Biography:
Janet Poley is CEO and President of the American Distance Education Consortium (ADEC). She develops collaborative distance education initiatives and conducts research and education programs related to technology access and applications with more than 60 land-grant university members and international affiliates. She is in the International Adult and Continuing Education Hall of Fame and on its Board of Directors and Treasurer; is a Board member and Treasurer of Sloan-C; is on the NASULGC Committee on Partnerships between African and U.S. Universities; is member of the Creighton University Health Sciences Distance Education Advisory Board and is a member of the Board of Advisors for Zamorano University in Honduras.
Dr. Poley received the Mildred B. and Charles A. Wedemeyer Award for Outstanding Practitioner in Distance Education in 2000. She served as principal investigator on a $5 million National Science Foundation grant for advanced networking and applications including work on distance education and digital libraries in China. She was a Co-PI on an NSF start-up program in Human Language Technology – a collaboration between U.S. and Moroccan institutions. She manages the USDA funded Agricultural Telecommunications Program; manages a cooperative agreement with the National Agricultural Library (NAL) of USDA and the Universidad de Concepcion (UDEC) in Chile; is the chair of the NAL AgNIC Board of Directors; and has received several Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and U.S. Department of Commerce grants.
Dr. Poley serves on the Editorial Board for the American Journal of Distance Education; is a liaison to the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges (NASULGC); was a member of the Penn State Advisory Board to the World Campus Initiative; was a member of the Great Plains Network Advisory Committee; and is a special member of the University of Maryland Eastern Shore Graduate Faculty. She is a professor in the College of Journalism and the Institute of Agricultural and Natural Resources at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. While Director for Communication, Information and Technology (CIT) at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), she served on the NSF Networking Council focusing on education and outreach. In 1994, she was named by Federal Computer Week as one of the 100 outstanding information technology leaders in government, business and academia. She has worked in more than 40 countries, serving six years in Tanzania and received the Excalibur Award from the U.S. Congress for that work.
Dr. Poley is the author of a number of journal articles, book chapters and presentations on information technology and distance learning and currently authoring a book titled “Building an Inclusive Future for Learning: A Practical Guide for Campuses and Communities”.
You may view a more extensive biography of Dr. Poley here.