Lisa Petrides

Lisa Ann Petrides is an American education researcher and the founder and chief executive of the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), a non-profit education research institute in Half Moon Bay, California. A former professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, she has published research on knowledge management, data-driven decision-making and open educational resources (OER), and in 2007 established OER Commons, a digital library and publishing platform for openly licensed teaching materials. She is a member of the advisory council for UNESCO's OER Dynamic Coalition and has served since 2020 as an elected trustee of the San Mateo County Community College District.

Education and career

Petrides holds a bachelor's of science degree from the University of California, Berkeley, an MBA from Sonoma State University and a PhD in education from Stanford University. She was a professor in the Department of Organization and Leadership at Teachers College, Columbia University, where her research addressed the use of information systems and institutional data in schools, colleges and universities. In 2000 she edited Case Studies on Information Technology in Higher Education: Implications for Policy and Practice (Idea Group Publishing), a collection of institutional case studies on information technology in higher education.

Petrides founded ISKME. in 2003 to apply knowledge management research to educational institutions. That year she convened a Knowledge Management in Education summit that brought together about 40 leaders from schools, colleges, universities and businesses to examine how educational institutions gather and share information. With Thomas Nodine she published the resulting monograph, Knowledge Management in Education: Defining the Landscape, in 2003; it is among her most frequently cited works. A related practitioner volume, Turning Knowledge into Action, was published by the League for Innovation in the Community College in 2004.

OER Commons

In 2007, with funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Petrides and ISKME launched OER Commons, a digital library and collaboration platform through which educators discover, evaluate, adapt and publish openly licensed course materials. The platform has been used by educators to search, discover, and create openly licensed materials aligned to the state curriculum standards and, later, open textbooks for higher education. ISKME's associated teacher-training programs, run workshops and summer academies for educators in the U.S. and more than 25 countries, was a finalist for the 2010 World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) Awards.

Open education policy

In 2007 Petrides was one of a group of open education practitioners who met in Cape Town, South Africa, to draft the Cape Town Open Education Declaration. She sits on the advisory group of UNESCO's OER Dynamic Coalition, established in 2020 to support implementation of the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Educational Resources adopted at the organization's 40th General Conference in 2019, and is a founding member of the advisory council of the OER Dynamic Coalition. She has served as institute faculty for the Institute on Open Educational Resources of the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

In 2023 Petrides was a finalist for the Leadership Award in Open Education Global's Open Education Awards for Excellence. She was named a distinguished alumna of Sonoma State University in 2000. She is a senior fellow of the American Leadership Forum of Silicon Valley.

San Mateo County Community College District

Petrides was elected to the San Mateo County Community College District Board of Trustees in November 2020, representing Area 1, which covers Pacifica and the coastal and central parts of the county including Menlo Park, San Carlos and Woodside. In a 2022 interview with the Half Moon Bay Review she described her priorities as expanding the district's presence on the San Mateo coast and improving board transparency, noting that she was the only professional educator then serving on the board. She served as president of the board during 2023.

She was re-elected to a second four-year term in November 2024, defeating challenger Keith Holden.

Research and reception

Petrides's research spans knowledge management and information systems in educational institutions, the organisational use of institutional data, and the adoption of open educational resources. As of September 2026 her publications had been cited more than 2,700 times according to Google Scholar, which gave her an h-index of 20; the OpenAlex index recorded 43 works and 939 citations. Her most cited works are the monograph Knowledge Management in Education: Defining the Landscape (2003), written with Thad Nodine, and a 2002 article on web-based technologies for distance learning.

Reviewing her edited collection Case Studies on Information Technology in Higher Education in EDUCAUSE Quarterly, Paul Morris, then chief information officer at Drake University, wrote that the papers "bring together in a single place much helpful material" and that the book "would be of great value to a teacher developing a course on IT management in higher education", noting that it dealt more with policy and people than with specific technologies. A 2018 review of the information systems literature identifies her 2004 paper on institutional "workarounds", written with Sara McClelland and Thad Nodine, as an early contribution to the study of workaround behaviour in organisations. Her paper "Open Educational Resources: Inquiring into Author Reuse Behaviors", written with Lilly Nguyen, Anastasia Kargliani and Cynthia Jimes, received the best paper award at the 2008 European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning in Maastricht.

In 2018 Petrides published the CARE Framework for OER stewardship with Douglas Levin and C. Edward Watson, setting out norms — contribute, attribute, release and empower — for organisations that make use of openly licensed materials. Inside Higher Ed reported that the framework was a response to commercial publishers repackaging open textbooks, and quoted Petrides describing it as a "set of norms" by which users of open educational resources could "hold each other to account". The framework prompted debate among open education researchers: David Wiley called it "an important contribution to important conversations" while questioning whether its expectations were realistic for time-pressed faculty, and the economist Jim Luke devoted a chapter of the edited collection Open at the Margins: Critical Perspectives on Open Education to defending it, arguing that it was "a great start towards a community definition of our own Open Education Commons".

Selected publications

• Petrides, Lisa A., ed. (2000). Case Studies on Information Technology in Higher Education: Implications for Policy and Practice. Hershey, PA: Idea Group Publishing. ISBN 978-1-878289-74-2.
• Petrides, Lisa A.; Guiney, Susan Zahra (2002). "Knowledge Management for School Leaders: An Ecological Framework for Thinking Schools". Teachers College Record 104 (8): 1702–1717. doi:10.1111/1467-9620.00217.
• Petrides, Lisa A. (2002). "Web-Based Technologies for Distributed (or Distance) Learning: Creating Learning-Centered Educational Experiences in the Higher Education Classroom". International Journal of Instructional Media 29 (1): 69–77.
• Petrides, Lisa A.; Nodine, Thad R. (2003). Knowledge Management in Education: Defining the Landscape. Half Moon Bay, CA: ISKME.
• Petrides, Lisa A.; McClelland, Sara I.; Nodine, Thad R. (2004). "Costs and benefits of the workaround: inventive solution or costly alternative". International Journal of Educational Management 18 (2): 100–108. doi:10.1108/09513540410522234.
• Petrides, Lisa; Nguyen, Lilly; Kargliani, Anastasia; Jimes, Cynthia (2008). "Open Educational Resources: Inquiring into Author Reuse Behaviors". Times of Convergence: Technologies Across Learning Contexts. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 5192. pp. 344–353. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-87605-2_39.
• Petrides, Lisa; Jimes, Cynthia; Middleton-Detzner, Clare; Walling, Julie; Weiss, Shenandoah (2011). "Open textbook adoption and use: implications for teachers and learners". Open Learning 26 (1): 39–49.

External links

• Official website (ISKME)