Catherine M. Casserly
Catherine M. Casserly is an influential figure in the open educational resources (OER) movement and served as the CEO of Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization dedicated to facilitating the legal sharing of knowledge and culture in the digital age. She played a pivotal role in establishing Creative Commons in 2001 through her work at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, where she managed significant investments in open content initiatives. Casserly holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Boston College and a PhD in the economics of education from Stanford University, with a diverse background that includes teaching mathematics in Jamaica and serving as a trustee for the San Mateo County Board of Education.
Her leadership at Creative Commons began in 2011, following her election to the board in 2010. During her tenure, she advocated for open licensing and collaboration in education, significantly expanding access to creative works, including millions of videos and photographs through Creative Commons licenses. After resigning in 2014, she continued her work in education and technology through various roles, including a fellowship at the Aspen Institute and a position as vice president of Learning Networks at EdCast Inc. Casserly is also recognized for her contributions to multiple educational initiatives and has received an honorary doctorate from the University of the People. She resides in Northern California and remains active in the education sector through advisory roles.
Subject Terms
Catherine M. Casserly
Former CEO of Creative Commons
- Born: Date and place unknown
Primary Company/Organization: Creative Commons
Introduction
Catherine M. Casserly was the chief executive officer (CEO) of Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization with the purpose of simplifying the legal, free exchange of knowledge and culture in the new digital environment created by the Internet. She was long involved with the open source movement. As a program consultant at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, she was instrumental in the $1 million grant by that foundation that helped to establish Creative Commons in 2001. She was directing the Open Educational Resources program of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching when she was elected to the Creative Commons board of directors in 2010. In March 2011, she succeeded Joi Ito as the nonprofit's CEO, a position she held for several years.
Early Life
Catherine M. "Cathy" Casserly received a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Boston College and a PhD in the economics of education from Stanford University in 1996. After college, she participated in an international volunteer program. Through this program, she taught mathematics to students in middle school and high school in Kingston, Jamaica. She worked for the Walter S. Johnson Foundation, a California nonprofit that funds education, leadership, and economic development programs for youth and families. She served as a program officer for evaluation and was responsible for improving the efficacy of education, school-to-career, and youth development grants. She also tutored in a high-security prison and served as a trustee for the San Mateo County Board of Education from 1997 to 2000.
Casserly worked as a policy analyst for SRI International, directing and participating in research projects related to the quality of education and training services targeting economically disadvantaged youth and adults. In 2001, she joined the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation as a program consultant with the education program. In that position, she was primarily responsible for technology-based grants in the area of open content. She became director of the foundation's Open Educational Resources initiative. As director, she managed investments totaling more than $100 million. In April 2009, she was named the first full-time senior partner at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Her responsibilities at the Carnegie Foundation included new program initiatives and managing the strategic direction of Carnegie's work in open educational resources. With the extended Carnegie team she launched a continuous performance improvement system to create alternative mathematics pathways for community college students.
Life's Work
In January 2010, Casserly was elected to the board of directors of Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that promotes the sharing of intellectual works and provides licenses whereby owners can share their art, music, photographs, research, and other work within existing copyright laws. A decade of work at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation had established her as an advocate of open educational resources (OER). These are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual-property license that permits their free use or repurposing by others. Such resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, and techniques used to support access to knowledge or that have an impact on teaching, learning, and research. As program officer at the Hewlett Foundation, which funded Creative Commons from its inception, Casserly has been involved with the organization at some level from its beginning. Serving on the Creative Commons board offered her an opportunity to use her experience in the OER movement worldwide. She received the President's Award for OpenCourseWare Excellence for her work in developing the open educational resources program at the Hewlett Foundation in March 2011. That month, she was named CEO of Creative Commons.
As CEO, Casserly spoke frequently at conferences, addressing the topic of open resources and explaining opening licensing. She argued that the infrastructure provided by Creative Commons is critical in promoting innovation and collaboration, particularly within the context of education. In June 2011, the Association of Educational Publishers and Creative Commons announced a partnership to improve search results online through the creation of a metadata framework specifically for learning resources. Casserly expected that the framework to enable educators and students to more efficiently and effectively and discover the resources they need, including those they can reuse under Creative Commons' licensing. This partnership marked the first joint effort by traditional content companies and free, open content sites.
During her tenure as CEO of Creative Commons, Casserly had more than four million YouTube videos made available for use through the Creative Commons' attribution license, which essentially allows the videos to be edited and changed for use in other projects as long as the original creator is credited. By the end of 2011, Flickr hosted more than 2 million photographs licensed by Creative Commons.
Casserly resigned from Creative Commons in early 2014. From 2014 to 2016, she was a fellow at the Aspen Institute and the vice president of Learning Networks at EdCast Inc. She also launched her own leadership consultancy in 2014. Casserly later became a research affiliate with the Institute for the Future in 2016.
Personal Life
Casserly served on the board of directors of Startl, a social enterprise committed to accelerating the growth of digital innovations for all levels of education, and Peer-2-Peer University, a grassroots open education project. She has also served on advisory committees for MIT OpenCourseWare and the University of the People. The latter awarded her an honorary doctorate in 2012. She later joined the advisory council for the National Science Foundation.
Casserly lives in Northern California.
Bibliography
Bitton, Miriam. “Modernizing Copyright Law.” Texas Intellectual Property Law Journal 20.1 (2011): 65–114. Academic Search Premier. Web. 24 May 2012.
Casserly, Catherine M., and Marshall S. Smith. “Revolutionizing Education through Innovation: Can Openness Transform Teaching and Learning?” Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge. Ed. Toru Iiyoshi and M. S. Vijay Kumer. Cambridge: MIT, 2008. 261–76. Print.
"Catherine M. Casserly, Ph.D." Catherine M. Casserly Website, cathycasserly.com/. Accessed 6 Mar. 2024.
Gordon-Murnane, Laura. “Creative Commons: Copyright Tools for the 21st Century.” Online 34.1 (2010): 18–21. Academic Search Premier. Web. 24 May 2012.
“Interest in Open Educational Resources Grows.” Electronic Education Report 15.19 (2008): 1–4. Academic Search Premier. Web. 24 May 2012.
Smith, Marshall S., and Catherine M. Casserly. “The Promise of Open Educational Resources.” Change 38.5 (2006): 8–17. Academic Search Premier. Web. 24 May 2012.