Two Leading High-Tech Entrepreneurs and Champions of Open Educational Resources to Join ISKME’s Board

Alex Fielding, CEO of Ripcord, and Jason Goecke, VP and GM at Cisco, will help nonprofit expand and deepen use of OER in schools and colleges

HALF MOON BAY, CA – Jan 13, 2017 – The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), a nonprofit education institute and global leader in providing comprehensive and open education resources (OER), today announced the appointment of two Silicon Valley executives, Alex Fielding and Jason Goecke, to its board of directors.

Fielding, the CEO of the high-tech start-up Ripcord and a founding member of Singularity University, which offers leadership training for social entrepreneurs to address humanity’s grand challenges, has led the development of a broad range of products and services for numerous prominent high-tech companies. 

Goecke, a Vice President and General Manager at Cisco, has unique experience in developing open source applications and services and is a leading national proponent to leverage STEM initiatives to drive inclusion and diversity in the technology industry through community engagement.

“As open educational resources begin to make significant inroads into K-12 and higher education classrooms, ISKME has brought on key leaders to our board who have made a difference in shaping and sharing quality online products and services,” said ISKME founder and CEO Lisa Petrides. Now in its 14th year, the education nonprofit offers educators in the United States and around the world training in design thinking and open education curriculum development. ISKME manages OER Commons, the nation’s digital library of record for open educational resources. It also conducts research and hosts the Big Ideas Fest, an annual convening of innovators in education around the globe.

New board member Alex Fielding is CEO of Ripcord, a high-tech startup funded by Kleiner Perkins, Lux, and Lenovo. Fielding has a background in engineering and management at Cisco, Apple, Exodus, and wOz (co-founded with Steve Wozniak), and is a board member of the CodeWarrior Foundation, a national foundation that teachers soldiers to write code at no charge during their military deployment so that they can come home to high-paying jobs . 

“To push forward the current state of OER, we must make fundamental educational content available to everyone with systems and technologies that empower educators and learners alike,” Fielding says. “From self-empowered learning to personalized education, ISKME is focused on providing technologies and infrastructure that bring thought leadership, policies, and content to a global audience.

“We need to ensure that educators at all levels and policymakers share ISKME’s vision for an interconnected, open, and collaborative system that connects educators and learners to global knowledge. If we do everything we can to make this a reality, the future will be focused on finding the most interesting problems to solve to improve individuals, communities, countries, and ultimately the globe,” Fielding adds.

Jason Goecke is a Vice President and General Manager at Cisco responsible for Spark Call, Hybrid Calling Services, Tropo, and Spark for Developers. He joined Cisco with the 2015 acquisition of Tropo, where he was CEO and co-founder. With more than 20 years of experience in cloud telecommunications and open source application development, he was previously VP of Innovation at Voxeo Labs, where he led the company’s innovation efforts for communications platforms. Prior to Voxeo Labs, Goecke was a co-founder of the Adhearsion open source telephony framework.

Having served on industry advisory boards for Ericsson and Telstra, Goecke joins the ISKME board driven by his desire to leverage STEM initiatives to drive inclusion and diversity in the technology industry through community engagement.

“Providing open education resources for STEM content is key to scale the impact in those communities that need these resources the most,” Goecke says. “It is imperative for all of us in the technology industry to do our part to ensure inclusion and diversity in the industry, and this starts with education and community engagement.”

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About ISKME

ISKME is an independent nonprofit dedicated to improving the practice of continuous learning, collaboration, and change in the education sector. Established in 2002, ISKME is a global leader supporting innovative teaching and learning practices and is well known for its digital public library of open educational resources and collaboration platform, OER Commons, as well as its award-winning research on information and knowledge use in the education sector. ISKME also assists policymakers, foundations, and education institutions in designing continuous improvement policies and practice.