Anne-Marie Scott

Anne-Marie is the Director of Anne-Marie Scott Consulting Inc. and Chair of the Apereo Foundation. Previously, she was the Deputy Provost at Athabasca University, Canada’s largest open and online university, where she led a number of transformational change projects. As a key member of the academic leadership team, she had the responsibility of ensuring operational excellence and high-quality delivery of academic operations, including learner experience, service and support. She would describe herself as a learning technologist, with a background in enterprise IT, and the sensibility of a humanities scholar, which she knows is an unusual combination! In addition to her work at Athabasca and for Apereo she writes, consults, and is often sought after as an expert in digital education and strategy.

Prior to becoming Deputy Provost at Athabasca University, Anne-Marie was  Deputy Director of the Learning, Teaching and Web Services Directorate at the University of Edinburgh. She was at the University of Edinburgh from 2002 to 2019 and was responsible for the selection and development of uPortal as the University enterprise portal platform in 2004. She is an expert in enterprise systems – in addition to implementing uPortal, she led a multi-year project to replace the University Identity Management system, moving operations to a real-time SOA based architecture. The solution delivered was a blend of open source solutions (Grouper, OpenLDAP) and bespoke development.

Starting in 2011 she focused on University of Edinburgh’s learning technology provision, developing strategy and leading large institutional change projects that enhance the student learning experience. She was responsible for the provision of all the centrally provided VLE, eAssessment, ePortfolio and lecture recording, and media services in the institution, as well as the adoption of WordPress as an enterprise blogging platform, and the use of Jupyter Notebooks to support computational learning. She has a keen interest in data and learning analytics, and has led development of policy for the ethical use of these technologies in both of her institutions. Whilst at Edinburgh she supported the inclusion of OnTask into the Apereo Incubation process.

Since 2019 she has also been an advisor to the Open Edtech Collaborative (OpenETC) a project based in British Columbia which provides open source software technologies as a shared platform for the post-secondary sector, based on the principles of platform cooperativism.

In 2023, Anne-Marie Scott was elected a Director at the Open Source Initiative. Anne-Marie was elected by the Affiliate organizations of OSI.

Anne-Marie holds an MA in English and Scottish Literature and a PG Dip in e-Learning, both from Edinburgh. One day she might do a Ph.D. She’s been telling herself that for a few years now.