Mara Hancock’s Resume

Mara I. Hancock Resume

1831 Parker St. Berkeley, CA 94703
Home Phone: 510.841.4557 | Work Phone: 510.407.0543
Email: maraberkeley@gmail.com

 

EMPLOYMENT SUMMARY

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY – March 2002 to present

 Educational Technology Services

Director of Educational Technologies, January 2008- Present
(Interim Director for Educational Technology Services, Jan. 2008- Jan. 2009)
Lead the innovative Educational Technology Services department (ETS), the campus-wide provider of educational technology services and systems. Provide services to a user-base of over 50,000 faculty, students, staff, and research teams for their teaching, collaboration, and learning technology needs. This includes media capture and delivery; classroom design, installations and support; mobile AV and production services for classrooms and special events support; instructional video studio; development and support for virtual learning environments and online learning applications; faculty development support for teaching, learning and technology in both classroom and virtual environments; and the campus radio station, KALX. Oversee staff of 55 – 65 employees, and an annual budget of ~$7m comprised of central, recharge, grant, and project-based income. Act as subject matter expert on a wide variety of educational technology needs.


Accomplishment Highlights:

Strategic Planning

  • Leader in open/community source initiatives for higher education
  • Led ETS organizational review and strategic planning activities using the balance scorecard methodology
  • Established a set of core values consistently used to focus departmental vision and strategic priorities
  • Initiated and deliver an annual report for the department communicating against key data metrics
  • Increased departmental focus on leading with teaching and learning, embedding teaching and learning expertise and goals across educational technology activities
  • Core Member of Student Services Operational Excellence Design team, representing the Academic Commons/Student Portal
  • Member of IT Advisory and IT Governance design team for the OE initiative representing IT needs in support of teaching, learning, and scholarship
  • Oversaw 2011 review and reorganization of ETS unit, aimed at providing focused leadership and support for both operations and innovation

Innovation

  • Envisioned and led the international Opencast project (opencastproject.org), a community of practice and open source development for media capture, management, delivery, and teaching, learning, and collaboration tools. Proposed and obtained external funding from the Andrew W. Mellon and The William and Flora Hewlett foundations for three year project. Current board chair
  • Socialized and launched fledgling Active Learning Classroom (ALC) Project and design and development of ALC “Test Kitchen” as a demonstrator project and sandbox for faculty to explore engaged teaching methods with support of instructional design staff
  • Engaged multi-year funding for resources to contribute to the design and development of the Sakai Open Academic Environment as the future teaching, learning, and collaboration platform for the University
  • Partner with Student Affairs IT and the Registrar to create a systems roadmap that enriches the student experience and bridges across services
  • Co-lead with Office of Educational Development the business case, communications and change management for design and roll-out of new online course evaluation process and system
  • Established User Experience team to implement user-centered design in strategic projects, leading to recognition as a UX Center of Excellence for the campus

Budget and Operations

  • Established classroom costing team to improve maintenance and refresh cost projections for general assignment classrooms and created a costing model for use in other service areas
  • Shaped and facilitated a diverse departmental funding portfolio of ~$7 million/year
  • Advocated for and received necessary ETS operational funding in an increasingly tight budget climate
  • Led the drive for regularization of the budgeting process for baseline ETS operational budget to ensure adequate and ongoing funding for key infrastructure

UC Online Instruction Pilot Project, Director for Online Learning, December 2010 – Present (concurrent position)

Establish the strategy and roadmap for the system-wide start up project to design, deliver, and evaluate online undergraduate courses.

  • Lead, motivate, and organize a diverse team of instructional designers and technologists that work on the project and sit across the 9 UC undergraduate campuses in the course design and development
  • Set roadmap for learning environment that can also act as a sandbox for collaboration across 9 UC Educational Technology units
  • Establish partnerships with campus service partners and a wide range of commercial vendors to evaluate and integrate innovative tools and emerging technologies

Associate CIO for Teaching and Learning, December 2006 – Present (concurrent position)
Represent and advocate for the IT needs for the campus Teaching and Learning constituency. Member of the Campus Technology Council, a strategic governance body that oversees and recommends campus IT budget strategy and prioritization to the CIO and Executive board.

Associate Director, ETS Learning Systems Group, March 2002 – December 2007
Oversaw the Learning Systems Group within Educational Technology Services at University of California, Berkeley. This team of approximately 20 staff developed and supported scalable and sustainable open source learning applications and tools for the campus and higher education community. It provided instructional design support for faculty, graduate and undergraduate students in integrating the effective use of technology into their teaching and learning activities.

