Jako Olivier is a professor in Multimodal Learning at the North-West University (NWU) and he holds the UNESCO Chair on Multimodal Learning and Open Educational Resources. He obtained his PhD in 2011 in which he researched the accommodation and promotion of multilingualism in schools through blended learning.

Before he joined the NWU as lecturer in 2010, he was involved in teaching information technology and languages in schools in the United Kingdom and in South Africa. From 2010 to 2015 he was a lecturer in the Faculty of Arts of the NWU after being appointed as associate professor in the Faculty of Education in 2015. During 2012 he was a guest lecturer at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. In 2018 he was promoted to full professor at the NWU. In 2018 he received the Emerging Researcher Medal from the Education Association of South Africa and he is a rated researcher from the South African National Research Foundation.

His research, located within the NWU’s Research Unit for Self-directed Learning, is focused on self-directed learning, multimodal learning, open educational resources, multiliteracies, individualized and contextualized blended learning, e-learning in language classrooms and online multilingualism. As an activist for openness in education he is an active member of the Creative Commons Chapter of South Africa and leads the newly established Network of OER and Multimodal Self-Directed Learning in Southern Africa (NOMSA).