Andrea Gregg, PhD works as the Director for Online Pedagogy and Credentialing and is a faculty member in the Department of Mechanical Engineering where she leads the instructional design of online and blended courses; provides guidance for innovative approaches to teaching and learning; and leads the micro-credentialing and badging initiatives within the department. Prior to this, in her role as Associate Director for Research, she provided strategic leadership for applied learning design, educational technology, and online learning research. Gregg’s primary research focus is in understanding learners’ experiences from their perspectives. She has over 15 years in the field of online education. In her previous role, she managed a design team made up of instructional designers and instructional production specialists responsible for roughly 100 unique courses offered online by Penn State. She has published and presented in a variety of educational technology, online and distance learning, and adult learning outlets. Prior to her work in online education, Andrea taught academic for-credit courses in Penn State’s Department of Communication Arts and Sciences.

Ronda Reid holds a Master’s in Education from Penn State University and is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP). Her years of work on various websites where user experience is common practice, lead her to believe the same user-focused principals should be applied to the realm of online education where she believed online course design problems could be an inhibitor to the learning process. She spearheaded the Canvas UX research project at Penn State as the University was switching to the learning management system and served as principal investigator for one of the research efforts as well as played an intricate role throughout the various stages of the other research projects.

Tugce Aldemir is a fifth-year PhD candidate in Learning, Design and Technology Program in the College of Education at the Pennsylvania State University. She is also a graduate research assistant in the Teaching and Learning with Technology (TLT) at the Pennsylvania State University. She has received her M.S. in the Computer Education and Instructional Technology Department at Middle East Technical University, Turkey. Her research interests are: computer-supported collaborative learning, socio-emotional interaction and regulation in collaborative learning environments, socio-metacognition, human computer interaction, emotionally responsive online learning environments, and cultural competence and collaborative discussions. Her PhD dissertation focuses on developing a new model of socio-emotional competence to inform metacognitive and socio-metacognitive expertise or modify the existing model of competence to broaden its scope to entail socio-emotional interactional patterns. Her previous work has centered around a diverse group of topics including online learning, learner-based UX design, gamification, game theories, and learning experience design for empathy and social connectedness, and she has co-authored in the journal articles and conference proceedings about these topics.

Amy Garbrick, PhD has over 25 years of experience in Education and Technology and is the Director of Learning Design in the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST). Amy manages the design and development efforts of over 100 courses for five award-winning online programs: the Masters of Professional Studies (MPS) in IST, MPS in Homeland Security, MPS in Enterprise Architecture, BS in IST, and BS in SRA (Security and Risk Analysis). Amy has taught in online, resident, and hybrid undergraduate courses and was the only instructor at Penn State to teach in all of the LMS pilot offerings using: MoodleRooms, Pearson, Desire2Learn, Blackboard (2 separate pilots), Canvas (3 separate pilots), and ANGEL. She has guest taught in numerous other courses both in Online and in Resident Instruction (RI). Amy completed her PhD in Learning Design and Technology with a dissertation on improving student engagement in online asynchronous discussion forums measured by quantity, quality, survey, and Social Network Analysis (SNA).

Jennifer Gray is an instructional designer in the College of Health and Human Development at The Pennsylvania State University. Jennifer earned her MEd in Business Education and has 25 years of experience in business, education, and technology fields. Her experience with learning and UX comes from various professional perspectives. Jennifer’s professional experience includes corporate experience managing people and projects, teaching and working as a technology coordinator in K-12 settings, training educators and collaborating with designers at an educational software company, and as a higher education instructional designer.