Mara Hancock’s Resume

Mara I. Hancock
1831 Parker St. Berkeley, CA 94703
Phone: 510.407.0543 • Email: mara@media.berkeley.edu

EMPLOYMENT SUMMARY

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY – March 2002 to present

Educational Technology Services Department

Interim Director, January 2008- Present
Lead the UC Berkeley innovative Educational Technology Services department (ETS org chart), serving a user-base of over 35,000 faculty, students, and staff for their collaboration and learning environment needs. This includes media capture and delivery, classroom design and installations, mobile AV, virtual learning environments and tools, teaching learning and technology workshops and support, and the campus radio station, KALX.

Associate Director, Learning Systems Group, March 2002 - December 2007
Oversaw the Learning Systems Group within Educational Technology Services at University of California, Berkeley. This growing team of 20 FTE develops and supports scalable and sustainable open source learning applications and tools for the campus and higher education community. We offer instructional design support for faculty, graduate students, and students in using technology in their teaching and learning.

Select Work Accomplishments:

• Since 2002, overseen organizational growth from 3.5 FTE to 20 FTE spread across three teams: Faculty Development and Support, Application Development and Maintenance, and User Experience
• Presided over a 1000 + % increase in course web site creation and adoption
• Established support for campus-wide collaborative and scholarly project sites
• Defined and improved organizational structure for growing team, formalizing roles and methodologies
• Constituted User Experience team to implement user-centered design in conjunction with application development
• Initiated and led the UC Berkeley Sakai strategy and implementation effort
• Directed and coordinated the ETS Learning Systems annual budget, resulting in increased annual budget appropriations even during years of campus cutbacks
• Advocated for stronger IT project management on UC Berkeley campus, engaging the ETS team in professional development activities and establishing appropriate project management practices
• Supervise the team in the delivery and assessment for Sakai tool development and local implementation
• Introduced software development methodology into the department planning process resulting in a common language for identifying user requirements, user interface design, and project management methodology throughout the organization
• Facilitated the rationalization and retirement of four campus systems: webCT, Blackboard, eRes, and CourseWeb
• Present regularly to the campus, UC administration, and Higher Ed community regarding Sakai, bSpace, Webcast, ETS programs, and open source/open content collaborations
• Led webcast.berkeley program through an extraordinary expansion, resulting in partnership distribution agreements with iTunes, Google, and YouTube
• Led webcast application redesign, partnering with the ETS video services and engineering groups
• Led effort to formalize open video content program through OCWC membership and stewarding the UC approval process for Creative Commons licensing for webcast content
• Initiated UC-wide dialog regarding community source licensing resulting in the Community Source Licensing Summit sponsored by the Mellon Foundation
• Established ETS Project Portfolio and project prioritization process
• Responsible for managing strategic partnership and contract negotiations for commercial systems, services, and collaborations
• Established ETS/library collaboration to integrate library resources into learning tools such as Sakai/bSpace and CourseWeb
• Led and designed the 2002 RFP process for an enterprise learning management system, working closely with a diverse LMS committee made up of faculty and campus-wide administrative staff

Grant and Community Source Projects

• The Open Cast Project | Planning Grant funded 2008-2009
• Planning grant jointly funded by the Hewlett Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
  • Lead Institution and manager on grant
  • Document best practices and explore the requirements and readiness for a new community source effort around the shared development and design of an open source podcast capture and delivery system for higher ed.
• The Fluid Project (http://fluidproject.org) | Grant funded 2007-2009
  • Core partner and co-PI on the Fluid Project, a 2.5 Millon grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
  • Collaborated on establishing vision and grant proposal
  • Direct lead user experience team on the project responsible for development of UI Components and templates, design patterns, UX methodologies for Fluid project, delivery of U-Camps for Sakai, uPortal, and Kuali Student Projects
  • Member, Board of Directors

• Sakai Project (http://sakaiproject.org) | Grant funded 2004-2005, Established Foundation 2006 - present
  • Member, Sakai Project Board of Directors (June 2004 – present)
  • Program Chair, December 2005 Sakai Conference
  • Chair, Requirements Working Group 2004-2006: Led team to develop and implement community practice for prioritization of Sakai product requirements.
  • Oversaw and directed four UCB FTE working on the following aspects of the project:
    • Sakai Gradebook development (2.0 - 2.4 releases)
    • Section Management tool development (2.3 - 2.4 release)
    • Core Contribution to Sakai architecture, Course Management API, and loosely coupled tools approach to development (June 2004 – present)
    • Leader in UI development and UX activities, including the creation of the U-Camp, an educational and hands-on day-long workshop for improving the user experience within Sakai.

