George Siemens

George Siemens is a Canadian scholar of digital education and learning analytics, currently professor and director of the Centre for Change and Complexity in Learning at the University of South Australia and also affiliated with the University of Texas at Arlington. He is best known for developing connectivism, a theory of learning for the networked digital age, first set out in a 2004 blog post. In 2008, together with Stephen Downes, he co-designed and taught an early massive open online course to more than two thousand participants worldwide, work later credited as a landmark in the push toward open teaching, and he distinguishes the connectivist cMOOC model he helped originate from later institutional xMOOC platforms.