Murray Goldberg

Murray Goldberg (born October 1962) is a noted Canadian educational technologist and a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Goldberg is best known for being the founder of the elearning companies WebCT, Brainify, Silicon Chalk, AssociCom, and Marine Learning Systems. Goldberg was born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada and raised in Edmonton until he moved to British Columbia to attend the University of Victoria in 1980. Murray graduated from UVic in 1985 and then went on to earn an MSc from the University of British Columbia. In 2004 he was awarded an honorary Ph.D. from the Southern Cross University. Murray serves as director for various companies, sits on the board of trustees of Harvey Mudd College in Claremont California, is a mentor at the GSV Labs tech incubator in Redwood City California, and is a frequent consultant and speaker on the future of eLearning. Murray is also the chair of the British Columbia chapter of the Manning Innovation Awards.

Murray began as a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science at UBC in 1993 and was awarded tenure there in 1998. In 1994, his first year as a faculty member at UBC, Goldberg won the Killiam Teaching Prize at UBC. Goldberg took a leave of absence from UBC in 1998 to lead WebCT full-time.

In 1995, as a UBC faculty member, Goldberg was researching the effectiveness of Web-Based learning environments. Goldberg found that the experience of building the courses for this experimentation was sufficiently time consuming and expensive that he decided to create a platform to enable the simple and rapid creation of web-based learning environments, WebCT. WebCT was widely accepted as a catalyst in the world-wide boom of on-line learning that accelerated beginning in 1997. By November, 2000 WebCT was purportedly serving 6 million students in 57 countries, and by late 2001, 10 million students in 80 countries at 2250 universities and colleges. In 1999, Goldberg sold most of his stake in WebCT to Boston-Based Universal Learning Technology. The combined company took on the WebCT name. Goldberg remained as president of the Canadian division of WebCT until 2002 when he left to co-found Silicon Chalk.

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