Renee Ford joined Smeal in 2012 and has worked as a senior instructional designer, instructional designer and instructor at Penn State since 2007. Prior to joining Smeal, she worked for Penn State’s College of Nursing and the College of Education’s Professional Personnel Development Center. Renee completed her Ph.D. in Workforce Education and Development at Penn State in 2015 and researched factors that influence leadership effectiveness. She has a teaching and learning, training, human resource development, and organization development background and is passionate about design, innovation, and educational equity. Renee believes that inclusively-designed teaching and learning experiences provide opportunities for students and instructors to participate in excellent, engaging learning experiences that meet the needs of diverse learners.

Renee is the lead designer for a number of Smeal's new and emerging programs and serves as the designer for several online and hybrid courses at Smeal, including a number of our large-enrollment courses. She also takes a leading role in overseeing the Smeal Academy to help respond to Smeal’s unique teaching and learning needs.

Renee has presented at a number of national and international conferences on topics such as flow experience and learning, social network analysis, flipped course design, accessibility, curation strategies for learning designers, video analytics, best practices and strategies for using a variety of educational technologies for teaching and learning, and leveraging Artificial Intelligence for teaching and learning. Her research interests are always evolving and she enjoys opportunities to collaborate on projects with our faculty.

Expertise

accessibility
large-enrollment teaching and learning strategies and best practices
learning analytics
learning outcomes
organization development
peer assessment and team dynamics
student engagement
training
DEIB
Universal Design for Learning
Artificial Intelligence and Generative AI

Education

PhD, Workforce Education and Development (Training, Organization Development and Human Resource Development Emphasis), Penn State University, 2015