Staff

Meet our core team

(Listed alphabetically)

Wayne Mackintosh

Managing Director, UNESCO/ICDE Chair in OER

Wayne MackintoshWayne Mackintosh is the founding director of the OER Foundation headquartered at Otago Polytechnic Ltd, New Zealand. He is coordinating the establishment of the OERu, an international innovation partnership which aims to widen access to more affordable education for all. Wayne holds the UNESCO Chair in OER and serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the OER Foundation. He is a strategy innovator with a passion for open sourcing education.

Wayne is a committed advocate and user of free software for education. He was the founding project leader of New Zealand’s eLearning XHTML editor (eXe) project (www.exelearning.org) and founder of WikiEducator (www.WikiEducator.org) – an international community of educators collaborating on the development of free/libre teaching materials in support of all national curricula.

Wayne has extensive international experience in educational technology, learning design and the theory and practice of open and distance learning (ODL). Previously, he was Education Specialist, eLearning and ICT policy at the Commonwealth of Learning (COL), an intergovernmental organisation based in Vancouver, Canada. Before joining COL he was Associate Professor and founding director of the Centre for Flexible and Distance Learning (CFDL) at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. At the University of Auckland, he was tasked with eLearning strategy and leading CFDL’s professional staff team. Prior to moving to New Zealand he spent eleven years working at the University of South Africa (UNISA), a distance learning institution and one of the world’s mega-universities. Wayne has participated in a range of international consultancies and projects including work for COL, the International Monetary Fund, UNESCO and the World Bank. Wayne served as the holder of the COL Chair in OER  from 2012 – 2015. Previously, Wayne served on Editorial Board of Open Learning for more than a decade, but now focuses on open access and open education research efforts.

Wayne is the recipient of the 2019 International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE) Individual Prize of Excellence in recognition of his work pioneering an OER-enabled transnational micro-credentialing system. In 2020, he received the award for Excellence in Leadership at Otago Polytechnic and the Open Education Global Leadership Award for significant long standing contributions to Open Education.

Wayne is married with three children and lives in Cromwell on the beautiful South Island of New Zealand.

Qualifications: Ph.D. University of Bath, United Kingdom. M.Ed., B.Ed., B.Com. and Higher Education Diploma (Postgraduate), University of Pretoria, South Africa.

Email: wayne@oerfoundation.org

Fediverse

Dave Lane

Open Source Technologist

Dave LaneDave Lane is the OER Foundation’s Open Source Technologist. His role is to build and maintain the computing systems used to make OERu courses available to learners everywhere, using exclusively Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) developed by communities, as well as strategic components he develops himself, or developed by his talented predecessor, Jim Tittsler. He finds great satisfaction knowing those systems enrich the global educational Commons with resources that can be shared freely by all – he maintains a tech blog to help others replicate OERF systems.

Dave is a passionate advocate for the use of FOSS in education and by educators: in addition to supporting learners at a global scale at a minuscule cost, using FOSS ensures learners develop digital confidence without strings – like proprietary file formats or ongoing license fees – attached, or being disadvantaged by costly proprietary software or exploited by privacy infringing surveillance capitalism business models.

Dave was delighted to join the OER Foundation in 2015 after a few years working with Catalyst IT, the company that in 2012 acquired, Egressive, the FOSS software development and IT services company he founded in 1998.

Born and raised near New York City on the east coast of the US, after completing his undergraduate degree, Dave moved to Seattle on the west coast for post graduate study. In 1994 he took up an unexpected invitation to work as a research scientist at one of New Zealand’s Crown Research Institutes, developing a prototype computer vision and remote mapping system. He formally emigrated to NZ in 1996, becoming a dual citizen a few years later.

In addition to his OER Foundation role, he has been the President of the NZ Open Source Society, a registered charity, from 2011 – 2020. He served on the advisory group of the NZ Creative Commons affiliate for 3 years. To document his thoughts, interests, and social activism Dave maintains a wide-ranging personal blog.

Dave is married to Jos and they are raising two enthusiastic boys and a rascally dog in Christchurch, halfway up the east coast of NZ’s stunning South Island. Among other enthusiasms, Dave enjoys the outdoors, reading dystopian fiction (or so he hopes!), cooking spicy foods, baking sourdough bread, imbibing fermented beverages, woodworking, designing and building radio controlled flying things, mountain biking in the hills with his boys, doing yoga, dancing swing, and singing in a band.

Qualifications: MS Mechanical Engineering, University of Washington (Seattle, WA, USA), BSc Physics, Haverford College (Haverford, PA, USA).

Email: dave@oerfoundation.org

Fediverse

  • Mastodon: @lightweight@mastodon.oeru.org
  • Blog: @dave@oerfoundation.org (follow to receive notifications of new blog posts)
  • Tech Blog: @lightweight@tech.oeru.org (follow to receive notifications of new tech blog posts)