Dr. Don Olcott, Jr
Dr. Don Olcott, Jr. is Chief Executive of The Observatory of Borderless Higher Education (OBHE). Dr. Olcott is a past Chairman of the Board of Directors of the United States Distance Learning Association (USDLA) and served as USDLA president from 2006-07.
He serves on the Executive Committee of the UK’s Council of Validating Universities (CVU), advisory committee of the U of London’s Distance Education Centre, and as a member of the external Strategy Group of the Open University. Dr. Olcott is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts (FRSA). Dr. Olcott also serves on the HEFCE Online Learning Taskforce and the British Council’s International Indexing committee.
Dr. Olcott previously held senior leadership posts at Western Oregon University, VCampus Corporation, the University of Arizona and the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE). He also held administrative and faculty posts with Oregon State University, the University of Missouri-Columbia, and Western Washington University.
Dr. Olcott is a member of the editorial boards of The American Journal of Distance Education, Distance Education (Australia) Open Education-Greece, Open Learning, the Journal of Continuing Higher Education, India's Open U. e-Learning Journal, and the European Journal of Open and Distance Learning. He has published extensively in the areas of leadership, faculty development for distance education, organizational change, and higher education policy. Dr. Olcott has received numerous national and international awards for leadership, research and publications in higher education leadership and distance learning.
Dr. Olcott is an internationally known speaker and he has consulted to colleges, universities, and corporations across the United States, Europe, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. He was a 1993 graduate of Harvard University’s Institute for the Management of Lifelong Education and a 2005 graduate of UCEA’s Executive Leadership Academy at New York University. He received his bachelors and masters' degrees from Western Washington University and his doctorate in higher education leadership from Oregon State University.
