International Open Education Experts to Speak at 30th AAOU Conference

The AAOU keynote speakers are International scholars in educational technology and open educationInternational scholars in educational technology and open education Dr. Laura Czerniwiecz and Dr. Qiong Wang will be the keynote speakers at the 30^th annual conference of the Asian Association of Open Universities (AAOU) to be held on 26-29 October 2016 in Manila, Philippines.
Dr. Czerniewicz is the director of the University of Cape Town's (UCT) Center for Innovation in Learning and Teaching and a well known scholar of technologically-mediated teaching and learning and the changing higher education environment. In 2005, as the first director of UCT's Center for Education Technology (CET) she helped to institute the university's first educational technology policy. Subse-quently, as head of OpenUCT in 2010 she initiated the open scholarship agenda, which includes the UCT Open Access policy and repository. Dr. Czerniewicz is involved in regional and international policy work and a member of the advisory boards of international educational and technology publications.
Dr. Wang, the director of Peking University's (PKU) X-Learning Center and one of the key experts behind PKU's first series of massive open online courses (MOOCs), heads the top MOOC research group in China. She has led numerous in-service teacher training programs on ICT integration for the Chinese Ministry of Education, including teacher professional development projects in partnership with Microsoft, Dell, and Apple. Dr. Wang's research focuses on teaching and learning in online environments, applying ICT to improve the quality of higher education, as well as MOOC pedagogy and learning communities.
The 2016 AAOU conference, which will be held at the Crowne Plaza Manila Galleria, is being hosted in the Philippines for the second time since 2000. The three-day conference will bring together open and distance learning advocates, academics, policymakers, practitioners, and scholars in Asia in a discussion of global trends in open and distance e-learning (ODeL). (Paula Grace Muyco)