KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Alan Ford
Pro Vice Chancellor, University of Nottingham
Professor Alan Ford is Pro Vice-Chancellor for Teaching and Learning in the University of Nottingham. Born in Dublin, and educated in Trinity College Dublin and the University of Cambridge, he joined Nottingham in 1998, and has served previously as Head of the School of Humanities and Dean of the Faculty of Arts.
Rachel Wenstone
Vice-President (Higher Education), National Union of Students
Rachel Wenstone is Vice-President (Higher Education) of the National Union of Students. Previously, she studied for an MSc in Human Rights at the London School of Economics. She studied Law as an undergraduate at Leeds University before spending a year as a sabbatical officer at Leeds University Union. She served two years on the NUS National Executive Committee, sitting as co-convenor of the Anti-fascism Anti-racism Committee for both years and on the NUS Women's Campaign Committee in her second year.
Rachel’s priorities as an officer of the national union include defending higher education as a public good, supporting students’ unions to work on student retention and success and championing excellent teaching.
Doug Belshaw
Badges & Skills Lead, Mozilla Foundation
Dr. Doug Belshaw is Badges & Skills Lead at the Mozilla Foundation. He's a former teacher and senior leader and has also worked in the Further and Higher Education sectors with JISC, a UK national body that works on behalf of the government to promote educational technology. Doug works across the UK and Europe for Mozilla on Web Literacies and evangelising Open Badges. You can find out more about him at http://dougbelshaw.com.
Nick Shockey
Director, Student Advocacy, SPARC
Nick Shockey is the director of student advocacy for the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and founding director of the Right to Research Coalition (R2RC). Supported by SPARC, the R2RC is an international alliance of local, national, and international student organizations that advocate for researchers, universities, governments, and students themselves to adopt open scholarly publishing practices. Under Nick's direction, the R2RC has grown to represent just under 7 million students in more than 100 countries around the world and has facilitated student lobbying in hundreds of legislative offices, in the United States and elsewhere.
Prior to joining SPARC, Nick was a student activist for the causes of Open Access and Open Educational Resources. He worked locally to make Trinity University the first small, liberal arts university in the United States to pass an institutional Open Access policy. He also worked nationally with SPARC in launching its student campaign. Nick was named a SPARC Innovator in 2007.
Support Centre for Open Resources in Education (SCORE)
The Open University, Walton Hall,
Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA
