I'm Chief Academic AI Officer and Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at Marshall University. My teaching, research, and consulting happen at the intersection of generative AI, open education, entrepreneurship, instructional design, and student success. I am deeply interested in how colleges and universities - and their students, faculty, and staff - can transform themselves in order to thrive in the age of AI. I hold a BFA in Music from Marshall University and a PhD in Instructional Psychology and Technology from Brigham Young University.
For nearly 30 years my research has focused on finding ways make education more affordable and effective. I've received several recognitions for my work, including a 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, a Visiting Scholar at the Open University of the Netherlands, an OLNet Expert Fellow at the Open University of the UK, a Senior Fellow for Open Education at the National Center for Research in Advanced Information and Digital Technologies (Digital Promise), an Ashoka Fellow, and a Shuttleworth Fellow.
This AI skill helps a domain expert author a complete, high-quality open textbook draft in a day - entirely through a structured conversation. I used this process to create my most recent open textbook, Relational Thinking: A Concepts-First Introduction to Databases for the Age of AI.
GitHub ↗Kaiwa is a system for creating, managing, administering, grading, and providing immediate, criterion-level feedback on LLM-powered conversational assessments. Currently in testing.
A proof-of-concept "generative OER" web app. Every layer of the app is openly licensed and runs entirely in your browser: an OpenStax textbook, a derived knowledge graph, and an open source, in-browser LLM. Meaning there's no backend, no accounts, and no cost. An experiment in building local, free, AI-powered learning.
GitHub ↗My teaching career has spanned a range of disciplines. I've taught in the Business, Computer Science, Entrepreneurship, Honors, Learning Design and Technology, Instructional Psychology and Technology, Instructional Technology, and Management Information Systems departments. I've taught as an adjunct, as three-year term faculty, and as tenure-track faculty. I'm currently Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at Marshall University.
I believe the most useful way to think about a course is as a campfire. A campfire has important nonsocial functions (like providing heat and light) just like courses have important nonsocial functions (like conveying information). But the most important function of both a great campfire and a great course is the manner in which they draw people together. A good campfire is a thing around which storytelling, singing, and other social interactions happen. The same is true for the best courses – they draw people into discussions, arguments, explorations, and even friendships. Those are the spaces in which deep, meaningful, transformative learning can happen.
When all is said and done, Education is Sharing.
I speak all over the world at conferences, on campuses, to associations, and with leadership teams about generative AI, open education, and the future of higher education, and I provide consulting services on these same topics. From working with a small group of community college leaders to presenting invited testimony to the US Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education, I've probably spoken to or worked with a group like yours.
I'd love to speak with your group to challenge, inform, and inspire you to more faithfully live your values and more fully accomplish your mission. Share a few details about your group and your goals, and I'll follow up to discuss how we might work together.
Prefer email? Write to me at speaking@davidwiley.org.
I've delivered hundreds of high-impact workshops focused on all aspects of open education, generative AI in education, and open licensing, and how these can be paired with evidence-based practices to increase access and improve outcomes. Workshops are available in half-day, full-day, and multi-day formats, and I would love to help your group transform its approach to teaching and learning to better serve your students. My most popular workshops are listed below (reach out if you're interested in a workshop on a different topic):
This workshop begins with a deep dive into the ways AI is changing academic disciplines, the world of work, and society at large. With this understanding as framing context, participants critically examine their course learning outcomes and make appropriate updates. These updated learning outcomes become the foundation for AI-aware assessment redesigns, including designs that leverage AI to measure learning in novel ways. Finally, participants redesign the learning activities students engage with to master course learning outcomes, again using AI to scale interactivity, feedback, and personalization.
This workshop introduces participants to my Open Textbook Draft skill for AI, which uses a structured conversation format to help domain experts author a complete open textbook in about a day. Participants also learn how to use AI to create a wide range of supplemental materials like interactive exercises, simulations, AI-powered assessments, presentation slides, and in-class active learning exercises. Finally, we work through ways to use AI to revise and remix existing OER, including engaging students in AI-powered OER-enabled pedagogy activities.
