Keynote Speakers
Professor of Learning and Instruction, Maastricht University, The Netherlands
Professor van Merriënboer holds a chair in Learning and Instruction at the Department of Educational Development and Research of Maastricht University, the Netherlands. He has been scientific director of the Interuniversity Centre of Educational Sciences and the Maastricht School of Health Professions Education, and associate editor of the journal Learning and Instruction. He is one of the most cited authors in the fields of Instructional Design and Educational Technologies and his books Training Complex Cognitive Skills (1997) and Ten Steps to Complex Learning (2018) had a major impact on the development of the educational sciences. His research is mainly conducted in higher and professional education and contributes to the further development of Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) and Four-Component Instructional Design (4CID). At RHEC 2021 Professor van Merriënboer will make a presentation on How Learning-Analytics Based Instructional Design Can Help to Improve the Quality of Higher Education.
Director of the Center for Research in Higher Education Policies and Professor of Economics, University of Porto, Portugal
Director of CIPES - the Center for Research in Higher Education Policies and Full Professor of Economics at the Faculty of Economics at the University of Porto. He has served as a special adviser to the President of Portugal since April 2016 on Higher Education and Science (2016-2021) and on Higher Education and Economic Affairs (since March 2021). He was Vice-Rector for Academic Affairs at the University of Porto (2014-208) and was also a member of Portugal’s National Council of Education (2014-2018). He has also served on the evaluation panels for the European University Association (EUA) and the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA). He is also a member of the Board of Governors and Secretary General of the Consortium of Higher Education Researchers (CHER), a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), and an Associate Researcher of the Program for Research on Private Higher Education (PROPHE). Pedro Teixeira was a Visiting Fellow at Oxford University (2011–2013), a Visiting Professor at the University at Albany, SUNY (2006), a Visiting Researcher at the Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE) of the University of California, Berkeley (2005), and Vice-Chair of the Council of the European Society for the History of Economic Thought (ESHET). He is a member of the Editorial Board of the following journals: Higher Education, the European Journal of Higher Education, Higher Education Policy, and the Journal of Research in Higher Education. Pedro Teixeira has published on his areas of specialization in a broad range of scientific journals. He has authored or edited several volumes on higher education issues for Oxford University Press, Springer, Palgrave, Routledge, and Sense; and is the editor of Human Capital: Critical Concepts in Economics, 4 vols. (Routledge, 2014) and Editor-in-Chief of The International Encyclopedia of Higher Education, 3 vols. (Springer, 2020).
Professor of Higher Education and Vice-Rector Education, University of Oslo, Norway
Dr. Bjørn Stensaker is a Professor of Higher Education and current Vice-Rector of Education at University of Oslo, Norway. He has a special interest in studies of policy, reform and change in higher education - especially related to quality and quality assurance. He has published widely on these topics in a range of international journals.