2026 Leadership Award Recipient
Lance Eaton
Senior Associate Director of AI in Teaching and Learning, Northeastern University
The 2026 EDUCAUSE Leadership Award is presented to Lance Eaton, whose work over nearly two decades has focused on making learning more accessible to people inside and outside of higher education. Across changing technologies, he continues to evaluate whether new tools open access to learning or create barriers.
That focus led Lance to design and teach hybrid-flexible courses in the early 2010s, building modality and choice into learning. When the COVID-19 pandemic moved teaching online in 2020, he created resources and facilitated workshops that helped institutions across the country make the shift while keeping access, community, and care in view. When generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) arrived, he engaged with it early, building resources such as an AI Syllabus Policy Crowdsource collection that has been used by thousands of faculty and accessed by many others. In early 2023, he fostered a process that resulted in one of the first institutional AI usage policies for faculty and students to be created by students.
His commitment to making learning open to all shows up throughout his work. He helped build an open educational resources (OER) programs at North Shore Community College. His dissertation, which he defended in 2024, focuses on academic piracy and what happens when scholars and staff are unable to access research. More recently, he created a database of education journals that helps authors identify which journals are diamond open access. Through his near-daily writing and speaking practice, he works to ensure that what he creates is available for others to use. This dedication to open access is why his resource documents, hundreds of slide decks, keynote talks, and thousands of blog posts all carry Creative Commons licenses.
Beyond access, much of his work involves translation. He clarifies how rapidly evolving technologies may impact education and turns those insights into practical guidance for the faculty, educational developers, and administrators who must use and make decisions about them. Along the way, he has meaningfully engaged with students, faculty, and staff across the institutions where he has worked, including North Shore Community College, Brandeis University, the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard, College Unbound, and now Northeastern University.
Within EDUCAUSE, he serves on the Teaching and Learning Advisory Committee, facilitates the Teaching with AI online program, co-created a Learning Lab on applying generative AI to OER, and has co-authored half-a-dozen articles in EDUCAUSE Review. In addition to his service to EDUCAUSE, he has been an active contributor to the Northeast Popular Culture Association, NERCOMP, the POD Network, and the wider higher education community through programming, mentorship, peer review, and the cultivation of communities of practice.
Colleagues describe Lance as thoughtful, collaborative, and calm under pressure, noting that he is someone who listens before acting and supports colleagues in their development. A scholar-practitioner and bridge builder, he approaches each shift in educational technology with the same guiding belief that understanding technology and its place in education requires open, ongoing, and honest grappling with both its opportunities and challenges.
Lance Eaton's work reflects the qualities the EDUCAUSE Leadership Award was created to recognize.