Having been the Education Fellow at Creative Commons and one of the original authors of the CC Certificate for Educators, I've taught thousands of people about the Creative Commons licenses. This workshop provides participants with a high-level framework for understanding the licenses, goes into detail about each of the license conditions (including critical nuance around the SA and NC conditions), covers the non-license tools (CC Zero and the Public Domain Mark), surveys which CC licenses are used most frequent in education, describes the relationship between the CC licenses and OER, and ends with an always-lively Q&A session.
I'd love to work with your group on a workshop. Share a few details about your group and your goals, and I'll follow up to discuss which workshop would serve you best and how we might work together.
Prefer email? Write to me at workshops@davidwiley.org.
In high school I was a show choir kid with a dream of going to Broadway. However, "encouraged" by my parents, I studied engineering during my first semester at WVU so I could get a "real job." But music kept calling to me, and I switched to Music Education the very next semester. When I transferred to Marshall University in 1993 I continued studying music... and was introduced to email.
The internet fascinated me. First email. Then Gopher and FTP. Then the World Wide Web. I was absolutely hooked on the web. I taught myself HTML by viewing the source code of other people's websites; first, using Lynx and later, Netscape Navigator. I knew the internet was going to change everything, and created my first startup - InterSpec - to train people in the Huntington area to use the internet. Soon I was making house calls configuring people's computers to dial in to the internet, creating websites for the City of Huntington and other local businesses, and helping the county school board setup a bank of modems so teachers could call in and connect to the internet for free.
In 1997, Marshall offered me a job as the university's first webmaster. It was working in this role that my vision of how the internet could change education started to crystalize. Working on a Javascript calculator, I realized there was something powerfully different between a digital calculator embedded in a website and a physical calculator. Only one person at a time could use the physical calculator, but an almost infinite number of people could use the online calculator at the same time. This magical property of digital resources (which I would later learn economists refer to as being non-rivalrous), meant that if we could just figure out how to fund the creation of digital learning materials once, we could share them freely with everyone around the world.
In early 1998, when the phrase "open source" was coined, I saw how these two forces - digital learning resources and open licensing - could combine to revolutionize teaching and learning materials. While the open source community was focusing on software, I launched the Open Content initiative, creating the world's first open source license for educational materials. (Years later, a UNESCO working group would rebrand open content as "open educational resources" or OER.) For almost 30 years now, in many roles with many organizations, I've advocated for combining the power of online resources with the power of openness to dramatically increase access to educational opportunity around the world.
In the early 2020s I saw history start to repeat itself. Generative AI began to arrive on campus - just as the internet had decades earlier - again, with the potential to transform everything. Instead of providing everyone, everywhere with access to learning materials as the internet had, generative AI is providing everyone, everywhere with real-time access to intelligence and expertise. Today, I work to combine the power of generative AI with the power of openness to both increase access to educational opportunity and increase the effectiveness and impact of those opportunities.
I currently live in West Virginia, where I was born and raised, with my wife Elaine and four of our five children. Our family loves taking cross-country road trips, making music together (the Wiley Trio!), playing video games together, watching our favorite shows together, and generally just being together.
I’m an active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I served a two-year mission in Fukuoka, Japan in the 1990s and currently serve in the Stake Presidency of the Charleston, WV Stake.
I’m a licensed amateur radio operator, call sign WV8O. You can find me on QRZ.
I love reading Brandon Sanderson and Ursula K. LeGuin.
I love performing. This summer (2026) I played John Hancock in a production of 1776 as part of Huntington’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. My past roles include J. Pierrepont Finch (How to Succeed), Curly McLain (Oklahoma!), Sid Sorokin (The Pajama Game), Nanki-Poo (The Mikado), and Perchik (Fiddler on the Roof).
I love listening to music by artists like Jacob Collier, Lauren Daigle, Natalie Layne, The Real Group, Sara Gazarek, The Manhattan Transfer, New York Voices, Take 6, Chanticleer, Voces8, Thelonious Monk, Emmet Cohen, Glenn Gould, Samuel Barber, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Dreams Come True, and yes, Barry Manilow.
Once upon a time I dabbled in composition. Sketches is a collection of original short piano pieces recorded in 1991. More recently, I arranged and recorded a new rendition of the state song, The West Virginia Hills.