About: Staff Profiles

Listed below are key administrators, affiliates and other faculty and staff with expertise in various aspects of online program development and delivery at UW Milwaukee. Feel free to contact them for more information.

Administrators

Overall responsibility lies with Laura Pedrick, Special Assistant to the Provost for Strategic Initiatives & Executive Director, UWM Online. Laura oversees UWM’s online and blended programs as well as UWM’s participation in the UW Flex Option program. Laura serves as the point person for regulatory compliance, data requests and grant proposals concerning online and blended instruction at UWM, and coordinates marketing and recruitment efforts for these programs.

Laura is assisted by Jeremy Gordon, the UWM Flexible Option Degree Project Manager, and the point person for UWM State Authorization compliance issues.

Affiliates

Dylan Barth, Online Programs Coordinator, assists with the overall administration and implementation of online education courses, degrees, and programs as well as the strategic planning for online/blended programs and degrees. Dylan also leads UWM’s Online and Blended Teaching Program in the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and manages the Online Summer Course Showcase promotional website. Dylan participated in two Gates Foundation Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC) grants, graduated from the EDUCAUSE Institute Learning Technology Leadership Program in 2013, and was selected to be a 2015-16 OPID Wisconsin Teaching Fellow.

Tanya Joosten, Director of Digital Learning Research and Development and Co-Director of the National Research Center for Distance Education and Technological Advancements (DETA, uwm.edu/deta), has been nationally recognized in her work in blended and online learning as an Online Learning Consortium (OLC) Fellow in 2013. She works to guide strategic digital learning efforts, including her current involvement on the University of Wisconsin System Learning Technology Executive Council, the CWiC Executive Committee, the McGraw Hill Research Board, the SXSWedu Advisory Board, and as a New Media Consortium (NMC) Challenge Leader. Dr. Joosten is a(n) author, speaker, teacher, social scientist and researcher with a background in leading faculty development and engagement initiatives, pedagogical and technological innovation projects,core learning technology oversight, and online program development. Her book on social media is available from Wiley Publishing, she has authored numerous articles, chapters, and encyclopedia entries on digital learning, and often writes invited blog posts and magazine articles for organizations, such as EDUCAUSE, WCET, Inside Higher Ed, and Pearson. You can find her work cited in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Forbes, U.S. News World and Report, and more. Recent interviews with Dr. Joosten are available on ResearchInAction and TOPcast available on iTunes. For more visit tanyajoosten.com or visit her on twitter.com/tjoosten.

Diane Reddy, Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) & Professor of Psychology at UWM, leads professional development of instructors and instructional innovation to increase student success. Diane developed the award-winning U-Pace instructional approach and established, with Tanya Joosten (see above), the National Research Center on Distance Education and Technological Advancements (DETA) (https://uwm.edu/deta/).

Kristin Woodward is Online Programs and Instructional Design Coordinator for the UWM Libraries. Kristin collaborates with faculty to embed information literacy instruction and assessment in online, hybrid and Flex Option courses. She leads the campus open educational resource (OER and Open Textbook) initiative and coordinates services within the library to ensure that online and Flex students have access to library content.

Faculty/Staff Experts

Simone C. O. Conceição is Professor of Adult and Continuing Education in the UWM Department of Administrative Leadership. She is the coordinator of the certificates in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, and Support Services for Online Students in Higher Education. Her teaching and research focus on adult and distance education, online faculty workload, and student retention and support in online environments. For more information about her work go to http://simoneconceicao.me.

Lorena Terando is Associate Professor and Chair of Translation & Interpreting Studies at UWM. She coordinates UWM’s unique online MA programs in Translation (Arabic, French, German, Russian and Spanish) and in Interpreting, which offer a broad array of advanced degrees to align with needs of the fast-paced language-services industry. For more information go to https://uwm.edu/translation-interpreting-studies/.

Chad Zahrt is Assistant Dean for Student Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Information Studies (SOIS) where he is responsible for student success, marketing, outreach, IT and the administrative operations of the School. SOIS offers fully online undergraduate and graduate degree programs as well as a Competency Based option for undergraduates.

Would you like to be listed on this page?

If you have expertise relevant to online program development/delivery and would like to be listed here as a resource for other UWM faculty and staff, please contact Laura Pedrick.