ISKME Board Adds Prominent Higher Education Equity Advocate and Corporate Information Officer
ISKME Board of Directors adds prominent higher education leader and equity advocate Martha Kanter and long-time corporate information officer Sharon Dhall as new board members.
Two new board members will help guide the development expansion of ISKME programs focused on access and equity and bring to the board significant expertise in policy and information technology.
HALF MOON BAY—November 19, 2018—ISKME’s Board of Directors announced today that it will add two new board members, one with a distinguished track record in increasing access to higher education and the other in transforming how information and knowledge is used across organizations.
The new board members are Martha Kanter, the executive director of the College Promise Campaign, senior fellow at New York University’s Steinhardt Institute for Higher Education Policy, and President Obama’s former Under Secretary of Education, and Sharon Dhall, an information science expert who was the long-time technology director for J.P. Morgan Chase and chief information officer at GE who is now leading technology modernization efforts at TIAA.
“The addition of Martha Kanter to the board will help us think about access and equity in higher education in new ways.” says ISKME CEO and founder Lisa Petrides. “Cost should not be a barrier for students seeking access to a quality education, and Kanter’s groundbreaking work in Open Educational Resources and now at the College Promise Campaign is building public support for funding the first two years of higher education for hardworking students across the nation.”
As a top-ranking federal education official, Kanter sought to make college more affordable and ensure that more students complete college. She was the first community college president ever to hold the post as Under Secretary of Education for the U.S. Department of Education. Previously, she served as chancellor of the 45,000-student Foothill-De Anza Community College District, one of the largest community college districts in the nation, distinguished professor at New York University, community college faculty, high school teacher, director, dean, vice president of academic and student affairs, and vice chancellor for policy and research for the California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office in Sacramento.
“ISKME is a leading force in advancing open education practice as a means to promote equity and quality in teaching and learning,” Kanter said. “To expand its influence, ISKME looks forward to establishing strategic partnerships with other groups and initiatives to bring the power of open educational resources (OER) to address the biggest needs in higher education: reducing costs to students, eliminating barriers to completion, and ensuring that every student has access to the best teaching and quality learning tools.”
“Sharon Dhall’s work at the nexus of information science and technology will help ISKME scale and grow their public digital library efforts in order to more effectively bring learning resources to under-resourced schools. She also will play a significant role in helping ISKME connect the power of information technology to libraries and librarians to teaching at all levels of education,” Petrides says.
Dhall currently leads efforts to modernize finance technology and operations at TIAA. Her focus is to help the company improve efficiency and customer service. She joined TIAA in 2017 from JPMorgan Chase, where she was Technology CFO/COO for the Corporate Investment Bank and spent over 10 years in several technology leadership roles. Previously, she spent more than 12 years with General Electric in the GE capital and finance divisions in roles that ranged from project management to chief information officer.
“Our work in creating innovative technology and learning tools will be bolstered by Dhall’s quick-to- problem-solve sensibility to an industry that can be slow to take risks.” Petrides says. “Dhall will help us to establish a stronger ecosystem of open knowledge networks that will support both K-12 and higher education institutions.”
“ISKME is poised to accelerate the impact that continuous improvement approaches can bring to teaching and learning environments, and I’m excited to contribute to the strategy and technology to better serve ISKME’s vast partner network,” says Dhall. Since 2012, ISKME has grown its services that provide custom digital curriculum libraries and supports to districts, state departments of education, higher education institutions, and ministries of education around the world. Though their public digital library, OER Commons, its curated collections and collaborative features are supporting a global community of users. ISKME also hosts the Big Ideas Fest, an annual convening of innovators in education around the globe and Washington, D.C. will be home to the Big Ideas Fest this December.
###
The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (www.iskme.org), located in Half Moon Bay, CA, is a global leader in research and practice in the field of open education. An independent nonprofit organization established in 2002, ISKME is well-known for its OER initiatives, as well as its OER Commons public library (www.oercommons.org), and its award-winning research on information and knowledge use in the education sector.
