User:Mackiwg/Biography

Dr Wayne Mackintosh is the founding director of the OER Foundation and is the UNESCO, Commonwealth of Learning and ICDE Chair in OER at Otago Polytechnic and the Foundation. He is coordinating the establishment of the OERu, an international innovation partnership which aims to provide free learning opportunities for all students worldwide with pathways for OER learners to achieve credible credentials. Wayne is also director of the International Centre for Open Education at Otago Polytechnic in New Zealand and serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the OER Foundation. Dr Mackintosh is an elected member and inaugural Chair of the WikiEducator Community Council. Wayne is a strategy innovator with a passion for making educational futures happen.

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 by 2015.

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 is a member of the Advisory Board of the Wikimedia Foundation, Creative Commons New Zealand and the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education. 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 married with three children and lives close to Dunedin on the beautiful South Island of New Zealand.

Qualifications Ph.D. University of Bath, United Kingdom. MEd, BEd, BCom and Higher Education Diploma (Postgraduate), University of Pretoria, South Africa.