Professor Alan Tait was Pro-Vice Chancellor (Academic) at The Open University of the United Kingdom from 2007 to 2012, and was formerly Dean of the Faculty of Education and Language Studies. He was Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning (2005–2013) and the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Learning for Development, produced by the Commonwealth of Learning for the first time at the end of 2013.
Professor Tait was President of the European Distance and E-Learning Network (EDEN) from 2007 to 2010, and Co-Director of the Cambridge International Conference on Open and Distance Learning. He is a Visiting Professor at Aarhus University, Denmark, a senior member of St Edmunds College, the University of Cambridge, and a Visiting Fellow of the Centre for Distance Education at the University of London.
In 2012, Professor Tait was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Moscow State University for Economics, Statistics and Informatics. He has worked widely in developing countries, and for international organisations, such as UNESCO, the European Commission, the Commonwealth of Learning, and the International Extension College.
Expertise: distance education, learner support, education and development
Professor Gwo-Jen Hwang is Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Mobile Learning and Organisation, and the Journal of Computers in Education, and an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Learning Technology. Professor Hwang also serves as an editorial board member and a reviewer for more than 30 academic journals on educational technology and e-learning, and was the guest editor of Educational Technology & Society, Educational Technology Research & Development and Interactive Learning Environments.
Professor Hwang has been the principal investigator in more than 100 research projects funded by the National Science Council and the Ministry of Education in Taiwan, and received the annual Outstanding Researcher Award from the National Science Council of Taiwan in the years 2007, 2010 and 2013. He has also been invited to be a keynote speaker at many international conferences.
Expertise: mobile and ubiquitous learning, digital game-based learning, adaptive learning, artificial intelligence in education
Dragan Gašević is Professor of Learning Analytics in the Faculty of Education and Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University. Previously, he was a Professor and the Sir Tim O'Shea Chair in Learning Analytics and Informatics in the Moray House School of Education and the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh (2015-2018). He served as the immediate past president (2015-2017) of the Society for Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR) and holds several honorary appointments in Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, and USA. A computer scientist by training and skills, Dragan considers himself a learning analyst who develops computational methods that can shape next-generation learning technologies and advance our understanding of self-regulated and social learning. Dragan had the pleasure to serve as a founding program co-chair of the International Conference on Learning Analytics & Knowledge (LAK) in 2011 and 2012 and the Learning Analytics Summer Institute in 2013 and 2014, general chair of LAK'16, and a founding editor of the Journal of Learning Analytics (2012-2017). Dragan is a (co-)author of numerous research papers and books and a frequent keynote speaker.
Expertise: learning analytics, self-regulated and social learning, higher education policy, data mining
Professor Jiyou Jia has been responsible for national projects and international cooperation projects such as the Chinese Education Finance Management System of the Ministry of Education since 2013 and World Educational Technology Research Supporting System: WETRSS since 2009. His research has won a number of national and international prizes such as the Excellence Award for Humanities and Social Science Research of the Peking University in 2015 and Innovative Application of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI) Deployed Application Award by Association of Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in USA in 2008.
Professor Jia has published more than 100 articles in international or national peer-reviewed journals and conferences. He has edited the book Educational Stages and Interactive Learning: From Kindergarten to Workplace Training and authored the book Intelligent Web-Based English Instruction in Middle Schools. He serves as reviewer for six international journals such as Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, a co-chair or PC member of more than 20 international conferences including ICCE, ICALT and GCCCE, and an advisory expert for several scientific and governmental organisations such as the Czech Science Foundation and Science Foundation of Beijing City. He was also a guest professor at School of Education, Technical University of Munich, Germany.
Expertise: educational technology and artificial intelligence in education, especially in Technology Enhanced Language Learning, math education with ICT, and decision making support system
founded the Centre for Education Research and Scholarship at Middlesex University. He is editor of Higher Education Quarterly, and the editor of Educational Thinkers and Debating Higher Education book series for Springer. He has published 20 books on topics related to higher education ranging from marketing to compassion and from Heidegger to trust and has published more than 100 academic articles. He has served on the editorial boards for seven journals. He is a visiting Professor at Sydney University of Technology, Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Higher Education Policy and Fellow of the Academy of Transdisciplinary Learning and Advanced Studies.
Professor Gibbs' current research activities include research on transdisciplinary thinking, values, and especially trust, in higher education, and the philosophy of higher education.
Expertise: heidegger, pedagogy of higher education, transdisciplinarity professional doctoral learning and the philosophy of higher education
