Podcast Guests#
Tristan Denley#
Tristan Denley currently serves as Deputy Commissioner for Academic Affairs and Innovation at the Louisiana Board of Regents. His work uses a data informed approach to implement a wide variety of state-wide initiatives surrounding college completion, stretching from education redesign in a variety of disciplines, to the role of predictive analytics and data mining, cognitive psychology and behavioral economics in higher education.
Amongst his most recent work has been the development and implementation of a comprehensive system-scale student success strategy, the Momentum Year, that transforms developmental education and advising. Implementation of the Momentum Year in Georgia increased system-wide 4yr graduation rates by 20%, and by 30% for African American students.
Denley earned his PhD in Mathematics from Trinity College Cambridge.
Alyssa Wise#
Alyssa Wise is a Professor of Technology and Education at Vanderbilt University and Director of the Learning Incubator: a Vanderbilt Endeavor (LIVE).
Wise’s research combines the fields of learning sciences and educational data science to study the design of learning analytics systems that can be used to inform and improve teaching and learning. She both develops tools to leverage new sources of data about teaching and learning (using natural language processing, social network analysis, and predictive modeling techniques, among others) and conducts mixed-method investigations to study how educational practices are being reshaped using such tools.
Wise’s scholarship has received several awards including the Editor’s Choice Article from Internet and Higher Education; two Best Short Paper Awards, a Best Poster Award, and a Best Practitioner Paper Award. Wise serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of the Learning Sciences, the International Journal of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning, and Educational Technology Research & Development. She currently serves on the advisory boards of the NSF-funded Learning Analytics in STEM Education Research Institute and National AI Institute for Student-AI Teaming.
Wise holds a Ph.D. in Learning Sciences and M.S. in Instructional Systems Technology from Indiana University, as well as a B.S. in Chemistry from Yale University, and has previously worked in industry, with non-profits and in classrooms across the Americas.
John O’Brien#
John O’Brien serves as the president and CEO of EDUCAUSE, a nonprofit organization seeking to inspire the transformation of higher education in service to a greater good. EDUCAUSE serves over 2,000 member colleges, universities, and organizations from 41 countries who themselves collectively serve over 14 million students.
He speaks and writes on a variety of topics related to higher education, technology, and the crucial intersection where the two meet. Throughout his career in higher education, John has served as an academic, technology, and institutional leader. He was a faculty leader in instructional technology, a statewide IT project leader, and associate vice chancellor/deputy CIO at the system level. He has been a college provost and president in the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system, the fourth largest higher education system in the United States. Immediately prior to his appointment at EDUCAUSE, he served as the system’s senior vice chancellor of academic and student affairs.
O’Brien holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Augustana University, a master’s degree in Anglo-Irish Literature from Trinity College Dublin, and a doctorate in English from the University of Minnesota.
Linda Feng#
Linda Feng is VP of Architecture at Desire2Learn, a leading learning plaform company. At D2L, Linda serves in a senior leadership role, reporting directly to the chief technology officer and being accountable for strategic planning for technology alignment, innovation leadership, strategic partnerships, data strategy, scalability, and more.
Feng came to D2L from Unicon, where she focused on providing strategic consulting to leading institutions, major publishers, and edtech companies related to integrations and learning analytics. Feng was formerly a senior product manager with Instructure, focusing on platform strategy and standards. Prior to Instructure, Feng had over 20 years of experience in database server and applications product development at Oracle, most recently serving as Software Architect in Oracle’s Student Products Division. She also guided numerous application development projects ranging from Oracle Public Sector Financials to Oracle Student Systems. Early in her career at Oracle, she successfully managed the development of Oracle’s Spatial Data Option technology, integrating it into the Oracle 7 server architecture. Her work with this project earned her a patent for multidimensional indexing techniques present in Oracle’s Spatial Cartridge today.
Feng has authored articles as well as spoken at numerous education technology conferences, such as EDUCAUSE, ELI (Educause Learning Institution), 1EdTech’s Learning Impact, and OpenApereo, on topics ranging from student data integration and data privacy initiatives to data pipelines and key innovations in learning analytics infrastructure.
Linda is an active leader in the gloabal standards development and interoperability. She was recently elected to 1EdTech’s Board of Directors.
Manoj Kulkarni#
Manoj Kulkarni is CEO of Realizeit. As CEO, he leads all aspects of Realeizit’s commercial development, growth agenda and operations globally.
Kulkarni has held senior executive roles for more than 20 years providing transformational leadership in high volume, high growth and global businesses in Education, Technology and Retail sectors.
