Lou Pugliese
Lou Pugliese

Misson

Serving Social Impact Disruption to
Create Mission-driven Change

Sparked by apprenticeship in on-ground field work, I’m passionate about leveraging two decades of hands on experience in working with high growth education enterprises developing, re-engineering and rethinking strategy to accelerate growth toward a social impact mission. I’m interested in creating successful education ecosystems in both impact capital seeking viable investments as well as providing social impact ventures the necessary guidance to assist social entrepreneurs in reaching their true potential.

I BELIEVE

  • We can foster sustainable economic growth in providing equity and access to education and human development

  • All learners can achieve their full potential irrespective of gender or ethnicity, where they live or what adversities they face

  • There is no replacement for earned apprenticeship through on-ground field work

  • Social ventures can only be successful to the extent they become self sustainable by empowering communities to create change.

I AM DEDICATED TO

  • Accelerating the flow of capital to social enterprises that create innovative solutions to poverty, inequity and to amplify total impact.

  • Disrupting and advancing new solutions in the global education market

  • Creating sustainable solutions to complex problems in economic development using education as a strategic lever

I AM INTERESTED IN

  • Designing high impact education solutions, access and equity for under-served populations

  • Alternative technology-based education solutions for remote, disadvantages communities

  • Leadership advancement in developing nations schools and remote communities

  • Improving impact and effectiveness of on ground social impact initiatives

  • Social entrepreneur leadership development and sustainable social impact business models

  • Education in humanitarian aid programs for displaced populations

"Activator. Maximizer. Connector."

— Gallup Strengths Finder

 
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about lou pugliese

Lou Pugliese is an innovator, thought leader, and successful venture-growth entrepreneur with a life-long passion to seek and engage new ways to disrupt, displace and advance business models.

His career spans two decades working with founders to re-engineer, restructure, and rethink strategy to accelerate growth and effectively address new competitive realities.

From Technology to Education to Social Impact, Lou brings his strengths as an Activator, Maximizer, and Relator to create mutualistic opportunities and synergy with Analytic Discipline and Futuristic Adaptability.

As a successful change lever, Lou’s deep experience has resulted in effective transitions with business leaders faced with making meaningful changes their growth opportunity enterprises.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Over the past twenty years, Pugliese has developed a strong track record managing growth stage businesses and acquiring and developing a number of education organizations.

Pugliese is currently Senior Innovation Fellow at Arizona State University and Managing Director of the Teaching and Learning Action Lab.

Lou was recently former Chairman and CEO of Moodlerooms, the largest global provider of open source software and services for eLearning for the K to Workforce markets which was acquired by Blackboard.

Prior to Moodlerooms, Pugliese was President of Learning Diagnostics Inc., an education a consulting practice providing strategic planning in Business Intelligence in academic and administrative information architecture.

He was recently vice president of corporate development and company director at Educational Testing Service (ETS). In this capacity, Pugliese led corporate strategy and growth and strategic alliances for the secondary, post secondary, workforce and international education markets. Prior to his appointment in corporate development, Pugliese served as the vice president of market development, which included marketing, sales, market research, and business development.

Prior to this post, he was the CEO of ETS Pulliam, LLC, an ETS K12 subsidiary, and vice president of elementary and secondary education products and services where he led ETS’s elementary and secondary education product development and customer facing activities. These included professional development, technology products and services and assessments.

Prior to ETS, Pugliese was an entrepreneur in residence at Novak Biddle Venture Partners, an equity financing firm established in 1997 to provide assistance to the management of young, information technology businesses. There he shaped the strategy for private equity investments in early stage educational technology companies.

While working with Novak Biddle, Pugliese was named CEO of AnswerLogic, a software company that delivers online question‐answering solutions for business through its innovative natural language processing technology.

Pugliese’s affiliation with Novak Biddle began with the firm’s early stage lead position in Blackboard, Inc., where he was founding CEO. Under Pugliese’s leadership, Blackboard experienced 500 percent annual revenue growth rates, international customer expansion to more than three million individuals teaching and learning on Blackboard, the roll out of multiple products and services and attainment over $50 million in private financing.

Pugliese served as Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of ETC, a subsidiary of Denver based Telecommunications Inc. (TCI).

Prior to joining ETC, he was Director of Marketing and Sales with Scholastic New Media in New York, and Vice President of Turner Educational Services in Atlanta where he successfully launched CNN Newsroom and a variety of other educational ventures.

