Susan Maunders

Biography

Photo of Susan Maunders

For over 20 years, Susan Maunders has been writing, designing, and producing educational media to help teachers, professors, corporate trainers, and nonprofit executives fulfill their organizations’ strategic needs for online educational curricula, traditional educational interventions, and learning environments that blend the two. She has designed or produced over 200 educational media products.

Currently, she specializes in design and production of learning environments for adolescents. She is an active researcher in the new discipline of the Learning Sciences, focusing on the design of virtual learning environments for adolescents. She is a doctoral candidate at The University of Colorado at Boulder, School of Education in Educational and Psychological Studies. In her dissertation research, she is studying the design of MMOs from a developmental perspective.

Susan is also involved in a nonprofit research and development organization, XRI Global, out of Stanford University, whose project PocketSchool is creating handheld learning systems for children worldwide who are in extreme educational need. (The PocketSchool team defines “extreme educational need” as situations where children have little or no possibility of attending school or are attending extremely under–resourced schools that are struggling to teach basic literacy and numeracy skills.)

Susan has set up programs to blend clinical training in healthcare with online learning in remote areas to lessen critical shortages of nurses and doctors. She has also designed many other educational media products for healthcare as well as authoring systems that promote distributed authoring expertise in large healthcare systems.

Sessions