I am a Professor with the Learning Sciences Program in the Department of Learning, Design, and Adult Education. I am also a Research Scientist with the Center for Research on Learning and Technology, Senior Fellow at the IU Center for Applied Cybersecurity, and Affiliated Faculty with IU Cognitive Science program. I completed my Ph.D. in Psychology at Vanderbilt University and completed a two-year Postdoctoral Fellowship at the ETS Center for Performance Assessment.

I use theories and methods from the Learning Sciences to uncover new solutions to enduring challenges in motivating, assessing, and recognizing learning, mostly using cutting-edge technologies. I started teaching online in 2009 and have been continually revising an approach that is based on situative theories of cognition. I was deeply involved in research of Open Badges and other forms of web-enabled credentials from 2011 to 2020. Since 2019 I have been deeply involved in multiple efforts to understand and improve learning of cybersecurity. I have been collaborating very closely with the fully online Indiana University High School since 2013. My research has been supported by the MacArthur Foundation, the US National Science Foundation, Google, the US Department of Education, Indiana University, and others.