IMS Europe Leadership Board

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

As a veteran of innovation and digital product management, Sebastian is Head of Portal Development at Cornelsen, one of the leading publishers for educational media in Germany. An important part of his responsibilities is the strategic alignment of Cornelsen's online activities with the vision of an interoperable EdTech landscape in Germany.

Eric Adams currently serves as the Director of Operations at Kimono, an education technology company dedicated to data interoperability, where he is instrumental in helping the company build, test, and release its platform features faster and more reliably. Eric leads the teams focused on DevOps, technical support, implementation, customer service, and quality assurance and serves on Kimono’s strategic council.  

He holds a number of leadership positions on several education standards boards and helps drive Kimono’s standards-based work. Eric is skilled in cloud-scale product deployments in AWS, Heroku, NodeJS, Ruby on Rails, and Java and holds a Master’s degree in MIS from the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business. 

United States

Nynke is the liaison between the IMS Global organization and the European IMS members and users of the IMS standards in Europe. Before working for IMS Global, Nynke worked as a project manager for innovation within education at SURF, the national collaborative organization for ICT in Dutch higher education and research. Before working for SURF, Nynke worked in the field of computer-based testing for 20 years for both commercial businesses (Pearson VUE) as the Dutch government (College voor Toetsen en Examens).

Tienhoven, Netherlands

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

Francesc Santanach-Delisau is an e-learning expert and project manager at eLearn Center, the e-learning research and innovation center of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. He is responsible for the e-learning laboratory that provides infrastructure and the instruments needed for experimentation in the classroom. He runs projects in the field of learning technologies, interoperability, learning analytics and AI. He holds a Master degree in Computer Science and Software Engineering of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia.

Barcelona, Spain

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

Annette represents EUNIS on the IMS Europe Board and works as a strategy advisor at Unit, The Norwegian Directorate for ICT and Joint Services in Higher Education & Research. Annette has a technical background and has earlier been working with standardization of learning technologies in the K-12 sector in Norway for 10 years (Uninett and Norwegian Centre for ICT in Education).

Trondheim, Norway

Dr. Jang is responsible for Explorance’s global customer community, teaching & learning expertise, and learning center. She continues her research in Education Technology, particularly in the areas of analytics and data literacy, as an adjunct professor at McGill University. Prior to joining Explorance, she took a sabbatical from the corporate world, while teaching Technology and Innovation management Courses at the Desautels Faculty of Management of McGill University with research focus on advancing the understanding of IT-to-Value pathways to help organizations drive innovation with technology, especially in Healthcare and Higher Education. Prior to joining McGill University, she worked as CIO and CKO at Samsung SDS, responsible for leading IT-enabled business transformation initiatives in support of Samsung’s global growth strategies.  Prior to joining Samsung, she held senior executive positions at Citibank and PSEG responsible for enterprise architecture, software product development, business intelligence, large-scale systems integration, and technology management. 

She serves on the IMS Global Europe Board and Caliper Product Steering Committee. She served on the Presidential Advisory Council on Science and Technology in South Korea and on the committee responsible for recommending future information architectures, processes, and strategies for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid in USA. She served on the Knowledge Management Committee of Canada National Research Council. She volunteers to help provide access to education to girls in developing countries (60 Million Girls Foundation).

Montreal, Canada

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

Oslo, Norway

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

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.

Liverpool, United Kingdom

Amsterdam, Netherlands

Steven is Head of Product Management at itslearning helping guide the strategic direction of itslearning. He is a member of several working groups within IMS. Steven is an accomplished, self-motivated online learning thought leader with 30 years experience. He has wide-ranging international experience, across multiple sectors, education, commercial and public. Before joining itslearning more than 10 years ago, Steven was the CTO at Netmedia Education designing, delivering learning systems for UK local education authorities. Before this he worked as a consultant on EU educational projects and was the Undergraduate Computing Programmes Manager and senior lecturer at the University of Derby.

Worcester, United Kingdom

For the past 6.5 years Jasmijn has worked at a consultancy firm. Here she worked on various projects related to digital learning environments, information management and standards. Jasmijn has worked at higher education institutions and The Dutch Standardisation Forum.

Utrecht, Netherlands