About me

I am the Technical Director for OpenStax at Rice University, overseeing product development and user experience for delivering high-quality, free, open learning content, and delivering learning tools that help students achieve their educational goals. My approach to product design is to build teams that begin with the end in mind, focus on the ‘why,’ develop clear goals and measurements, and then use engineering cycles of design, build, measure, and adjust to continuously improve.

Strong product management skills and strong user experience skills and processes are essential to healthy software development teams, as are building trust and commitment. The best part of the job is coaching and learning from the fantastic product teams at OpenStax. 

Lately, I have been increasing knowledge and expertise in Privacy, Inclusive Design, and Fair, Accountable, and Transparent algorithms, to ensure that the technology that I help deliver is beneficial for ALL students.    

Before joining OpenStax, I had a Fellowship from the Shuttleworth Foundation from 2011-2014 to foster the use of and adaptation of open education resources. I built an international team, created and implemented a remixing and publishing API, and designed, built and tested a prototype remixing editor. You can learn more about the fellowship work on this site under the section about OERPUB. And you can apply for one yourself!

More stuff I have done: I helped build a small business, have built numerous advisory boards and brain trusts, have a research master’s degree in computer science, and have taught computer engineering and computer architecture.  As you will see below, I am also a parent of talented and generous people.

About the site

The banner art on the site is by Ariana Fletcher-Bai. Each are photos of portions of the actual pieces. Ariana Fletcher-Bai, Trinity ’20, has been editing papers professionally for two years and making art for as long as she can remember. She is a Human Communications major with Studio Art and Creative Writing minors. She is interested in patterns of all kinds, whether in language or in color, and her current artwork explores ideas of retelling and mapmaking.

Editing of some of the posts has been provided by both Ariana Fletcher-Bai (who also wrote two paragraph summaries for Linked In) and Maya Fletcher-Bai.

All opinions, views, ideas, and errors on the site are strictly my own, and are not necessarily shared, supported, or endorsed by my employer.

About OERPUB

OERPUB was the fruition of the fellowship work I did on the use and adaptation of OER. Find out more about the OERPUB community, projects, and code here.