He is the former Chief Technology and Innovation Officer for Career Education Corporation, where he and his team pioneered the implementation of AI-based personalized learning across large-scale ground and online institutions powered by Realizeit technology. His work at Career Education has resulted in numerous awards and accolades for EdTech innovation from Information Week, Computerworld, and others.
Prior to Career Education Corporation, he served as the Vice President of Information Technology for Toys R Us Inc., leading technology operations and engineering in the US and internationally.
Manoj earned his Bachelor in Engineering from India’s College of Engineering, Pune and his Masters in Business Administration from Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management.
Patrick Methvin#
Patrick Methvin is the Director, Postsecondary Success at Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He oversees work designed to significantly increase the number of Americans achieving a post-high school credential and eliminate educational attainment disparities by race and income.
Previously, Patrick served as deputy director for the Postsecondary Success strategy, focusing on the adoption and scaling of innovations associated with improving student success and institutional sustainability. Prior to joining the foundation in 2013, Patrick served as a principal in the Boston Consulting Group’s Social Impact and Consumer Goods Practice Areas. In the Social Impact Practice, Patrick supported higher education institutions in managing operating model changes necessitated by their rapidly changing funding environments. He also supported K-12 transformation at the state, district, and charter school organization levels.
Patrick holds an MBA from the Wharton School, a Master in Educational Leadership from the University of Pennsylvania, and a B.A. in Economics and Political Science from the University of North Carolina, where he was a Morehead Scholar.
Teresa-Martin-Retortillo Rubio#
Teresa Martín-Retortillo is the Executive President of Executive Education at IE University since September 2016. She also leads innovation in open programs both on-line and face to face. Prior to that, she was senior vice president of Strategy and Business Development for McGraw-Hill Education in 2014 where she supported CEO David Levin, and the executive team in the digital transformation of the company through strategy definition and execution as well as with investments and partnerships.
Before joining McGraw-Hill Education, Teresa was a partner with Bain & Company where she worked for circa 20 years, responsible for advising C-level executives and their boards with the objective of driving company transformations and increasing shareholder value. She worked for clients representing a range of industries including education, helping to develop business strategies and translate plans into tangible results. She has extensive experience supporting private equity clients through deal sourcing, due diligence, and portfolio company transformation on more than 100 deals.
Teresa began her professional career at Goldman Sachs as a Corporate Finance Analyst in London. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from CUNEF (Colegio Universitario de Estudios Financieros) in Madrid, and a MBA degree from Harvard Business School.
Robert Ubell#
Robert Ubell is Vice Dean Emeritus of Online Learning at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering and Senior Editor of CHLOE, an annual survey of higher ed online officers, sponsored by Quality Matters. For nearly a decade, Ubell headed Tandon Online, ranked No. 2 by US News & World Report of the nation’s Computer Information Technology online graduate programs. Ubell consults for universities and edtech companies, including Coursera, NYU and The New School, among others.
Recipient of the highest honor given for individual achievement in digital education, the A. Frank Mayadas Leadership Award, Ubell is a Fellow of the Online Learning Consortium (OLC) and a member of the Advisory Board of Online Learning, the journal of OLC, where he served on the organization’s board for a number of years. Until recently, he was a member of McGraw-Hill Education’s Learning Science Research Advisory Board.
Abroad, Ubell has been active across the globe. In China, he headed three blended online master’s at Central University of Finance and Economics and Beijing Institute of Technology. A member of the board of the Lianyungang Universal Vehicle Manufacturing Company, he was honored as a Council Member of the Chongqing International Exchange Association. Ubell consults for Beacon Education, a Beijing company that serves Chinese students enrolled in US online graduate programs. In London, he served as American Publisher of Nature, the prominent science weekly, and launched the journal, Nature Biotechnology.
A columnist for EdSurge and contributor to Inside Higher Ed and other leading publications, Ubell has contributed more than 100 articles to scholarly and general periodicals and is the author or editor of 20 books, with the most recent being Going Online, published in 2017, and its companion volume, Staying Online, published in 2021 — both from Routledge. Ubell has taught and lectured at leading colleges and universities, including Columbia, MIT, The New School, NYU, University of Rochester, and Stevens Institute of Technology, among others.
Michael Taft#
Michael Taft is ZogoTech’s Chief Executive Officer. Since co-founding ZogoTech in 2003, he has worked to create solutions that help colleges and universities use data to improve institutional performance and student outcomes.
Previously, Michael spent 10 years in software consulting for the Dallas County Community College District, the University of Kansas, IBM, Sprint, and AT&T.
