Rebecca Quintana

Dr. Rebecca M. Quintana earned her PhD at the University of Toronto in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning. Rebecca’s doctoral research centered on the role visual representations can play in collaborative knowledge construction, specifically within a rich simulation environment in middle school science classrooms.

In her current role of learning xxperience designer at the University of Michigan’s (U-M) Office of Academic Innovation, Dr. Quintana uses a learner-centered approach to design and develop online learning experiences for diverse audiences of global learners. Partnering with faculty across the University, Dr. Quintana facilitates design collaborations and is involved in curriculum development, assessment design, and course strategy for a wide range of courses across U-M’s portfolio of online courses.

Dr. Quintana leads several research projects that inform her work, including exploring how design representations and practices can be used to support design teams, developing approaches that allow learners to take on a more consequential role in course design and iteration, and investigating the processes and resources that are needed to support hybrid and blended instances of online courses.

Central to this work is a design approach that values both diversity and inclusiveness, which is based on the foundational principle of equitable use. Dr. Quintana's research aims to develop processes to ensure that online courses developed by faculty and staff at the University of Michigan are designed with issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion in mind.

Dr. Quintana is a certified teacher with teaching experience spanning 20 years within a variety of K-16 contexts, including teaching core subjects at the elementary level, visual arts at the secondary level, and knowledge media design at the post-secondary level. Dr. Quintana will be the instructor for video games and learning at U-M’s School of Education.

Current Work:

Online learning environments appear to hold great promise for meeting the needs of a diverse student body, particularly when they have been designed with diversity, equity, and inclusion in mind. For example, massive open online courses (MOOCs) have been celebrated for their potential to democratize higher education, reducing cost and geographic barriers to the world’s leading academic institutions.

However, while probably unintended, online learning environments can also raise barriers to full accessibility. MOOCs and other online environments can benefit from being more responsive to learner populations, because learners are so diverse, coming from different cultural and educational backgrounds, and with different accessibility needs. My ongoing work explores how design teams can create learning experiences that are accessible for online learners, with diverse perspectives represented and opportunities for all learners to participate. I draw on culturally responsive pedagogies (Ladson-Billings, 1995) and universal design for learning (Meyer, Rose, & Gordon, 2014) as foundational frameworks for design.

One of my main foci is how designers can best structure and manage design processes to create content, activities, and assessments that are equitable and inclusive, and represent diversity. There is a need to understand (1) how decisions are made during the the design process that lead to the creation of final course resources and materials, and (2) how we might improve our design processes so that they are sensitive to variation in subject matter and domain practices. Within the MOOC design process, our best chance of creating fully inclusive and accessible online courses lies within the design phase, when we have access to the full design team (including faculty expertise), rather than in the iteration phase, when course assets can only be improved retroactively.

A goal of my research is to extract generalizable findings and present practical recommendations for how course design teams can best structure and manage design processes to ensure that online experiences are designed with diversity, equity, and inclusion in mind.