About

Jenni Hayman is a community educator and learning designer. She often has strong opinions, and they are always her own. Jenni is also a learning scientist and education activist, balancing time and talents to explore open practices that contribute to increased social justice at a global level. A key part of her work is inclusive design as a core element of openness.

Jenni is currently working in a full-time role as the Chair, Teaching and Learning at Cambrian College in Sudbury, Ontario. In her work Jenni partners with team members and educators to explore excellence in online and technology-enabled teaching and learning. Jenni also recently completed her Doctor of Education (Ed.D) in Leadership and Innovation at Arizona State University. Her dissertation focus was measuring the effectiveness of a multi-layered awareness and support strategy to increase use of OER in Ontario. Jenni is an extremely proud alumna of the Global OER Graduate Network, a wonderful community of practice.

In addition to her role at Cambrian College, Jenni stays active volunteering for a variety of global conferences, presentations, and works has worked the past two years as North American Hub Coordinator for the Slovenia-based open initiative Open Education for a Better World (OE4BW).

From January 2015 to July 2016, Jenni worked as part of a talented team on massive, open, online courses (MOOCs) on the edX platform as part of Arizona State University’s Global Freshman Academy. This was an amazing opportunity to get under the hood of OpenEdX and learn in the trenches about accredited open education. There were a lot of excellent wicked, messy problems in that. They continue to haunt her dreams.

Prior to moving to Arizona (December 2014), Jenni was the Executive Director of a another great learning experience, Wide World Ed, now closed for business. From July 2013 to July 2015 she engaged with an amazing, open group of global educators to talk about open courses and OER. She completed her Master of Education (M.Ed) degree in January 2014 with Athabasca University, choosing the thesis stream to strengthen her research skills. If you’re interested, the thesis was called Essential Practices for Online Instruction: A Delphi Study. Jenni learned that it is very important to have a colon in a thesis title.

From 2010-2013 with Ryerson University, Jenni combined her change management, mentoring, and instructional design skills to collaboratively develop a lot of online courses. These degree-credit course designs included research and exploration of open and digital resources, assessment options suited for the online environment, exploration of copyright and accessibility needs for digital materials, and tools for interactive online teaching and learning. Her work, in partnership with several open minded instructors on the development of Ryerson’s Food Security Certificate, earned the 2013 Sloan Consortium (now called the Online Learning Consortium) Award for Pedagogical Innovation.

Specialties: Leadership in open public education, critical thinking, consultation and support on the curation and effective pedagogic implementation of open education practices and resources.

Jenni was an inaugural Steering Committee member for the Open Policy Network (OPN), and continues to love their work, and the work of all organizations committed to open access.