Chad Outten is a qualified educator and technologist with more than 15 years of experience in the education and ICT sectors. He is the Managing Director at My Learning Space, an Australian e-learning company, and has worked closely with high-profile organizations such as eBay, Shell, Ricoh, iiNet, Rip Curl, and Queensland Health, among a diverse range of clients to help them improve staff performance and business outcomes through better learning, training, and compliance programs.
Chad is a Moodle certified teacher and has acted as a mentor and assessor for the internationally recognized Moodle Teacher Certification program. He is a proud member of the esteemed Particularly Helpful Moodlers and Quality Assurance Testers groups at moodle.org, and in 2008, he organized the Australian Moodle Moot. Chad is passionate about e-learning, admires educators, and understands the value of a good learning management system to address the challenges of 21st century education.
Ian Rifkin has experience with servers and applications (purchased, open source, and custom), and acts as a release engineer for his institution. He has in-depth knowledge of web application development and middleware integrations, including identity management systems. He is a developer and manager who has intimate knowledge of command-line Unix environments.
He has worked with Moodle as a student, faculty member, and administrator. Currently, he is employed as the software systems manager at Brandeis University, where he manages a small web team. He also holds a part-time adjunct instructor role for the Graduate Professional Studies division at Brandeis University, where he teaches web content management and web application development.
Ian holds an M.Sc. degree in information technology management and a BA degree in anthropology (with a minor in Internet studies). In his spare time, he enjoys computer games, genealogy research, baking, gardening, and spending time with his wife, Valerie, and son, Caleb.
Shashikant Vaishnav was born and brought up in Jodhpur, a desert town in Rajasthan, India. He's involved with a London-based Seedcamp-supported start-up, Shoprocket. It's an e-commerce system delivered over the cloud and integrates seamlessly into any application with a single line of code.
He is been involved with Moodle for quite a long time as a student. While an undergraduate, he participated in Google's Summer of Code program and integrated Apache Solr with Moodle. He also participated as a mentor in Google's Code-in program for the Sugar Labs organization.
He finished his graduation from the Government Engineering college Bikaner with a bachelor's of engineering and technology degree in computer science in 2013. His focus on academics aside, he harbors a deep interest in music and sports.
He loves to blog about his experiences with open source technology, travel, and life. He reads spiritual books, indulges in photography, and hacks around with open source projects.
He previously collaborated with Packt Publishing as a technical reviewer of Git Version Control Cookbook and Moodle 3 Administration Third Edition.