Open Learning ExchangeUniversal Basic Education 2015

Tom Oates joined OLE as Chief Development Officer on July 1, taking on responsibilities for fund raising for OLE worldwide. Tom’s professional fund raising experience extends back to door-to-door canvassing in the early 1980s and includes managing foundation and corporate relations for Defenders of Wildlife and serving as director of development for Christian Relief Services Charities, a family of affiliated US and international human services charities.

Tom’s professional success has opened doors to broad opportunities. His interest in human/wildlife interactions led to his doing the field audio and distribution work for an EMMY-nominated documentary focusing on the annual spawning of Atlantic horseshoe crabs on the Delaware Bay, “Dollars on the Beach.” Building on that material, he later helped develop an award-winning, multi-media, multi-disciplinary curriculum, “Green Eggs and Sand.”

Tom’s service on the board of a Chinese nature protection organization led to his developing an “up close and personal” profile of the composer Chien Tai Chen, that aired nation-wide on China’s five major television networks, featuring Chen’s theme song for an emerging grassroots Chinese environmental organization. He also has served on the advisory board of an American Indian educational organization.

Living on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, near Washington, DC, Tom enjoys volunteering in the local community, riding his bicycle and eating roast sweet corn and watermelon when they are in season.

Positions available — You will now see an Opportunities with OLE link at the top right of the menu bar of each page. The opportunities are great to do great good for the world’s children, and we need your help to get it done. Check this page regularly for new opportunities

Our team in Cambridge is small, dedicated, and committed to providing open source educational resources using an innovative technology framework to support the global OLE mission of Universal Basic Education. We are not building new learning systems; instead we are leveraging the wealth of existing open educational content and systems to provide K-12 teachers and students around the world with easy access to the quality tools they need for basic education. Please consider helping us to make this a reality.

Volunteers — We have opportunities for:

Teachers who can provide modules, courses, and curricula they have developed, or would like to create, under a Creative Commons license. These resources will become part of the Billion Kids Library and teachers around the world will be able to use them in their current form or adapt them to create locally-appropriate resources.

Translators who can help us provide our toolkits, tutorials, and printed documents in as many languages as possible. Our immediate needs are for translation into Mandarin, Spanish, French, Hindi, Nepali, and Arabic.

If you would like to join OLE and support our mission as a volunteer, please sign up here.