Accomplishment Highlights:

  • Spearheaded the campus initiative for a single enterprise-level LMS for the Berkeley campus to meet the diverse needs of the UC Berkeley faculty and students.
  • Led the UC Berkeley Sakai strategy, development, and enterprise implementation
  • Presided over a 2000 + % increase in course site creation and adoption (over 2300 sites/sem)
  • Facilitated the migration to the Sakai CLE as the single enterprise LMS on campus, enabling the retirement of four aging and redundant campus systems
  • Expanded virtual collaboration services, offering Sakai CLE to campus-wide collaborative and scholarly project sites (over 2600 sites to date)
  • Led the webcast.berkeley program through an extraordinary expansion, resulting in partnership distribution agreements with iTunes, Google, and YouTube
  • Sponsored webcast application re-architecture, establishing key intra-departmental partnership between Video Services, ETS Applications Design and Development, and Engineering groups
  • Aligned open video content program with the Open Courseware Consortium, the Hewlett Foundation’s OER program, and stewarded the UC approval process for Creative Commons licensing for UC Berkeley’s webcast content
  • Initiated UC-wide dialog regarding community source licensing resulting in the Community Source Licensing Summit sponsored by the Mellon Foundation
  • Forged strong collaborations with other campus departments such as the Library Systems and Teaching library, the Registrar, IST, and ResComp resulting in improved services, increased integration between the bSpace and library and campus data systems

Grant and Innovation Leadership

  • The Opencast Project | funded 2008-2011
    Received Planning, Implementation, and Organizational Effectiveness grants, jointly funded by the Hewlett Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
    • Acted as PI and chair of board on project
    • Planning Grant: Explored the requirements and readiness for a new community source effort around the shared development and design of an open source podcast capture and delivery system for higher ed. Document best practices and case studies.
    • Matterhorn Implementation Grant: Designed and developed a free, open-source platform to support the management of educational audio and video content. Institutions use Matterhorn to produce lecture recordings, manage existing video, serve designated distribution channels, and provide user interfaces to engage students with educational videos.
    • Organizational Effectiveness Grant: Conducted a strategic alignment exercise with Matterhorn board and key community advisors to establish a plan for future (post grant) governance and alignment with other community and open source projects.
  • The Fluid Project (http://fluidproject.org) | Grant funded 2007-2009
    Core partner on the Fluid Project, a two-year $2.5M grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
    • Collaborated on establishing vision and grant proposal
    • Directed lead user experience team on the project responsible for development of UI Components and templates, design patterns, UX methodologies for Fluid project, delivery of U-Camps for Sakai, uPortal, and Kuali Student Projects
    • Member, Board of Directors
  • Sakai Project (http://sakaiproject.org) | Grant funded 2004-2005
    UC Berkeley ETS was a key contributor to the Sakai development effort. The Sakai Foundation was established in 2006.
    • Member, Sakai Project Board of Directors (June 2004 – 2009)
    • Program Chair, December 2005 Sakai Conference
    • Chair, Requirements Working Group 2004-2006: Led team to develop and implement community practice for prioritization of Sakai product features.
    • Oversaw and directed four UCB FTE working on the following aspects of the project:
      • Sakai Gradebook development (2.0 – 2.4 releases)
      • Section Management tool development (2.3 – 2.4 release)
      • Core Contribution to Sakai architecture, Course Management API, and loosely coupled tools approach to development (June 2004 – present)
      • Leader in UI development and UX activities, including the creation of the U-Camp, an educational and hands-on workshop for improving the user experience within Sakai
  • eBerkeley Initiative Funded Innovation Projects (2002-2004)
    Proposed, received, and managed three Innovation Projects funded through the eBerkeley Initiative:
    • Web-enabled Powerpoint — Project manage and assess the Web-enabled PowerPoint pilot project, including vendor negotiations, project plan, outreach, and tester support (complete December 2002, with extension through Spring 2003)
    • ETS Multimedia Services — Wrote and managed start-up grant for the ETS Multimedia Services unit, a student-staffed unit that developed campus web sites and applications using templates and scalable and sustainable methodologies
    • Usability Models – Wrote and oversaw project to conduct usability studies for several campus units and promoted usability methodologies on campus

 

