Introduction

Hi there! I am the digital pedagogy coach at UNC School of Social Work, where I started in March 2023. As the contact person for faculty to talk through effective online learning and teaching strategies, I discuss the pedagogical potential of educational technology trends and tools and engage in the scholarship of teaching and learning. I serve as an editor and writer for the blog magazine AACE Review and teach as an adjunct instructor at the Asian University for Women and Cologne University of Applied Sciences. My Tarheel journey started in January 2012, when I began my role as the lead instructional designer at UNC School of Government on the Instructional Support team, providing instructional design consultation and guidance for faculty and teaching professionals and project management for instructional technology initiatives.

I am native German and several transatlantic trajectories marked the years before joining UNC. In 2010-2011, I served as Director of E-Learning at Ulm University, Germany, where I joined the Institute of Psychology and Education at Ulm University to implement university-wide e-learning projects, consult with faculty, and teach courses on instructional design, computer-mediated communication, and webnography. In 2009, I received my PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of Bielefeld with a thesis on the information design of educational websites. From 2008 to 2010 I lived in Austin, TX, where I worked as a freelance e-learning consultant and conducted research on instructional design projects at St. Edward’s University. From 2003 to 2008 I worked with the academic staff of the Knowledge Media Research Center in Tuebingen, Germany, an interdisciplinary institute for research on educational technology. During this time, my team developed an award-winning portal on e-learning in higher education (e-teaching.org), and I lectured media psychology courses at Neu-Ulm University.

I am passionate about applied research in the field of educational technology and serve as a member of several conference program committees (ED-MEDIA, E-LEARN, SITE, ECEL), as a reviewer for e-journals (MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, Digital Humanities Quarterly), as editor for social software at the Educational Technology and Change Journal (ETC) and as social media coordinator at the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE).

I lam using this Web site as a portfolio for my instructional design work, research and teaching. For a collection fo blog postings see my contributions at ETC and AACE.