UCOE’s Keith Williams will return to UC Davis at end of June
June 9, 2014 •
Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Aimée Dorr has issued the following announcement to the UCOP community today, June 10:
Keith Williams, interim director of UC Online Education (UCOE), will be leaving his position at the end of June and returning to the Davis campus.
Keith has made a significant impact in his four years at UCOP. In 2010, he accepted an offer from then Vice Provost Dan Greenstein to join UCOP and serve as a faculty advisor on issues related to undergraduate education, including indicators of student success and online education. Keith had been chair of the Senate’s University Committee for Educational Policy twice over a three-year period and also served as co-chair of the Education and Curriculum Work Group of the UC Commission on the Future in 2010.
In 2011, Keith’s work had shifted almost entirely to UCOP’s new online instruction initiative. Serving as the project’s chief academic officer and Senate liaison, he was instrumental in working with the Senate during early efforts to establish the academic policies for online courses throughout the system. In 2012, the project was named UC Online Education and, with the departure of Vice Provost Greenstein, Keith was asked to serve as interim director.
He refocused the program on enabling UC students to enroll in online courses at other UC campuses, while also continuing to explore how to increase access to UC courses through the enrollment of non-matriculated students. He worked with many others at UCOP and the campuses to develop the systemwide online program from a controversial one that pushed the boundaries of online education at UC to one that is poised to make the availability of online courses from all campuses a standard option to all UC students as they make their way toward degree completion.
Keith has been a faculty member at UC Davis for the past 32 years in the Exercise Biology Program, which is part of the Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior Department.
A former chair of the Technical Group on Footwear Biomechanics, which is part of the International Society of Biomechanics, he has consulted widely in the athletic footwear industry, worked with elite distance runners through the UC Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs and USA Track and Field, and been an expert witness in many legal cases involving footwear and exercise equipment. His teaching and research efforts involve the biomechanics of human movement in relation to performance ability, metabolic energy cost and injury susceptibility. He looks forward to reviving that work in his lab when he returns to UC Davis.
During his years at UCOP, Keith has made lasting contributions to the development of online education at UC. Please join me in thanking him and wishing him well at an informal gathering on the 11th floor of the Franklin building, Tuesday, June 24, from 3 to 5 p.m.
