Speaker: Nicole Allen

Nicole Allen is the Director of Open Education for SPARC. In this role she leads SPARC's work on Open Educational Resources (OER), focusing on public policy and engaging and supporting the library community on this issue. Nicole joined SPARC in 2013 already established as a leading figure in the OER movement through her previous role at the Student Public Interest Research Groups. During her seven year tenure, Nicole worked with college students to organize numerous large-scale grassroots campaigns on OER and related issue areas, including a 40-campus, cross-country van tour called the "Textbook Rebellion" and organizing 3,000 professors to sign a commitment to consider adopting open textbooks. Nicole is widely cited in the media for her work, and is considered one of the leading issue experts on college textbook costs.
Nicole graduated from the University of Puget Sound in 2006 with a Bachelors of Arts in Philosophy. A life-long activist, Nicole chose a career in grassroots organizing because of her first hand experience with the power of the student voice. Currently she splits her time between her home in Providence, RI and SPARC's headquarters in Washington, DC.

Speaker: Marilyn Billings

Marilyn Billings is the Scholarly Communication & Special Initiatives Librarian at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, a position she has held since 2006. She provides campus and regional leadership and education in alternative scholarly communication strategies and gives presentations on author rights, new digital publishing models and the role of digital repositories in today's research and scholarship endeavors. As an active member of professional library organizations, Marilyn is also involved in regional and national workshops on these topics. Current projects include her oversight of the UMass Amherst’s digital repository ScholarWorks and her recent role as the leader of the campus’ Open Education Initiative which has saved students over $1 million to date.

For a more complete listing of presentations and publications, visithttp://works.bepress.com/marilyn_billings/

Speaker: Mary Lou Forward

Mary Lou Forward is the Executive Director of the Open Education Consortium, supporting the development of the open education movement and the impact of open sharing on higher education globally. The Open Education Consortium is a worldwide community of hundreds of higher education institutions and associated organizations committed to advancing open education and its impact on global education. The Consortium seeks to instill openness as a feature of education around the world, allowing greatly expanded access to education while providing a shared body of knowledge upon which innovative and effective approaches to today’s social problems can be built. The Open Education Consortium realizes change by leveraging its sources of expert opinion, its global network and its position as the principal voice of open education. Prior to joining the Open Education Consortium, Mary Lou worked in and with institutions in Africa for nearly two decades, where she incorporated technology and distance learning in international programming and developed opportunities to collaborate across countries and between diverse student groups..

Speaker: Marisha Marks

Marisha Marks is an instructional designer at UMass Amherst Continuing & Professional Education. She has a graduate certificate in Instructional Technology Design from UMass Boston and a Master's in Education from McGill University. She brings her background in building engaging science programs to help instructors design and develop online courses with student success in mind. Marisha joined the C&PE team in 2013 after working as an instructional designer at UMass Boston.

Speaker: Charlotte Roh

Charlotte Roh is the Scholarly Communication Resident Librarian at UMass Amherst. Her undergraduate degree is from Johns Hopkins University and her MLIS is from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has a background in academic publishing with Taylor & Francis and Oxford University Press and continues to freelance as an editor.