As the Associate Director, Systems at the Centre for Extended Learning (CEL), University of Waterloo, I lead a 22-member team who develop and maintain large enterprise level systems which are multi-year and multi-stakeholder projects in nature. These systems connect to several upstream and downstream campus systems such as the student information system (Peoplesoft), learning management system (Brightspace), content management system (Contensis) and Workday. On average, the systems developed by my team serve 18-20k online learning students a year. Further, we power the registration systems which drive professional development (WatSPEED) at the University of Waterloo, transacting over $2million a year in revenue, among several others.
On the academic front, I currently teach, as a part-time Professor, the postgraduate course Management Information Systems (MIS) in the Graduate Certificate in Information Technology Business Analysis (ITBA) and Graduate Certificate in Information Technology Project Management (ITPM) courses offered by the School of Workforce Development, Continuing Education and Online Learning at Conestoga College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning, Kitchener, Ontario. Prior to this, I was a Senior Lecturer in IT at the School of Science and Technology, Wawasan Open University (WOU), Penang, Malaysia for five years. I served a term as the Deputy Dean of the School from July 2013 to August 2014. As the Deputy Dean, reporting to the Deputy Vice Chancellor (Academic), I provided leadership in all administrative and academic functions of the school. Additionally, I held the portfolio of the Dean for one year in his absence. I directly managed 17 academic staff including four PhD holders and two administrative staff. In this position, I provided leadership in administrative and academic functions of the school; designed financial projections and operating budgets for the school; provided leadership in undergraduate and postgraduate affairs, online learning course development and delivery, tutor assessment and examinations; and established research clusters in the school.
As a Senior Lecturer at WOU, reporting to the Dean of the school, I was responsible for teaching, course development for online learning, tutor management, assessments, research and publications. I designed and developed five Bachelor of Technology (Hons) degrees in Software Engineering, Information Systems, Multimedia Design, Networks and Data Communication and Database Management; designed and developed the MBA in Manufacturing and Production Management program; successfully coordinated the program accreditations for BTech (Hons) in Electronic Commerce and BTech (Hons) in Information Systems by the Malaysian Qualification Agency (MQA); and lectured a total of 8-10 courses at undergraduate and postgraduate level. The courses I taught are Advanced Manufacturing (PG), Enterprise Resource Planning (PG), Visual Programming, Human Computer Interaction, Electronic Commerce, Data Structures and Algorithms, Website Design and Development, Operating Systems, Intelligent Systems for Decision Support, Web Database Applications and Software Project Management. Additionally, I conducted research and development funded by foreign and local grants. I currently have 366 citation and an h-index of 10 on Google Scholar.
In my capacity as the Adviser on OER at the Commonwealth of Learning (COL), Canada, I successfully completed the Open Educational Resources for Skills Development (USD600k) project funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, USA. Reporting to the Vice President, my mandate was to facilitate the development of OER policy frameworks at national, provincial and institutional levels while building capacity of teachers to develop good-quality OER learning materials. As a part of this three-year project, I had developed 29 provincial OER policies and sensitized 649 policy makers in Cameroon, Botswana and Sri Lanka; 53 institutional policies in Kenya and India; 26 OER skills courses and toolkits with over 4 hours of instructional videos; and trained 272 teachers from 89 institutions in OER reuse and course development. Further, I was a member of the COL/UNESCO Global Task Team for the OER Regional Consultations leading up to the 2nd World OER Congress in Slovenia and acted as the facilitator/convener of the Latin America and Caribbean Regional Consultation, held in Sao Paulo, Brazil, where 31 government officials, policymakers, advocates and researchers from 21 countries participated to identify the current state of play with respect to OER in the region and concrete actions to drive the OER movement.
As the Director, International Academic Relations Division and Acting Director, National Online Distance Education Service (NODES) at The Open University of Sri Lanka (OUSL). The International Academic Relations Division (IRD) acts as the interface between OUSL and the global academic community. Reporting to the Vice Chancellor, my role as the Director of the IRD was to enrich the academic, economic and cultural aspects of OUSL staff and students by establishing international collaborations with like-minded individuals and institutions while managing all operational aspects of the division. NODES is an entrepreneurial, self-sustaining, national agency established to coordinate the delivery of online distance education programs in Sri Lanka. As the Acting Director, I migrated the NODES data center to University premises working closely with national and international vendors who were selected through a comprehensive tender process; streamlined the NODES operations including the 26 access centers distributed across the country; developed business plans to achieve self-sustainability for NODES; designed technical plans to revamp the existing technology architecture; generated new business through public private partnerships; and designed action plans to deliver high quality distance education to the masses through the Moodle LMS.
Ishan Abeywardena 