IMS Europe Leadership Board

The OU has over 170k students studying at a distance using a range of digital services. Andrew has worked on the design and development of OU’s open, informal OpenLearn and FutureLearn platforms (around 15m learners a year combined). He’s currently looking at new, edtech led business opportunities for the OU, as well as consulting with UK and African governments on edtech for skills development.

Arjan brings more than 15 years of experience in building advanced and effective IT-solutions for the testing industry. As an architect, he is involved in development and implementation of advanced e-assessment tools.

Arnhem, Netherlands

Oslo, Norway

Francesc Santanach-Delisau is EdTech Architect at UOC (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya - Open University of Catalonia). He is responsible for Education Technologies architectures at the institution, providing the vision, the principles and mechanisms for the improvement and growing of the EdTech ecosystem at UOC. He has been engaged in projects in the field of learning technologies ever since 1998 and is expert in disciplines such as interoperability, learning analytics and AI. He holds a Master degree in Computer Science and Software Engineering of the UPC (Universitat politècnica de Catalunya - Polytechnic University of Catalonia).

Barcelona, Spain

Dr Gill Ferrell supports the IMS member community in Europe. In a career spanning over 30 years she has managed the implementation of administrative IT systems in higher education and led research and edtech projects in areas such as assessment, learning design, course management, learner records and learning analytics. She directed a UK-wide support service for Jisc providing advice, guidance and training in ICT for further and higher education providers in the UK and, as an independent consultant, she has been involved in projects of national significance. For almost 20 years she has volunteered with EUNIS fostering knowledge exchange and developing communities of practice across European higher education.

Gill holds British and French nationalities and lives in south-west France.

Jasmijn works as a programme manager Online Education & Digital Assessment at SURF, a Dutch National Research & Education Network (NREN). Through this programme, we stimulate the use of open standards by higher education institutions and suppliers of educational applications.

A video on the importance of open standards in the digital learning environment: https://edu.nl/74th9.

See for more information: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasmijnwijn/

Jonathan was co-promoter of Digitary (www.digitary.net), which now has national services for secure digital higher education credentials and micro-credentials in Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, Canada and Japan. He co-founded the Rome Student Systems and Standards (RS3G) group in 2007 that brought vendors together with the standards community and provided direction and a route-to-implementation for standards in student mobility. RS3G spawned standards initiatives in the European Association for International Education (www.eaie.org) and the European Universities Information Systems Association (www.eunis.org). He was a founding signatory in 2012 of the global Groningen Declaration Network (www.groningendeclaration.org) and subsequently held held senior roles in US higher education technology company Ellucian (www.ellucian.com) and at Indian multi-national Tata Consultancy Services (www.tcs.com) where he led education market activities and education platforms business in Europe. He is founder and CEO of Pivotal EdTech (www.pivotaledtech.com) that aims to enhance the development and commercialisation of EdTech.

Lee Farmer is Director of Customer Success, Integrations and Onboarding at VitalSource, a division of the Ingram Content Group. VitalSource is a global educational technology company with a suite of learning and analytics tools, including Bookshelf® the most widely used platform for delivery of electronic textbooks in the world. Lee leads high performance, global teams that focus on technical implementations, and building long lasting customer relationships to ensure mutually beneficial outcomes with partners. Lee joined VitalSource six years ago and has a deep interest in data and software systems.

Milton Keynes, United Kingdom

Monica is graduated in Economics from Bocconi University. After a few years spent in a consulting company and mass market retailer she started in IQC, the Italian Quality Company. IQC provides innovative tools and services for the companies that desires to enhance their digital performances of management systems, processes, products and people’s skills. IQC strongly believes in the adoption of digital badges and therefore despite having has realized C-Box, a platform that issues badges compliant to IMS Global. IQC has founded a Digital Badges Stakeholder Table where their members contribute in defining guidelines for the diffusion and adoption of open badges.

Nicolaas Matthijs is an entrepreneur and product creator with over 12 years of experience in Educational Technology. Nicolaas has worked at several leading R1 institutions such as Cambridge University, UC Berkeley and Georgia Tech, where he developed Learning Management Systems, Academic Collaboration Tools, Learning Analytics solutions and other learning tools. 

Nicolaas was the co-founder and CEO of Fronteer, developing a revolutionary tool, called Ally, that helps institutions make course materials more accessible for all learners. Following the acquisition of Fronteer by Blackboard, Nicolaas now acts as the Product Director for Ally at Blackboard.

Cambridge, United Kingdom

Pekka Kähkipuro is Chief Information Officer at Tampere University and Executive Secretary at EUNIS.

Prior to joining Tampere University, Pekka has been CIO at Brunel University London, Director of IT at Aalto University in Finland 2010-2015 and, before that, he held various senior roles in the private sector including Nokia and Nokia Siemens Networks in 2005-2010. Pekka obtained his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Helsinki in 2000. He has been Board member of the European University Information Systems (EUNIS) organization on two occasions and the President of EUNIS in 2015. He has also been board member and Chairman of the Board in several private sector companies.

Sidharth is the Head of EMEA Product for Instructure and oversees the strategy and vision of Product for both Canvas and Bridge at Instructure. Sidharth manages the strategic direction of the fast growing platforms and works with the Global teams to ensure that as the Product is developed, that it is thought about in a global capacity. Additionally, Sidharth works to identify market specific Product initiatives recognising that education can vastly vary in between and inside of regions and sometimes may require additional Product needs.

Sidharth has been actively working in Education Technology for nearly 10 years and is dedicated to providing avenues for institutions and learners to have access to the best tools and resources to enhance education.

London, United Kingdom

Uwe is Head of the EdTech Engineering department at Cornelsen, one of the leading publishers of educational media in Germany. With more than 25 years of professional experience in software development, a clear focus on interoperable and scalable EdTech solutions, a DevOps mentality, agile and lean methods and the advocation of best practices of modern software development, he is dedicated to creating inspiring products for learners and teachers.

Working as a learning technologist at the medical university Karolinska Institutet, Wietze de Vries is also one of the product owners of the Sunet LMS at Sunet, which is an organisation providing Swedish universities and colleges access to national and international data communication, national academic identity infrastructure and related services. Sunet is part of the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet).

Stockholm, Sweden