[Listed in alphabetical order]

Trudy Banta 

Professor Trudy W. Banta is Vice Chancellor for Planning and Institutional Improvement, and Professor of Higher Education, at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. She has developed and coordinated thirteen national conferences and ten international conferences held in the United Kingdom, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Australia, the U.S., and Malaysia on the topic of assessing quality in higher education. She has consulted with faculty and administrators in 38 states and Puerto Rico on the topic of outcomes assessment. She has also given invited addresses at national conferences in China, France, Germany, Canada, and Spain. Since 1983, Banta has written or edited seven published volumes on assessment, contributed 20 chapters to other published works, and written more than 100 articles and reports. Her two most recent books are entitled Assessment in Practice, and Assessment Essentials. She is the founding editor of Assessment Update, a bi-monthly periodical published by Jossey-Bass since 1989. Professor Banta is joined in her keynote by her colleagues Sharon Hamilton and Susan Kahn.

David Boud

Professor David Boud has been involved in research and teaching development in adult, higher and professional education for over 30 years and has contributed extensively to the literature. Previously he held the positions of Head of the School of Adult and Language Education and he was Associate Dean (Research and Development) in the Faculty of Education. Prior to his appointment at UTS he was Professor and Foundation Director of the Professional Development Centre at the University of New South Wales.

David Nicol

Dr David Nicol is Deputy Director, and Head of Research and Development in E-Learning, within the Centre for Academic Practice and Learning Enhancement (CAPLE) at the University of Strathclyde. He is also Director of the Re-engineering Assessment Practices (REAP) project one of six projects funded by the Scottish Funding Council (£1m) as part of its E-Learning Transformation Initiative. This project is investigating ways of improving assessment practices supported by technology across three Scottish HE institutions – Strathclyde, Glasgow University and Glasgow Caledonian University.

David has published in the areas of assessment, digital repositories, shared workspaces, electronic voting systems and on the social dimensions of e-learning. He is leading a QAA Scotland project on diagnostic and formative assessment in relation to the first year experience and is a collaborator in other JISC (community dimensions of learning object repositories) and HE Academy projects (learning from digital natives). He has also published on cost-benefit and risk analysis of investments in e-learning in higher education and provided workshops on these topics for the Centre for Excellence in Leadership. He led the University of Strathclyde’s benchmarking of e-learning pilot and is currently convening a cross-institutional working party at Strathclyde which is revising policy and guidelines for assessment.

Mantz Yorke

Professor Mantz Yorke was, until August 2005, Professor of Higher Education at Liverpool John Moores University, and is now Visiting Professor in the Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University.

His early career was in teaching and teacher education, after which he turned to staff development and educational research at Manchester Polytechnic. He then spent six years as a senior manager at Liverpool Polytechnic followed by two years on secondment as Director of Quality Enhancement at the Higher Education Quality Council. On returning to LJMU he engaged in research and development focusing largely on the student experience. He has presented and published on various aspects of higher education.