Dr. Rory McGreal

UNESCO/ICDE Chair in Open Educational Resources

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Dr. Rory McGreal

UNESCO/ICDE Chair in Open Educational Resources

Contact information

Email: rory@athabascau.ca

Phone:

Rory McGreal is a Professor in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies at Athabasca University (AU), Alberta Canada. He is also the UNESCO/International Council for Open and Distance Education Chair in Open Educational Resources and Director of the Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute (TEKRI). In addition, he is the Editor-in-Chief of Canada's first open access journal, The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning (IRRODL). As part of his work as a Chair in OER, he has been responsible for creating the OER Knowledge Cloud, a database of scholarly articles and reports related to OER. From 2001 to 2011, he was the Associate Vice President, Research at AU.

Previously, he was the executive director of TeleEducation New Brunswick , a province-wide bilingual (French/English) distributed distance learning network. Before that, he was responsible for the expansion of Contact North (a distance education network in Northern Ontario ) into the high schools of the region. His Ph.D. degree (1999) in Computer Technology in Education at Nova Southeastern University 's School for Computer and Information Science was taken at a distance using the Internet.

Rory was the founder of the world's first e-learning website and one of the world's first metadata learning object repositories, the TeleCampus. In the past, he has worked in Canada as a teacher and teacher representative, and abroad in the Seychelles, the Middle East and Europe in various capacities.

Awards

Innovative Educational Technologies. First Place. UNESCO/IITE. June 2020
European Distance Education Network (EDEN) Senior Fellow October, 2016
Canadian Network for Leadership in Education Award, from the Canadian Network for Innovation in Education, Waterloo, ON, May, 2016
Lifetime Achievement Award, Open Education Consortium, Krakow, Poland, April, 2016
Open Courseware Consortium Award for the OER Knowledge Cloud 2014
Wedemeyer Award as a distance education practitioner 2002

Discover my research

Research interests

Distance Education
Elearning
Open Access
Open Educational Resources
Mobile learning
Micro-Credentials

Educational credentials

1992-1999 PhD from the School of Computer and Information Sciences, Nova Southeastern U (Computing Technology in Education). Doctoral dissertation: TeleEducation NB: A systems analysis of a province-wide distributed distance learning network.
1983-1985 Cours (3) les ordinateurs et la formation TéléUniversité du Québec.
1983-1984 Master of Arts (Applied Linguistics-TESOL) Concordia University, Montreal.
Thesis: A Curriculum development project for the National Youth Service, Seychelles, Indian Ocean
1980-1981 Certificat: Français pour les non-francophones, Université Laval, Québec.
1977-1980 Certificate in Second Language Teaching, McGill.
1977 Certificate in Russian for Teachers, Pushkin Inst., Moscow, USSR
1976-1977 Master of Arts (History) -incomplete, Dalhousie
1975-1976 Bachelor of Education,Dalhousie University, Halifax
1973-1975 Bachelor of Arts (Joint Honours) Russian & History, McGill.
1972-1973 First Year at University of Waterloo.

Professional affiliations

Board member OER Foundation, Otago, New Zealand
Advisory Board Hamdan Bin Mohammed SMART University, United Arab Emirates
QS Quacquarelli Symonds Global Advisory Board (University rankings) 2020 -
UNESCO OER Dynamic Coalition

McGreal, R. (2020). Evaluation Report on three Regional Centres established by the Commonwealth of Learning. Commonwealth of Learning: Vancouver
McGreal R. (2019) Understanding the impact of OER: Canada. UNESCO Institute of Information Technologies in Education (IITE).
McGreal, R. (2018). Pockets of Innovation: OER implementations. Contact North/Contact Nord. Available from https://teachonline.ca/tools-trends/open-education-resources-oer-applications-around-world/taxonomy-term
McGreal, R. (2017). Special Report on the role of Open Educational Resources in supporting the UNESCO Sustainable Development Goal 4:Education for All. Canadian Commission for UNESCO, IRRODL, 18,7 October, 2017. Available from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/3541/4433
McGreal, R. (2020). Open Educational Resources and global online learning. In Humanistic futures of learning: Perspectives from UNESCO Chairs and UNITWIN Networks (pp. 122 126). Retrieved from
https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000372577?posInSet=1&queryId=4253f7a0-a9bf-4e2f-b0f8-28cca0bc9384
McGreal, R. (2019). OER in Canada. In S. Knyazeva (Ed.), Understanding the impact of OER: Achievements and challenges. Retrieved from https://iite.unesco.org/publications/understanding-the-impact-of-oer-achievements-and-challenges/
McGreal, R., Anderson, T., & Conrad, D. (2016). Open Educational Resources in Canada [Reprint]. F. Miao, S. Mishra, & R. McGreal (Eds.). Retrieved from http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0024/002443/244365e.pdf
McGreal, R. (2013). Why Open Educational Resources are needed for mobile learning. In Ally, M. & Tsikanos, A. (Eds.) Mobile Learning. Commonwealth of Learning. Retrieved from http://www.col.org/resources/publications/
Miao, F., Mishra, S., & McGreal, R. (Eds.)(2016). Open Educational Resources: Policy, costs and transformation Retrieved from http://oasis.col.org/handle/11599/2306
McGreal, R., (2013). Guide to Open Educational Resources. Commonwealth of Learning, Retrieved from http://oasis.col.org/handle/11599/44
McGreal, R., Kinutha, W., & Marshall, S. (Eds.) ( 2013). Open Educational Resources: Innovation, Research and Practice. Perspectives on Open and Distance Learning Retrieved from http://oasis.col.org/handle/11599/486
Perris, K., & McGreal, R. (2021). Developing partnerships to acquire impact: The role of three regional centres’ capacity building efforts for ODL adoption in the emerging world. Journal of Learning for Development, 8(2), 346 - 363. https://jl4d.org/index.php/ejl4d/article/view/507
Henderson, S., McGreal, R., & Vladimirschi, V. (2018). Access Copyright and Fair Dealing Guidelines in Higher Educational Institutions in Canada. Partnership: Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research, 13(2). Retrieved from doi: https://doi.org/10.21083/partnership.v13i2.4147
McGreal, R. (2018). Special Report on the role of Open Educational Resources in supporting the UNESCO Sustainable Development Goal 4:Education for All. Journal of Open Learning. 2018.
McGreal, R., & Chen, N.-S. (2011). AUPress: A Comparison of an Open Access University Press with Traditional Presses. Educational Technology & Society, 14(3), 231 - 239. Retrieved from http://www.ifets.info/journals/14_3/19.pdf
McGreal, R. (2009). A case study of an international e-learning training division: Meeting objectives. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 10 (6). Retrieved from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/619/1430

Dr. Rory McGreal

Contact information

Dr. Rory McGreal

Dr. Rory McGreal

Contact information

Awards

Research interests

Educational credentials

Professional affiliations

Selected publications