Concurrent 3A: E-Learning: The Next Big Thing for Scholarly Publishers?

Richard Zorab has been involved in medical publishing for 35 years, formerly in the UK and latterly in the US rising to be Editor-in-Chief and Publishing Director at W.B. Saunders/Mosby/Churchill Livingstone (Harcourt Health Sciences) before becoming Vice-president of Clinical Education at the American Academy of Ophthalmology.

Robert Ubell, Executive Director of Stevens Institute for the Advancement of Online Learning and Professional Education, launched the school’s first online graduate program, WebCampus.Stevens, in 2000. Distinguished by several of the most prestigious awards in e-learning, the Sloan Foundation prize for the best online learning university and the US Distance Learning Best Practices award, it has enrolled nearly 15,000 students since it delivered its first online course.

Ubell also heads Stevens’ programs in China where he manages the school’s Chinese graduate programs at Beijing Institute of Technology and at Central University of Finance and Economics. Stevens’ China programs were awarded the Sloan Prize last year for best teaching and learning. Earlier, Ubell held a number of positions in publishing. He was vice-president and editor-in-chief of Plenum Publishing Corporation, editor of the National Magazine Award-winning monthly, The Sciences, and American publisher of the premier British science weekly, Nature.

He was also founding publisher of Nature Biotechnology. In addition, Ubell has held senior posts as an Internet executive-president of BioMedNet’s US operation and executive vice president for new media at Marcel Dekker. For more than a dozen years, he was head of his own consulting firm, Robert Ubell Associates. He is the author or editor of five books and more than 50 articles and has served on dozens of scholarly and corporate committees and boards.

He currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Chinese chassis manufacturing company, Lianyungang Universal Vehicle Manufacturing Co., Ltd. and is also Vice President of the Board of the Parkinson Unity Walk Foundation. Ubell received his undergraduate degree from Brooklyn College and has taught at MIT and Columbia’s College of Physicians & Surgeons. He has received grants for online education from the National Science Foundation, Sloan Foundation and IEEE, among other institutions.