Meet the Co-Chairs

Melissa Highton, Director of Learning, Teaching and Web Services Division (LTW), University of Edinburgh. http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/information-services/about/organisation/learning-teaching-web/directors-office

Lorna M. Campbell, Open education consultant and EDINA Digital Education Manager, University of Edinburgh. https://lornamcampbell.wordpress.com/about/

Both Melissa and Lorna have an outstanding track record in supporting and promoting the development of open education policy and practice that is recognised both nationally and internationally.  They also both have experience of creating open education policy requiring strategic support at institutional and national level.  Melissa has provided leadership in developing open education policy and rolling it out across the institution at the universities of Oxford,  Edinburgh and Leeds.  As Director of Academic IT Services at the University of Oxford Melissa was responsible for overseeing a wide range of successful OER projects and initiatives 2008-2014 and was a SCORE Fellow at the Open University.

Lorna has led and participated in many open education initiatives. She is the leader of the Open Scotland initiative, the co-author of the Scottish Open Education Declaration, a member of the Open Policy Network and the Open Knowledge Open Education Group Advisory Board. Lorna was also responsible for developing and supporting the technical strategy for the Jisc HEA UKOER programmes from 2009 – 20012.

Melissa and Lorna are both active members of the broad UK open education community and are regular delegates and speakers at the OER conferences. They also present on the topic of open education at a wide range of international conferences including Open Education Global, OCWC Global and OERde.  In addition, Melissa and Lorna are active members of ALT and regular participants in the annual ALT conferences.  Lorna is also a member of the ALT Scotland SIG Steering Group and one of the moderators of OER-Discuss one of the longest standing OER community discussion groups in the UK. Melissa is on the steering group of Opening Educational Practices in Scotland (OEPS). They are both giving papers at OER 15.