Leadership Team

The leadership team includes Co-Directors Jacky Hood and Mitchell Levy and senior managers:

Bob Sawyer, Special Projects
Jim Huether, Sustaining Revenues Projects, COT Website, Textbook Reviews
Marie Highby, Communities
Sharyn Fitzpatrick, Marketing Communications

Jacky Hood
Co-Director, College Open Textbooks
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In her role as Co-Director of College Open Textbooks, Jacky is guiding a team dedicated to driving the awareness and advocacy of open textbooks among community college instructors and students. The campaign, funded by a grant from the Hewlett Foundation, is focused on leading the effort to increase the number of low‐cost, high‐quality digital textbooks available online for community college courses with the highest enrollments.

Under her leadership, College Open Textbooks has championed several initiatives including the Advocate/Trainer program that included train-the-trainer sessions around the country and online. The program provides tools and resources for the community to evangelize open textbooks among their peers. In October 2010, this effort was recognized with a WOW award by WCET for Outstanding Use of Technology in Higher Education

Jacky is an Account Manager and Internal Consultant at RightWave. She has held management positions at HP, SlamDunk Networks, IBM/ROLM, FieldDay Solutions, and other companies. She also taught classes on career strategy, customer service, corporate governance, and business management at Chalk Institute, Foothill College, and UC Santa Cruz Extension.

Jacky has published four books including Happy About Working to Stay Young, Expanded Careers for Boomers and Seniors and the award-winning Diagnostic Practices Benchmark Study. She leads the Project Management Open Resources network that recently completed Project Management Skills for All Careers (an open textbook) and is creating the Project Management Certification Open Textbook.

Jacky holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Nebraska and a Masters in Systems Engineering from Carleton University.

Mitchell Levy

Mitchell Levy
Co-Director, College Open Textbooks
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Mitchell Levy is Co-Director of College Open Textbooks (COT), a role he stepped into in September, 2011. Previously he ran the marketing arm for two years. Initiatives during that time focused on branding and implementing a new visual brand, deploying a new Joomla-based Web site, creating consistent messaging delivered across all channels, building and maintaining strategic partnerships, and enabling the extended team to be more productive and successful. During that timeframe we also published and distributed over 1,000 physical copies and a large number of eBook copies of a CC BY book called #OPEN TEXTBOOK tweet comprising 140 bite-sized contributions from educators and experts with best practices for open textbooks and related topics

He is also the author of twelve business books and the CEO of the independent publishing house Happy About. After earning his MBA from the College of William and Mary, he spent 13 years working for corporations in IT, Finance and Operations. He then spent 11 years as an entrepreneur creating 13 companies and strategic partnerships including Happy About in 2005. During this timeframe, he created over 70 courses at various universities, online learning courses, and booked over 500 speakers at large-scale conferences.

Mr. Levy is also partner of the physical networking firm CXOnetworking and sits on the board of directors of Rainmaker Systems (NASDAQ: RMKR). Previously, he created four executive education programs at two different Silicon Valley Universities, was the conference chair for four Comdex conferences focusing on business executives at medium-to-large sized enterprises, has contributed to and written over 100 articles and given over 250 speeches on e-commerce and business.

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Leadership Team