Dr. Paul J. LeBlanc is President of Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) and author of Students First: Equity, Access, and Opportunity in Higher Education and Broken: How our Social Systems are Failing Us. Under the 20 years of Paul’s direction, SNHU has grown from 10,000 students to over 180,000 learners and is the largest non-profit provider of online higher education in the country. Paul immigrated to the United States as a child, was the first person in his extended family to attend college and is a graduate of Framingham State University (BA), Boston College (MA), and the University of Massachusetts (PhD). From 1993 to 1996 he directed a technology start up for Houghton Mifflin Publishing Company, was President of Marlboro College (VT) from 1996 to 2003 and became President of SNHU in 2003.
Dr. Inge Molenaar is the director of the National Education Lab AI (NOLAI) and associated professor Educational Sciences at the Behavioural Science Institute at Radboud University in the Netherlands. She has over 20 years of experience in the field of technology enhanced learning taking multiple roles from entrepreneur to academic.
Her research in the Adaptive Learning Lab focusses on technology empowered innovation to optimize students’ learning. The application of data from online learning environments, apps and games in understanding how learning unfolds over time is central in her work. NOLAI focuses on the role of Artificial Intelligence in education which offers a powerful way to make new steps towards measuring, understanding and designing innovative learning scenarios. Dr Molenaar envisions Hybrid Human-Systems that augment human intelligence with artificial intelligence to empower learners and teachers in their quest to make education more efficient, effective and responsive. In NOLAI co-creation between governments, schools, research and industry is used to develop the next generation educational systems. Additionally, dr Molenaar has received an ERC Starting Grant to develop the first Hybrid Human-AI Regulation system to train young learners’ Self-regulated learning skills with the help of AI and she is a Jacobs Foundation Fellow and leads the International research Centre of learning and Living with AI (CELLA) together with Sanna Jarvela.
Dr Molenaar holds Master’s degrees in Cognitive Psychology and International Business studies and a PhD in Educational Sciences (University of Amsterdam).
Dr. Candace Thille is the director for workforce and adult learning in the Stanford Accelerator for Learning and a professor of Education and Neuroscience at Stanford University. Prior to rejoining Stanford in 2023, she spent five years as the director of learning science at Amazon.
She was the founding director of the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University. For the past two decades, in all her roles, her focus has been on applying the results from research in the science of human learning to the design of technology mediated learning environments and in using those environments to conduct research at the intersection of human learning and machine learning. Thille serves on the board of ETS and has served on the board of the AACU; on the Assessment 2020 Task Force of the American Board of Internal Medicine; and on the advisory council for NSF EHR. She served the U.S. Department of Education, co-authoring the 2010 and 2015 National Education Technology Plans.
Dr. Thille holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, a master’s degree from Carnegie Mellon University, and a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania.