AECT
President Elect

David Wiley
Lumen Learning / Brigham Young University - Download Profile/Vita


About Me: My name is David Wiley. I'm the Chief Academic Officer of Lumen Learning, a company dedicated to increasing student success, reinvigorating pedagogy, and improving the affordability of education using a combination of open educational resources, learning analytics, continuous improvement, and professional development. I'm currently a Simon Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University, the Education Fellow at Creative Commons, an Ashoka Fellow, and adjunct faculty in Brigham Young University's graduate program in Instructional Psychology and Technology, where I was previously a tenured Associate Professor. You can learn more about me, my family, my hobbies, and my work at davidwiley.org.


My Academic Mission: I'm a firm believer in focusing our work on problems (e.g., illiteracy) rather than things (e.g., iPads). For over twenty years my work has focused specifically on increasing access to education and improving outcomes for underserved students. I've used several intellectual tools and frameworks as I've tried to make progress on these problems, including learning objects, open educational resources and OER-enabled pedagogy, social entrepreneurship, continuous improvement, and professional development.


Scholarship: I have an extensive record of publications, including dozens of peer-reviewed articles co-authored with students (see my Google Scholar Profile for more details) as well as peer-reviewed open source software. I’ve received over $10 million in grants as Principal Investigator or Co-Principal Investigator, including a CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation, edited several books (three with student co-editors), spent time at both the Open University of the Netherlands and the Open University in the UK as a visiting scholar, and given keynote addresses all over the world (in Brazil, China, Israel, Kenya, Malaysia, Thailand, and the UK from 2010 - 2020).


Teaching: I began my teaching career as an adjunct at Ashland Community College in Kentucky and Marshall University in West Virginia. After finishing my PhD at Brigham Young University, I held tenure track positions at Utah State University and then Brigham Young University where I taught classes on open education, new media and learning, grant writing, project management, social entrepreneurship, and other topics.


Leadership: I love translating research and theory into practice that has real impact, and I proactively look for opportunities to do that. I founded the Open Education Conference and served as its lead organizer for its first 16 years, stepping down from that role after the 2019 meeting (when the conference had grown to over 800 attendees). I founded the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning at Utah State University, a grant-funded research center where I had the opportunity to employ and mentor dozens of graduate students as we worked to increase access to educational opportunity for learners around the world. I founded Mountain Heights Academy, a free, fully online, public charter school in Utah that serves over 1000 students in grades 7 - 12. And I co-founded Lumen Learning, which this year helped faculty replace expensive, inflexible textbooks with open educational resources for over 380,000 students.


AECT and Me: I love AECT. It is my professional home and family. I'm deeply grateful for all the ways AECT has supported my growth and professional development, as well as the growth and development of the many students I've had the opportunity to bring to the conference over the years. From my first year as a graduate student in 1998 until today I've only missed AECT a single time. I've served on the AECT Board as an at-large member, participated in summer leadership and research meetings, and published my first book with AECT back in the late 1990s.


AECT Vision: I believe that AECT can be more useful to the world than it is currently. We can do more good. We can increase our impact.


Publishing. Specifically, we can raise the visibility of our members and their research by increasing our commitment to open access publishing. Our work will be much more widely read when it is available to read for free, rather than priced at $40 per research article as it is for most of our non-members. And we can do much more to get the word out about the results of our members' research so that people find it, read it, cite it, and - most importantly - use it to improve outcomes for learners.


Partnerships. We can continue to strengthen and build partnerships across geographic boundaries.  And we can build partnerships with other disciplines like the learning analytics and educational data mining communities, the artificial intelligence and machine learning communities, and the nascent learning engineering community (to name a few). We can find ways to work productively together on joint projects with other organizations like ISTE and the Aurora Institute (the organization formerly known as iNACOL).


Policy. We can participate more actively in the policy creation process by meeting and talking directly with policymakers and their staff at our local, regional, and national levels. We can draft model policies. And we can have a positive influence on funding agendas by meeting and speaking directly with staff at private foundations and in government.


Professional development. We can better prepare our own membership for the future with professional development in emerging areas in which - to be honest - our members may have little or no experience (like learning analytics). We can also work together on shared open course designs in these emerging areas - making them easier for us to teach effectively and improve collaboratively.


Participation. While I've outlined some of my ideas here, I'm sure that the ideas that you have for improving AECT’s impact in the world will be even better. Let's move them forward.


Conclusion: AECT members have knowledge, skills, and expertise the world needs - now more than ever. AECT members can make the world a better place as we help effectively translate research and theory into practice that concretely improves teaching and learning. I would love the opportunity to work with all of you to help make that happen.





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