Technology program at Royal Roads University, and an occasional Sessional Lecturer in the Department of Education at the University of Victoria.

In the past I was the Manager of Learning Technologies in the Centre for Teaching & Technology at Royal Roads University and have also worked at Camosun College supporting faculty in development of distributed education courses and programs. In 2002, I attended the Application and Management of Information Technology (AMIT) program at the University of Victoria and completed my Masters in Learning and Technology at Royal Roads University in 2011.

I am an active edtech blogger (at edtechfactotum.com) and have recently shifted much of my social media presence from Twitter to Mastodon where you can find me at clintlalonde[at]mastodon.oeru[dot]org.

First-term Apereo Board Director
Organizational Member Seat
Current term, July 1, 2022 – June 30, 2025

Salvador Pellicer - Entornos de Formacion

Salvador Pellicer has been elected for a second term for an Organizational Member seat.

Salvador is CEO at EDF (Entornos de Formacion).

Exclusively dedicated to the learning field with new technologies, Salvador works as a general manager at EDF. EDF is an e-learning company established in 2006, working for universities and corporate companies across 3 continents. EDF is involved in Apereo Foundation, working closely as a commercial affiliate for many years.
Salvador’s main goal is focused on Teaching and Learning and how educational technologies can be incorporated effectively. 

Prior to EDF, Salvador started in 1995 using computers for education, thus creating a company called Macromoon Multimedia Solutions, where he was the winner of the Möbius Award in edutainment. 
His drive for learning with technologies took his business one step further. In the year 2000, Salvador worked in the development of the first Spanish learning management system for the national market, where the results spoke for themselves in the Valencian Government learning department. His work in the project expanded the e-learning formula and he started to manage a new team. As a result, 25 institutions were added to the project, where all infrastructure, software, support and management is centralized in a specialized team that serves around 400.000 users.

The Valencian International University (www.viu.es) proposed an interesting collaborative opportunity where Salvador worked as an IT Educational manager, planning and developing a new online University using open source, in particular Sakai. Since then, Sakai is one of the fundamental technologies used in projects throughout his professional career.

Currently, EDF is offering cloud services, as well as support and development in educational technology.

Second-term Apereo Board Director
Organizational Member Seat
First elected, June 2019
Current term, July 1, 2022 – June 30, 2025