Individual Award Winners
Lifetime Achievement Award
The Lifetime Acheivement Award is a Special Merit Award presented by the Board of Directors to individuals who, during their lifetimes and careers, have made creative contributions of outstanding significance to the advancement of open education.
Frederic Michael Litto – 2014
Fredric M. Litto was awarded the Lifetime Achievement ACE award in 2011 from the OpenCourseWare Consortium for his lifelong contributions to digital and open education, enhancing the capacity of Brazilian universities to produce, maintain and use OERs and OCWs.
Litto is Professor Emeritus at the University of São Paulo, where he served thirty-five years as professor of communications. He founded and directed from 1989 to 2006 the “School of the Future,” a self-sustaining laboratory of more than 70 researchers/producers. Together they produced digital learning materials for school-based virtual learning communities; digital open-content multimedia repositories of humanistic material for learners in Portuguese; and learning objects in science education used annually by more than two million young and adult learners.
Litto served for many years as president of the Brazilian Association for Distance Education-ABED, a learned society with 2,600 members. In addition, he was a member of the Executive Committee of the ICDE-International Council for Open and Distance Learning and Re.ViCa International Advisory Committee (IAC).
Born in New York City in 1939, Litto received his B.A. at the University of California, Los Angeles (1960), his Ph.D. at Indiana University, Bloomington (1969), and his Livre-Docente degree at the University of São Paulo (1977).
He has served as a member of the editorial boards of American Journal of Distance Education (USA); Advanced Technology and Learning (USA); Open Learning (U.K.); IRRODL-International Review of Research in Open & Distance Learning (Canada); and RIED-Revista Iberoamericana de Educación a Distancia (Spain). In addition, he has served as a consultant to the World Bank and as a member of the ICDE Task-Force on OERs.
In 2013, he signed the accord between ABED and the OpenCourseWare Consortium, providing the OpenCourseWare Consortium with a national affiliate consortium in Brazil and enhancing the capacity of Brazilian universities to produce, maintain and use OERs and OCWs.
ABED Associação Brasileira de Educação a Distância
Rory McGreal – 2016
Dr. Rory McGreal is an influential international OER expert. His research and substantial participation in the global discourse argue persuasively for the benefits of openly licensed learning materials. He is a true OER globetrotter, supporting institutions and governments in many parts of the world with his presentations and guidance, generating global impact.
McGreal was the recipient of one of the first two UNESCO Chairs in OER established in 2010. With his OER Chair, he operates the OER Knowledge Cloud, a curated database and repository to identify,