Known for her love of storytelling, play and all things gameful, Madeline (Maddie) Shellgren thrives on facilitating and designing meaningful ways for people to connect, learn, and grow together. This makes her an inspired choice as OLC’s new Director, Online Engagement.

In her new role, Shellgren serves as lead innovator, designer and project manager of OLC’s portfolio of online engagement opportunities. No stranger to the OLC community, Shellgren has served on steering and operations committees for several OLC conferences, including as Technology Test Kitchen and Innovation Studio lead, as well as Engagement Co-Chair. She is also the mastermind behind OLC’s popular conference “Escape Rooms.”

“Maddie brings a unique ability to inspire participation and a commitment to sustainable, equitable and anti-oppressive ecologies within education,” said Jennifer Mathes, CEO, Online Learning Consortium. “OLC is thrilled to welcome her to our team.”

“I look forward to supporting OLC’s community-building efforts and am genuinely excited to help advance OLC toward innovative and transformative models of what’s possible for online and digital engagement,” added Shellgren.

Shellgren joins OLC from Michigan State University (MSU), where she served as lead on numerous student success initiatives related to instructional design and technology, accessibility, equity and inclusion. Over the past 11 years, she has dedicated her professional life to teaching and learning-related initiatives and has strategically sought out opportunities that give her a multi-dimensional perspective on teaching and learning, including working as a Standardized Patient training medical students, serving as Program Director for Teaching Assistant development, taking lead on a number of cross-institutional educator onboarding and professional development projects, and teaching across online and face-to-face contexts.

Most recently Shellgren worked as Assistant Rowing Coach for the MSU Varsity Women’s Rowing Program. There she helped redesign the community from the bottom up – chronicling the team’s new journey together in fun and multimodal ways, leading in the co-construction of community expectations and norms, helping ensure alignment across a variety of stakeholders and initiatives, and developing and operationalizing strategic structures for long-term sustainability, including entirely new social media, marketing, communications, and content management strategies. She had the privilege of seeing the impact of her human-centered and equity-oriented approach each and every day as the team reimagined what it meant to be a Spartan on the MSU Rowing Team.

Shellgren will continue as a volunteer coach, still supporting the rowing team and the efforts she helped initiate. At the same time, she is thrilled to step into her new role here with #teamOLC.

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