Daniel Burgos appointed as new ICDE Chair in Open Educational Resources

The International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE, http://www.icde.org) has appointed Daniel Burgos as a new Chair in Open Educational Resources for the next four-year period. ICDE is a consulting partner of UNESCO, and it is focused on enhancing the quality of open, distance, flexible and online education, including e-learning.

Dr. Rory McGreal, UNESCO-COL Chair in OER and ICDE Chair in OER, recently announced the appointment of Dr. Burgos during the Chairs meeting at the Open Education Global Conference held in Banff, Canada.

This appointment is relevant to UNIR because of the impact of ICDE worldwide. Along with Burgos, the other new ICDE Chair in Open Educational Resources is Dr. Tolly S.A. Nbwette, Vice-Chancellor of the Open University of Tanzania and President of the Pan-African University Council.

Daniel Burgos has highlighted that “the ICDE Chair in Open Educational Resources means a great deal to our University since we combine informal and formal education resources in official academic programs”. With this system “students, tutors, professors, and all the academic and transversal staff can get the best out of all the resources across the world and not just for the academic records, and the official textbooks, but also from open and flexible educational resources, duly integrated along the learning path”, Burgos has explained.

Burgos comments, in addition, that “we expect much out of the Chair results and how this can be actively applied to our university and the network of researchers and institutions who we work with. We are honored and pleased for the appointment, and we commit to work hard for the next four years”.

Dr. Burgos works as Vice-chancellor for Research & Technology (UNIR Research), and UNESCO Chair on eLearning, at Universidad Internacional de La Rioja (UNIR)

About UNIR and UNIR Research

Universidad Internacional de La Rioja (UNIR, http://www.unir.net, Spain) is a young 100% online university founded on a global vision of education directly linked to the market and the Society. UNIR facilitates an exclusive, innovative and high-quality virtual model of higher education, which leads on a personalized, proactive, and collaborative distance learning method of instruction. UNIR is an academic institution established in compliance with the current regulations governing universities, fulfilling all parameters and regulations of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA).

UNIR provides international courses, in English and Spanish, and comprises an academic community of over 1.000 highly knowledgeable lecturers across the World, along with a strong team of more than 500 multidisciplinary staff members (including 150 tutors), working on R&D projects and support services (i.e. tutoring, legal, publishing, editing, technical, administrative, et cetera). Student number keeps increasing exponentially: over 22.000 in 2015. UNIR has premises in Spain (Logroño and Madrid), Colombia (Bogotá), Argentina (Buenos Aires), Bolivia (Santa Cruz), and Mexico DF (Mexico), along with a number of collaboration agreements with Latin American and European universities, mainly. Furthermore, UNIR works hard to remove barriers, and to eliminate distance for learners with different profiles so that they can study at anytime and anywhere, thanks to an innovation strategy which applies the research outcomes to improve better learning and teaching at the university.

UNIR Research (//research.unir.net), the Research Department of Universidad Internacional de La Rioja (UNIR, http://www.unir.net) works on selected scientific and humanistic fields of study. All of them are designed for practical implementation and subsequent exploitation in the market (i.e. end-user, Industry, Academia, and Public administration). UNIR Research supports over 260 researchers distributed in 16 complementary academic fields like i.e. Humanities, Communication, Semantics, Marketing, and others. In addition, UNIR Research supports specific chairs with UNESCO, ICDE, IBM, Telefónica, Tavistock Institute, Aenor and Atos.

About ICDE

The International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE) is the leading global membership organization for the open and distance education community and is open to institutions, educational authorities, commercial actors, and individuals.

ICDE is an NGO having consultative status with UNESCO and shares UNESCO’s key value – the universal right to education for all. ICDE further derives its position from the unique knowledge and experience of its members throughout the world in the development and use of new methodologies and emerging technologies.

ICDE was founded in 1938 in Canada as the International Council for Correspondence Education and today has members from over 50 countries worldwide.

ICDE’s Permanent Secretariat is in Oslo, Norway, and has been hosted by this country on a permanent basis since 1988.