 

SUMMARY OF QUALIFICATIONS

• Deep experience in working in developing countries through social impact work in education, community development, student health and nutrition, teacher professional development and primary grade young female student retention in Jacmel Haiti through the Community Coalition for Haiti. This body of work represents a career shift from successful private sector entrepreneur and leveraging business skills as a social impact innovator.

• Development and execution of an early stage business plan for mobile education in Ghana. Conducted research and negotiations with Africa based government, social impact funds and private foundations funding social impact enterprises in East and Sub-Saharan Africa.

• Visiting Faculty University of Pennsylvania-Graduate School of Education Education Entrepreneurship capstone program

• Board Member Educate Global Fund

• Extensive experience in early to mid stage venture financing and excellent working knowledge of the explosive growth of Impact Investing asset class.

• Twenty-five years in K-16 education in global education content, technology and assessment. Substantive experience in working with grant making institutions, public sector, Ministries of Education and Impact and Venture equity.

• Twenty years + operating in a C-level capacity with strong P&L control.

 

CV

 

ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY

Senior Innovation Fellow
Managing Director, Action Lab

  • Digital Teaching and Learning Research

THE PRAXIS GROUP

Social Impact in Education

  • Saylor Foundation for Education

  • USAID/Education Development Center

  • Laureate Education

  • Community Coalition for Haiti

BLACKBOARD

SVP Open Source Solutions via Acquisition of Moodlerooms

LEARNING DIAGNOSTICS

Impact Measurement consultancy

EDUCATION TESTING SERVICE

VP Corporate Development
VP Elementary and Secondary Education

  • Cross functional divisions management

  • M&A, scaling enterprises

 

NOVAK BIDDLE VENTURE PARTNERS

  • Early stage education investment strategy

  • Portfolio company turnarounds and growth

BLACKBOARD

Founding CEO

ETC W/ TCI

  • Corporate Strategy

  • Growth through M&A

SCHOLASTIC

  • On Line New Media division start-up

TURNER EDUCATION SERVICES-TURNER BROADCASTING

  • New product innovation

PBS- NJN

  • Education programs and operations

 

RELEVANT COURSEWORK

The Wharton School

  • 2014 Social Entrepreneurship

  • 2011 Executive Education

George Mason University, Mason Center for Social Entrepreneurship

  • 2014 Social Entrepreneurship

University of Michigan

  • 2014 Social Network Analysis

Pennsylvania State University Bachelor of Arts

  • Speech Communications and Journalism

 
 

Biography

Lou Pugliese is Executive Vice President of University Maryland Global Campus (UMGC). He brings to UMGC over twenty years in e-Learning innovation. He is an innovator, thought leader, and successful venture-growth entrepreneur with a life-long passion for seeking and engaging new ways to disrupt, displace and advance business models. Lou is always looking for the linchpins within an organization and finding ways to collaborate and drive ongoing innovation to better serve students and educators. Lou’s leadership in digital teaching and learning spans over thirty years in developing enterprise scale instructional technology design in learning management, competency based and adaptive learning systems advancing new innovation in EdTech globally. His unique background includes working in three distinct dimensions of the education sector; in executive leadership in public education, providing capital in EdTech as a venture capital leader and as an entrepreneur inventing new innovative solutions to public education's most challenging needs.

Prior to joining UMGC, Lou was Chief Executive Officer of UMUC Ventures, a new model of EdTech venture equity. Using a double bottom line investment strategy, UMUC Ventures actively invests in, nurtures and operationalizes education technologies that improve the online learning experience, student outcomes and university operations. Lou recently led a majority position exit for HelioCampus, a spin-off of UMGC's analytics unit, representing a four-fold return and a $16mm contribution to student scholarship for UMGC.

Before joining UMUC Ventures, Lou was a Senior Innovation Fellow and Managing Director of the Arizona State University (ASU) Action Lab at EdPlus, a research and development enterprise for ASU focused on the design and scalable delivery of digital teaching and learning models. Previously, he held senior leadership positions in venture equity and EdTech companies including as Chairman and CEO of Moodlerooms, entrepreneur-in-residence for Novak Biddle Venture Partners, CEO of AnswerLogic, and founding CEO of Blackboard Inc. Lou also teaches social entrepreneurship at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Maryland.

