Dr Stewart Hase has always been a believer in human agency, and he first realised that people have agency over their own learning while watching nurses learn at work in the 1970s. As an educator, he started experimenting with learner agency by providing nurses with the opportunity to negotiate their own learning within a very structured curriculum. The experiments continued on into higher education in both face-to-face and distance education, and in professional development programs in workplaces as a consultant for many years. Finally in 2000, Stewart and Chris Kenyon put a name to a set of principles and practices that put the learner at the centre of the learning process and called it heutagogy, or self-determined learning. Now an independent scholar, consultant and psychologist in clinical practice, Stewart is semi-retired and lives in a small fishing village in the north coast of NSW, Australia. In between traveling, painting, writing, fishing, golfing, and grandchildren, Stewart still seeks to better understand how people learn. www.stewarthase.com.

Lisa Marie Blaschke is program lead of the online Home Hub at Learnlife in Barcelona, Spain. Previously, she was program director of and instructor in the Master in Management of Technology Enhanced Learning at the University of Oldenburg, Germany, as well as a senior researcher at DHBW in Heilbronn. She is a former executive committee member of the European Distance Education and E-Learning Network (EDEN) and is a Senior EDEN Fellow. Lisa has a BS in Technical Communication, and two master’s degrees (MDE, MBA), and a PhD in Education. Prior to academia, Lisa worked for SAP in Walldorf, Germany, leading and implementing enterprise-wide knowledge management and training processes and solutions. Lisa’s research interests are in the areas of self-determined learning (heutagogy), online collaborative learning, and the pedagogical application of web 2.0 technology and social media.