As the 2013-24 Consortium president, I am particularly pleased to announce that Dr. Martha Kanter, Distinguished Visiting Professor of Higher Education at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development and former U.S. Under Secretary of Education is the recipient of the OpenCourseWare Consortium’s President’s award for her commitment to access and equity in education, and her promotion of open educational resources as strategic imperative for reaching these goals.
Dr. Kanter has important roots in California. She was the Chancellor of Foothill-DeAnza College, which played a leadership role in the early days of open education, particularly in the area of open textbooks, which have reduced costs to an increasing number of students. The Community College Coalition for Open Educational Resources was founded by her and other innovators and continues to this day as a part of the OpenCourseWare Consortium. Under her leadership at the U.S. Department of Education, grants awarded by several agencies of the government adopted the requirement of releasing newly created resources under an open license (CC-BY).