Lou is deeply involved with the Community Coalition for Haiti education programs, which promote student learning through teacher development, child wellness, and safe, learning centered school environments. He has also worked to improve access to education via technology-enabled programs in Subsaharan Africa.

Publications

“Pervasively improving performance requires coordinated measurement, intervention, and action across the entire education / workforce spectrum.”

— Lou Pugliese
"Measuring and Improving Performance That Matters in Higher Education"

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Publications
Framing Action Analytics and Putting Them to Work
Framing Action Analytics and Putting Them to Work
Adaptive Learning Systems: Surviving the Storm
Adaptive Learning Systems: Surviving the Storm
Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0
Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0
Action Analytics: Measuring and Improving Performance That Matters in Higher Education
Action Analytics: Measuring and Improving Performance That Matters in Higher Education

 

Speaking Engagements

Futureproofing 2025—The Smartest 5 Year Predictions in The Room

HOSTED BY FUTUREPROOFING NEXT

Future Proofing Next bridges the distance between corporate aspiration and innovation++ success, business model delivery & transformational growth. Featuring global industry leaders, Futureproofing Next leadership Andrea Kates and Sean Moffitt explore current industry headlines from 2020 retrospectives and future insights and predictions for 2021-2015. How might leaders use that trend insight to build a bigger, bolder, better future for their organizations or teams or industry/customers or society at large 2021-25? Futureproofing is defined as taking agency over our futures, so the conversation will focus less on being "right" about future predictions and more about how our guests from around the globe envision positive change in business and society by weaving today's early trends into new future scenarios.

 

CAEL 2020 CONFERENCE: A New Learning Ecosystem for the COVID Era

HOSTED BY CAEL

A talk by Andre Bennin, Scott Fleming, Lou Pugliese, Dara Warn and Kip Wright: WGU/NewU Ventures, Strada Education Network, UMGC, Penn Foster & Genuent

COVID has amplified workers' need to continuously upskill themselves to prepare for the future of work and learners' need to map training and coursework to in-demand skills for growing careers. Join us to hear from experts on how learning providers, employers, technology, and data can work together to meet the evolving needs of learners and workers in the COVID era.

Leadership Reimagined: Transformation in Education

HOSTED BY JANE LOVAS

Leadership Reimagined podcast traversing the intersection between Education and Business, and how workforce enablement and economic development impacts higher education institutional mission. Developing a new, post pandemic education environment of access, equity and affordability with an emphasis the expansion and inclusion of students who are often times marginalized.

Future Trends Forum: ROI of Digital Learning

HOSTED BY BRYAN ALEXANDER

With limited institutional data available, Lou Pugliese, as part of Arizona State University, and in conjunction with the Boston Consulting Group, conducted a study of six institutions to understand and quantify the impact of digital learning on institutional priorities (e.g., enrollment growth, student outcomes, and financial returns).

In this Future Trends Forum, Bryan Alexander and Lou discussed the results of this study as well as insight into where digital learning is headed.

 

 

The Cube: AWS Imagine

INTERVIEWED BY JEFF FRICK

Interviewed live by Jeff Frick for The Cube at the AWS Imagine conference in Seattle, Washington, Lou shared his thoughts on how Amazon gives ASU’s Learning Lab limitless possibilities.

“At ASU, what's interesting is is that there's a significant digital presence. You know, 35 thousand students very historically, back to 2009. So with that comes a significant amount of footsteps, digital footsteps, that students have taken. And so now you have the ability to be able to analyze that at a much higher level. And so now what we can do, and the part of what we're doing at the Action Lab is: looking specifically at the efficacy of these digital programs, finding out what course design elements do work, and what needs to be changed. And that gives us the ability to sort of feed that information back into the instructional design process, and continue to iterate on that improvement. The unique thing about the lab is that, it's a persistent lab.” 

ASU-GSV: Next generation digital platforms

PANEL HOST: LOU PUGLIESE

Lou Pugliese led a panel of leading experts to discuss the comparison and contrast of next generation digital platforms transforming higher education. Topics included the rise and fall of adaptive and personalized learning systems and AI based technologies that further enrich the teaching and learning landscape. Included in this panel was a realistic dialog of the gaps between the supply of capital, the development of new innovations, the need for extensive research and the lack of impact necessary to move the needle on student success.