August 24, 2009

Dr. Peter S. Cookson has been appointed to serve as the Delaware State University Director of Distance Education.
For the past three years he served as the academic director of Consorcio Clavijero, a higher education network of 46 universities and other institutions that offered baccalaureate degrees via online distance education.

He previously served as the director of the Center for Education and Information Technology at the United Nations-affiliated university in Costa Rica; professor of distance education and associate vice-president of academic and research at Athabasca University, Canada’s Open University; and associate professor and professor-in-charge of the graduate Adult Education Program at Penn State.

Dr. Peter S. Cookson

He currently serves as a book review editor of the journal, International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (www.irrodl.org), of which he was the founding editor, and serves on the comité científico of Revista Iberoamericana de Educación a Distancia, edited at the Universidad de Educación a Distancia (Spain) and published at the Universidad Tecnológica de Loja, Ecuador.

He has served in professional leadership positions with the Commission of Professors of Adult Education (of North America), the Adult Education Association of the USA, and President of the Alberta Association of Adult and Continuing Education. A native of Liverpool, England, he has worked for many years in several countries in Latin America as well as in projects related to adult and continuing education and distance education in India, Sri Lanka, and Sudan.

Dr. Cookson received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in sociology and Latin American studies from Brigham Young University and his Ph.D. in adult education from the University of Chicago. He has authored numerous refereed publications and is author and editor of three books about program planning for continuing education and training for adults.

With a personal and professional commitment to the promotion of distance education programs that expand access to educationally underserved adults, Dr. Cookson says, “I look forward to collaborating with DSU faculty members to build online distance education courses and programs that extend DSU’s dual land grant and HBCU mission to people of diversity not only within the state of Delaware, but also throughout the nation and internationally.”