• eBerkeley Initiative Funded Innovation Projects (2002-2004)
  Proposed, received, and managed three Innovation Projects funded through the eBerkeley Initiative:
  • Web-enabled Powerpoint — Project manage and assess the Web-enabled PowerPoint pilot project, including vendor negotiations, project plan, outreach, and tester support (complete December 2002, with extension through Spring 2003)
  • ETS Multimedia Services — Wrote and managed start up grant for the ETS Multimedia Services unit, a student staffed unit that developed campus web sites and applications using templates and scalable and sustainable methodologies.
  • Usability Models – Wrote and oversaw project to conduct usability studies for several campus units and promote usability methodologies on campus

Committee and Advisory Roles

Current Activity

• Associate CIO for Teaching and Learning. Work with other Associate CIOs on Campus Technology Council to define campus IT budget strategy and prioritization
• Member, YouTube Advisory Committee
• Member, DUE Faculty Development Committee, cross divisional projects for faculty development. Responsible for the May 2007 Teaching, Learning and Technology Symposium: Cultivating Communities in Our Learning Landscapes
• Member, Digital Library Services Advisory Group (California Digital Library)
• Member, UC LMS group, group of LMS managers across the UC System to collaborate and leverage learning and effort.
• Member, Steering Committee, UC Berkeley IT Collaboration Tools
• Member, Advisory Committee, Media Vault Project
• Member, Community Council, Student Systems 2012 Project (now Kuali)

Past Activity

• Member, Steering Committee, Mellon Faculty Institute for Undergraduate Research (2003-2007)
• Member, and planning team, Educational Technology Committee (2002-2006)
• Member, Information Technology Architecture Committee (2002-2006)
• Member, eBerkeley Implementation Task Force (2003-2005)
• Staff Advisory, IT Governance and Funding and Review Committee (2005)
• Oracle Academic Environment Advisory Group 2006-Present
• External Reviewer, UCLA LMS Review Spring 2006

DIGITALTHINK – December 1998 to March 2002
DigitalThink was a leading provider of e-learning solutions for Fortune 1000 companies from 1996-2004.

Manager, Design Strategies and Technology
Responsible for the start-up and leadership of a cross-functional team with the primary goal to create reusable interactive elements, learning architectures, and development tools that serve to increase efficiencies, shorten the product development cycle, and ensure the creation of best-of-breed e-learning.
In the team’s first two months we successfully:

Senior Manager, Quality Improvement Services
Responsible for administrative and functional management of the Quality Assurance and Maintenance Services teams (20 staff), including: budget, capacity and cost planning, and design and implementation of strategic programs.

Catalog Course Development Manager
Responsible for managing a cross-functional team of 8-14 Instructional Designers, Web Designers, and Web Producers in the development of approximately 10 web-based courses per quarter.

“Mara makes everything seem and feel possible. To work with her is empowering — to work with her is a lesson in how to treat people and how to challenge yourself. And she’s funny. Really funny. She’s simply the best.”

– DigitalThink Instructional Design Manager

Instructional Designer
Instructional and Media Design of course content and interactivity design for e-learning courses.

Acquisitions Manager
Developed a parallel development method for working simultaneously with multiple SMEs to publish a course series in order to decrease product time-to-market.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA EXTENSION, CMIL – November 1996 - November 1998
Founding team member and Online Multimedia Specialist for UC Extension Online, a pioneering, award-winning collaborative project between UC Berkeley Extension and the Center for Media & Independent Learning.

INKWORKS PRESS – August 1989- October 1996
Founding member for Design, Desktop Publishing & Electronic Prepress Department at Inkworks Press, a collectively-owned and managed offset printing company.

EDUCATION
San Francisco State University, MA, Instructional Technology, 1997
California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, CA, B.F.A., 1986

RELATED COURSES AND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Frye Leadership Institute Participant, Emory University & Educause, 2006
CIO Institute, Haas Business School, UC Berkeley, 2006
Interaction Design Practicum, Cooper, San Francisco, 2006
Design Communication Workshop, Cooper, San Francisco, 2006

PROFESSIONAL AFFILIATIONS
Educause
Educause Learning Initiative (ELI)
BayCHI, Bay Area’s chapter for ACM’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI)
New Media Consortium (NMC)

OTHER PLACES TO FIND ME
Blog: http://promptu.wordpress.com
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/marahancock
Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bigbluetractorgirl/
Facebook Profile: http://tinyurl.com/2bsfw6