You Are Here: Gregory M. Benson, Jr.
Greg formerly served as CIO for the School District of Philadelphia, overseeing all aspects of learning technology and telecommunications for the nation's 5th largest school district and administered a $30 million budget. In 1998, he received the award for distinguished service from the Philadelphia Association for School Librarians for his reform and upgrading of the 250+ Philadelphia School Libraries. In his role as CIO, Greg secured several substantial corporate and foundation grants to enhance instructional and library services to students and teachers in the Philadelphia School District, developed the first Strategic Technology Plan for the District, secured over $15 million in Federal e-Rate funding to interconnect all district schools and administrative facilities and initiated and oversaw the district's Y2K compliance plan.
In 1995, Greg founded Learning Systems Engineering (LSE), a private consulting firm that has provided services to organizations with an interest in enhancing learning technology applications and to educational organizations and corporations developing products and services for the K/post-secondary educational market. Through LSE, Greg also served as Chair of the International Education Advisory Board for an Internet start-up, offering real time education services.
Previously, Greg was the VP of Bibliographic Retrieval Services, Inc. (BRS), an online information service, which he helped to create in the late 1970's. He served as President of the Education Service Group, a division of BRS and was the Director of the NYS Center for Learning Technologies. During that time, he pioneered online distance learning initiatives in NYS and with substantial corporate and grant support, developed a state of the art technology-training center in Albany. He oversaw the production of the national award winning monthly teleconference series Learning in New York. Greg served as the Director of Program Development for the SUNY Central Office of Educational Technology and as the Assistant Vice President for Learning Technology at SUNY's Empire State College, a campus that operates entirely in a virtual mode. While with SUNY, Greg was central to the initial development of the current SUNY Learning Network (SLN), which is now one of the largest and most successful virtual university systems in the country, offering over 1,000 online undergraduate and graduate courses and enrolling more than 13,000 online students.
Greg holds a BS and MS in Education, has served on numerous national and international advisory boards for corporations and large nonprofit organizations, and has authored several articles and papers on the application of technology to enhance learning.