David Wiley, PhD

Hello! I'm David. Welcome to my little corner of the web.

I'm the Chief Academic Officer of Lumen Learning, a company dedicated to eliminating race, gender, and income as predictors of student success in US higher education. My work and research happen at the intersection of open educational resources, generative AI, learning analytics, continuous improvement, and professional development. I'm one of the founders of the open educational resources movement. I'm also adjunct faculty in Brigham Young University's graduate program in Instructional Psychology and Technology where I was previously a tenured Associate Professor, and Director of The Brad D. Smith Student Incubator in the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Marshall University.

As an academic, I've been fortunate to receive several recognitions for my work, including an National Science Foundation CAREER grant and appointments as a Nonresident Fellow in the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, a Peery Social Entrepreneurship Research Fellow in the BYU Marriott School of Business, and a Shuttleworth Fellow. As a social entrepreneur, I've founded or co-founded numerous entities including Lumen Learning, Degreed, and Mountain Heights Academy, and was named an Ashoka Fellow. In 2009, Fast Company named me one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business. In my professional community, I was Education Fellow at Creative Commons from 2013 - 2016 and one of the original authors of the CC Certificate Program, as well as President of the international Association for Educational Communications and Technology from 2022 - 2023.

I began my teaching career in 1996 as adjunct faculty at Ashland Community College in Kentucky where I taught Introduction to E-Business. I then taught Advanced Web Techniques as an adjunct in Marshall University's Computer Science Department. And then Educational Psychology at Brigham Young University as a graduate student. I then held tenure-track faculty appointments at Utah State University and Brigham Young University, where I taught courses in instructional design, grant writing, open education, social entrepreneurship, social media in education, and other subjects. As an adjunct, I most recently taught IPT 515R, Generative AI for Instructional Designers, at BYU and ENT200h, The Brad D. Smith Student Incubator, at Marshall University during 2024.

I'm a living organ donor. In 2019 I donated part of my liver to a good friend. Learn more about living organ donation at UNOS and organdonor.gov.

I was born and grew up in West Virginia. I'm an active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and served a two-year mission in Fukuoka, Japan. I currently live in West Virginia with my wife and three of our five children. I enjoy hiking, running, amateur radio, listening to and making music, reading, and playing basketball.

You can reach me at [email protected].

Honors, Recognitions, and Experience

• Distinguished Alumni Award, Marshall University
• Co-Founder, Lumen Learning
• President, Assocation for Educational Communications and Technology
• Recipient, National Science Foundation CAREER Grant
• Simon Fellow, Carnegie Mellon University
• Ashoka Fellow, Ashoka
• Nonresident Fellow, Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School
• Education Fellow, Creative Commons
• Founder and Steward, The Open Education Conference
• Shuttleworth Fellow, Shuttleworth Foundation
• Co-Founder, Degreed
• Innovator Award, Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)
• Peery Social Entrepreneurship Research Fellow, Melvin J. Ballard Center for Economic Self-Reliance, BYU Marriott School of Business
• Founder, Open Education Group
• President's Lifetime Achievement Award, The Corporation for National and Community Service and the Office of the President of the United States
• Senior Fellow for Strategy, Saylor Foundation
• Senior Fellow for Open Education, National Center for Research in Advanced Information and Digital Technologies (Digital Promise)
• OLNet Expert Fellow, The Open University
• Founder, Mountain Heights Academy
• John Deaver Drinko Outstanding Achievement Award, Marshall University
• Scholar / Researcher of the Year, USU College of Education and Human Services
• Founder and Director, USU Center for Open and Sustainable Learning
• Visiting Scholar, Open University of the Netherlands
• Founder, OpenContent.org
• Vice President for Instructional Design, Neumont University
• Chief Openness Officer, Flat World Knowledge
• Design Scientist, EduMetrics Research Institute
• Webmaster, Marshall University
• #78, Fast Company's 100 Most Creative People in Business

Influence

"Wiley (2000) collated work on the concept of LO [learning objects], which led to significant amounts of activity by educational technologists and software engineers to devise the systems, processes and models to enable educators to design, share and (re)use LO (McGreal, 2006; Weller, Little, McAndrew & Woods, 2006).

With the expansion of the Internet and the emergence of the World Wide Web (WWW) it was also Wiley (1999) who took another major feature of software engineering - the open licences applied to open source software that enabled community-driven improvement of the software code - and applied it to educational content. Wiley's notion of open content, his first attempts at an open licence and the separate but related developments of the Creative Commons movement and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology OpenCourseWare initiative then led on to the adoption of the term open educational resources at a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization meeting, all of these actions stimulated and supported by significant programmatic funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (Ilyoshi & Kumar, 2008)."

Lane, A. & Mcandrew, P. (2010). Are open educational resources systematic or systemic change agents for teaching practice. British Journal of Educational Technology, 41(6), pp. 952-962. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8535.2010.01119.x

Music I Like

Jacob Collier, Lauren Daigle, The Real Group, Sara Gazarek, saje, The Manhattan Transfer, New York Voices, Harry Connick, Jr., Thelonius Monk, Chanticleer, Take 6, Lauren Kinhan, Janis Siegel, Sara Evans, Peter Hollens, Stacey Kent, David Hykes, Glenn Gould, Billy Joel, Glad, Yo Yo Ma, Samuel Barber, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Lisa Ono, Dreams Come True, Sakamoto Ryuichi, Laura Pausini, Pizzicato Five, Yano Akiko, Wong Faye, Imai Miki, and yes, Barry Manilow.

Once upon a time I dabbled in composition. Sketches is a collection of original short piano pieces recorded in 1991. I still do a cappella arrangements for my church and other groups I sing with.

Fiction I Like

Anything and everything by Brandon Sanderson - The Way of Kings, Words of Radiance, Oathbringer, Rhythm of War , The Final Empire, The Well of Ascension, The Hero of Ages, Elantris, Warbreaker, and everything else!

The Earthsea Cycle by Ursula K. Leguin is the one that started it all for me, and Earthsea still feels like home in many ways - A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore, Tehanu, Tales from Earthsea, The Other Wind.