Michael graduated with high honors / Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Texas at Austin with degrees in Computer Science and Art History.
Charles Dziuban#
Charles Dziuban is Director of the Research Initiative for Teaching Effectiveness at the University of Central Florida (UCF) where has been a faculty member since 1970 teaching research design and statistics. Since 1996, he has directed the impact evaluation of UCF’s distributed learning initiative examining student and faculty outcomes as well as gauging the impact of online courses on the university.
He has published in numerous journals including Multivariate Behavioral Research, The Psychological Bulletin, Educational and Psychological Measurement, the American Education Research Journal, the Phi Delta Kappan, the Internet in Higher Education, the Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, and the Sloan-C View. His methods for determining psychometric adequacy have been featured in both the SPSS and the SAS packages. He has received funding from several government and industrial agencies including the Ford Foundation, Centers for Disease Control, National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
In 2000, Dziuban was named UCF’s first ever Pegasus Professor for extraordinary research, teaching, and service and in 2005 received the honor of Professor Emeritus. He has co-authored or edited numerous books and chapters on blended and online learning including Handbook of Blended Learning Environments, Educating the Net Generation, and Blended Learning: Research Perspectives of which, he is the co-editor. In 2005, Chuck received the Sloan Consortium award for Most Outstanding Achievement in Online Learning by an Individual. In 2007, he was appointed to the National Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Literacy Policy Council.
Dziuban received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin.
Patsy D. Moskal#
Patsy D. Moskal is Director of the Digital Learning Impact Evalulation at the Research Initiative for Teaching Effectiveness at the University of Central Florida (UCF). Since 1996, she has served as the liaison for faculty research of distributed learning and teaching effectiveness at UCF. Patsy specializes in statistics, graphics, program evaluation, and applied data analysis.
Patsy specializes in statistics, graphics, program evaluation, and applied data analysis. She has extensive experience in research methods including survey development, interviewing, and conducting focus groups and frequently serves as an evaluation consultant to school districts, and industry and government organizations. She has also received funding from several government and industrial agencies including the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. In 2011, she was given the honor of being named an Online Learning Consortium (previously Sloan-Consortium) Fellow. She has co-authored numerous articles and chapters on blended and online learning and is a frequent presenter at conferences and to other researchers.
She holds a MS in Computer Science and a Doctor of Education (Ed.D) in Curriculum and Instruction, both from University of Central Florida.
Anthony Picciano#
Anthony G. Picciano holds multiple faculty appointments at the City University of New York’s Hunter College, Graduate Center; and the School of Professional Studies. He has also held administrative appointments at the City University and State University of New York including that of Vice President and Deputy to the President at Hunter College. He assisted in the establishment of the CUNY PhD Program in Urban Education and served as its Executive Officer for ten years (2007-2018). Dr. Picciano’s research interests include education leadership, education policy, online and blended learning, multimedia instructional models, and research methods. He has authored nineteen books and numerous articles including Educational Leadership and Planning for Technology which currently is in its fifth edition (Pearson Education). His latest book is, Picciano, A.G., Dziuban, C., Graham, C. & Moskal, P. (in press). Blended Learning: Research Perspectives, Volume 3. New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis, Publishers.
He has been involved in major grants from the U.S. Department of Education, the National Science Foundation, IBM, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He was a member of a research project funded by the U.S. Department of Education – Institute for Education Sciences, the purpose of which was to conduct a meta-analysis on “what works” in postsecondary online education (2017-2019). In 1998, Dr. Picciano co-founded CUNY Online, a multi-million dollar initiative funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation that provides support services to faculty using the Internet for course development. He was a founding member and continues to serve on the Board of Directors of the Online Learning Consortium (formerly the Sloan Consortium). His blog started in 2009 has averaged over 600,000 visitors per year. Dr. Picciano has received wide recognition for his scholarship and research including being named the 2010 recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Consortium’s (now the Online Learning Consortium) National Award for Outstanding Achievement in Online Education by an Individual.
Dave McCool#
Dave McCool is the founder and CEO of Muzzy Lane. Muzzy Lane is addressing the skills gap by allowing institutions to create engaging, skill-based activities and assessments to incorporate into their courses. Students practice solving problems in simulated scenarios and get immediate feedback on their performance. The software tracks and reports progress to show proof of mastery. Dave was previous a co-founder of 2 successful technology startups: Shiva Corporation (went public in 1993) and Aptis Communications (acqured by NOrtel in 1998). He graduated from MIT with a BS in Electrical Engineering in 1987.