Committee and External Advisory Roles

Current Activity

  • Member, New Media Consortium Board of Directors
  • Board Chair, Opencast Project
  • Vice-chair, Educational Technology Leadership Group
  • Co-Chair, Course Evaluation Project
  • Vice-Chair, UC Educational Technology Leadership Group (ETLG)
  • Chair, ETLG  Subcommittee for Online Learning
  • Member, Systemwide Library and Scholarly Information and Advisory Committee (SLASIAC)
  • Co-Chair, SLASIAC  committee on Copyright
  • Member, Committee on Classroom Policy and Management
  • Member, Digital Library Services Advisory Group (California Digital Library)
  • Member, Steering Committee, UC Berkeley IT Collaboration Tools
  • Member, Advisory Committee, Media Vault Project
  • Member, Student Systems 2012 Community Council (now Kuali)

 Past Activity

  • Board Member, Sakai Foundation
  • Board member, Fluid Project
  • Founding member, UC LMS group, group of LMS managers across the UC System to collaborate and leverage learning and effort (2005-2009)
  • Member, UC School of Global Health Information, Communication and Education Technology (ICET) Task Force (2009)
  • Member, YouTube Advisory Committee (2008-09)
  • Member, Joint Task Force on Course Evaluation (2009)
  • Member, Teaching and Learning Faculty Development Committee, cross-divisional projects for faculty development. Responsible for the May 2007 Teaching, Learning and Technology Symposium: Cultivating Communities in Our Learning Landscapes
  • Member, Steering Cmte., Mellon Faculty Institute for Undergraduate Research (2003-2007)
  • Member and planning group, Educational Technology Committee (2002-2006)
  • Member, Information Technology Architecture Committee (2002-2006)
  • Member, eBerkeley Implementation Task Force (2003-2005)
  • Staff Advisory, IT Governance and Funding and Review Committee (2005)
  • Oracle Academic Environment Advisory Group (2006-2008)
  • External Reviewer, UCLA LMS Review (Spring 2006)

DIGITALTHINK – December 1998 to March 2002
DigitalThink, Inc. was a leading provider of e-learning solutions for Fortune 1000 companies from 1996-2004. They provided a large subscription-based course catalog and custom course development. During my time at the company it grew from 60 employees to over 500.

  • Manager, Design Strategies and Technology
    Responsible for the start-up and leadership of a cross-functional team with the primary goal to create reusable interactive elements, learning architectures, and development tools that serve to increase efficiencies, shorten the product development cycle, and ensure the creation of best-of-breed e-learning.
  • Senior Manager, Quality Improvement Services
    Responsible for administrative and functional management of the Quality Assurance and Maintenance Services teams (20 staff), including: budget, capacity and cost planning, and design and implementation of strategic programs.
  • Catalog Course Development Manager
    Responsible for managing a cross-functional team of 8-14 Instructional Designers, Web Designers, and Web Producers in the development of approximately 10 web-based courses per quarter.
  • Instructional Designer
    Instructional and Media Design of course content and interactivity design for e-learning courses. Worked closely with authors and subject matter experts world-wide to develop course objectives, author content and multimedia, and establish effective learning assessment.

“Mara makes everything seem and feel possible. To work with her is empowering — to work with her is a lesson in how to treat people and how to challenge yourself. And she’s funny. Really funny. She’s simply the best.”

— DigitalThink Instructional Design Manager

 

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA EXTENSION, CMIL – November 1996 – November 1998
Founding team member and Online Multimedia Specialist for UC Extension Online, a pioneering, award-winning collaborative project between UC Berkeley Extension and the Center for Media & Independent Learning.

INKWORKS PRESS – August 1989- October 1996
Founding member for Design, Desktop Publishing & Electronic Prepress Department at Inkworks Press, a collectively owned and managed offset printing company in Berkeley, CA.

EDUCATION
San Francisco State University, MA, Instructional Technology, 1997
California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, CA, B.F.A., 1986

RELATED COURSES AND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

  • UC Berkeley Senior Manager Leadership Training (Haas Business school), 2011
  • Frequent presenter at IT Higher Ed conferences
  • Frye Leadership Institute, Emory University & Educause, 2006
  • CIO Institute, Haas Business School, UC Berkeley, 2006
  • Interaction Design Practicum, Cooper, San Francisco, 2006
  • Design Communication Workshop, Cooper, San Francisco, 2006

 

PROFESSIONAL ENGAGEMENT

  • Educause
  • DET/CHE
  • JASIG
  • Sakai Foundation
  • Opencast Project
  • Open Courseware Consortium
  • Open Video Coalition

 

OTHER PLACES TO FIND ME

 

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