Sangeetha Gopalakrishnan
Assistant Dean for Online and Learning Innovation, Office of Online Programs
Contact
140H Education Building
(mail code 708)
Champaign (UIUC Campus Mail), IL 61820
Biography
Sangeetha Gopalakrishnan joined as director of Online Programs for the College of Education (COE) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in May 2020. The key areas she oversees in this role are strategic planning, innovation in program development, online program operations, policy making, faculty development and support for online teaching, online course development, and online student services.
Before coming to UIUC she was director of the Foreign Language Technology Center at Wayne State University (WSU), an academic support unit in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. In that position she primarily worked with faculty teaching language, literature, and culture on the integration of innovative technologies in instruction and facilitated the creation of fully online and blended courses. She oversaw the operations of the center and its technology infrastructure.
Her research interests include technology integration at academic institutions, and best practices and leadership strategies for implementing successful online programs at universities. She has extensive experience teaching in fully online, blended, and face-to-face formats. During her time at WSU she was one of the principal investigators in a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) funded digital storytelling project involving the creation of multimedia narratives of historic sites in the Detroit area. She also has a background in German language teaching and taught at the Goethe Institute in Chennai, India.
She received a Ph.D. in Instructional Technology from Wayne State University in 2011 and a M.S. in Educational Technology from Purdue University in 2001. She also holds a master’s in Mathematics from Delhi University, India. She has near native fluency in German and holds advanced German language proficiency certification. She is past president of the International Association for Language Learning Technology (IALLT).