Longtime member of the open education movement and friend of OCW Candace Thille, who for ten years has headed up Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative, is heading to Stanford. We wish her well!
Open Learning Pioneer Heads West
May 28, 2013 – 3:00am
By
Doug Lederman
Since long before the advent of massive open online courses, Candace Thille’s project to fuse learning science with open educational delivery, developed at Carnegie Mellon University, has been heralded as one of higher education’s most significant and promising developments.Friday, Thille essentially launched stage two of her research-based effort to expand the reach and improve the quality of technology-enabled education, with word that she (and at least part of her Open Learning Initiative) would move to Stanford University.
Thille and Stanford officials alike believe that by merging her experience in building high-quality, data-driven, open online courses with Stanford’s expertise in research on teaching and learning – notably its focus on how different types of students learn in differing environments – the university can become a center of research and practice in the efficacy of digital education.
“The opportunity to get someone like Candace is just thrilling to us,” says Claude Steele, dean of Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, where Thille will have her first-ever faculty appointment. “She will complement the strengths we have in studying the effect of context in learning and research on the role of technology in education, and can tie a lot of these things together. She can help us transform what would otherwise be independent, somewhat fragmented efforts into systematic improvement of this kind of pedagogy.” Read more.