OEC announces the 2018 winners of the Open Education Awards for Excellence, Individual Awards

CONCORD, Mass. - Feb. 13, 2018 - PRLog -- The Open Education Awards for Excellence provide annual recognition to outstanding contributions in the Open Education community. The awards are presented by the Open Education Consortium Board of Directors to recognize truly exceptional work and dedication to Open Education. Individual awards recognize career achievements in the two categories of Leadership & Educator.


This year, the Leadership Award  is presented to an individual that has demonstrated strong leadership, longstanding involvement, and whose contributions have spanned regions or had global impact on Open Education.

Cable Green, Director of Open Education, Creative Commons

For the past 11 years, Cable has worked tirelessly with the global open education community to leverage open licensing, content, practices, and policies to significantly improve access to open education and research resources. Cable has dedicated his career to increasing access to educational opportunities for everyone around the world. He's a leading advocate for open licensing policies that ensure publicly funded education materials are freely and openly available to the public that paid for them, and has helped multiple governments, foundations and civil society projects implement these policies.

Cable dedicates his time contributing to the open education community serving on multiple advisory boards (e.g., Global Digital Library, ICDE OER Public Policy), mentoring new community members through the CC Open Education Platform, as a dissertation advisor, giving conference workshops and webinars, and in 1-to-1 meetings with community members around the world. Cable's default position is "how can I help?" and "what can we do right now?" He is an inspiring advocate, and a relentless supporter of communities around the world.

The Educator Award is presented to two individuals who have shown exceptional dedication to high quality teaching and learning and a commitment to the ideals of Open Education, namely: access, equity and opportunity. This year, we are pleased to present the awards to:

Lee-Ing Tong, Distinguished Professor, National Chiao Tung University

Besides doing extensive research, Professor Lee-Ing Tong exhausts all her energies teaching statistics-related courses. She hopes students are not only learning in the classroom, but also through exploring knowledge further by themselves. Professor Tong has won the excellent teaching award 3 times; one was from University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth and two were from National Chiao Tung University.

Professor Tong has been developing open courses since 2010, such as Basic Statistics, Statistics I and II, and has helped more than 53,000 learners around world. These courses have also been used in flipped classrooms and online learning environments to create different learning experiences. Professor Tong continues to update lecture notes and modularize some parts of courses too. Each year, she opens 3 different courses with an estimate of 3,000 participants per course.

Felienne Hermans (www.felienne.com) Assistant Professor at the Department of Software Engineering, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Sciences, TU Delft.

One of Felienne's biggest passions in life is to share her enthusiasm for programming with others. She has been an active supporter of open and online education since 2014, constantly searching for ways to allow learning pathways to anyone in the world that wishes to develop programing skills.

Felienne created several MOOCs to train children (K-12), and their teachers, in the development of programming skills. Her courses have attracted more than 250,000 enrollments. She co-organizes the yearly "Joy of Coding" (www.joyofcoding.org/) conference in the Netherlands and teaches programming at a community center every Saturday. She is also a host at SE radio (www.se-radio.net/), one of the most popular software engineering podcasts on the web.

About the Open Education Awards for Excellence

The Open Education Awards for Excellence provide annual recognition to outstanding contributions in the Open Education Consortium community. These awards recognize distinctive open education sites, technological innovations, notable open courses, and exemplary leaders in Open Education worldwide.  http://www.oeconsortium.org/projects/open-education-awards-for-excellence/

About the Open Education Consortium

The Open Education Consortium is  a global network of educational institutions, individuals and organizations that support an approach to education based on openness, including collaboration, innovation, collective development and use of open educational materials. The Open Education Consortium is a non-profit, social benefit organization registered in the United States and operating worldwide. http://www.oeconsortium.org/