Remembering Phil Dodds

Philip Dodds, an American engineer long active in multimedia standards efforts dating back to the first MPCs, and widely acknowledged for his contributions to learning communications, passed away on 6 October. Phil is credited with design and development of the SCORM standard for eLearning communications, and he played a bit part as sound engineer in the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (center person in the photo).

Phil was founder and CEO of Visage - an pioneering company in interactive media, was later VP of R&D for Kurzweil Music Systems, and his most recent post was chief architect of the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative, a project of the US Department of Defense.

When you ask a prospective engineering employee who his/her role models are, and they answer Bill Gates, I suggest your next question should be "Why not Phil Dodds".