Cathy Casserly / Ede & Ravenscroft / CC BY-SA

In March, Cathy, our CEO, was recognized for her contributions to open education through an honorary doctorate awarded by The Open University. The Open University is home to the OpenLearn initiative, which makes available over 11,000 hours of structured learning via CC BY-NC-SA and has received over 20 million visitors. In addition to sustaining the largest YouTube EDU presence in Europe and iTunes U downloads totaling over a quarter a million a week, The Open University also leads the TESSA project in Africa, under CC BY-SA, which has delivered open educational resources to over a million teachers.

Professor David Vincent conferred the degree, with the following remarks:

The proliferation of knowledge on the web has challenged traditional boundaries between formal
and informal learning. Students have been quick to seize the opportunities, using their keyboards
to explore the vast archives of information now available to them. Schools and universities, and
the public bodies who fund them, have been much slower. It takes courage to abandon time-
honoured means of owning and protecting the learning resources that they have created and paid
for. Through her leadership at a number of key American foundations Cathy has played a critical
role in challenging established thinking and promoting innovation.

Her approach has been essentially collaborative. She has used donor income to stimulate change in
educational bodies in the United States and around the world. After a PhD at Stanford and a spell in
teaching, she has served as Director of the Open Educational Resources Initiative at The William and
Flora Hewlett Foundation, Vice President and Senior Partner, Innovation and Open Networks at the
Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and is now Chief Executive Officer of Creative
Commons, which is dedicated to providing the legal infrastructure for open resources.

Congrats, Cathy! CC hopes to do more great work in open education together.