Our Team Members

Dr. Jennifer Mathes (IELOL Global Executive Advisor)

Dr. Jennifer Mathes is the Chief Executive Officer for the Online Learning Consortium. She provides leadership in researching and planning strategic initiatives, special projects and partnerships that align with OLC’s mission, vision and goals. Dr. Mathes has nearly 20 years of experience in both public and private higher education where she has supported online learning initiatives since she taught her first online course in 1997. She has been instrumental in working with start-up online initiatives as well as leading growth in institutions with an existing online program. She holds a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Education from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she wrote her dissertation on “Predictors for Student Success in Online Education.” She also has earned a Master of Science degree in Business Education and a Bachelor of Science degree in Mass Communications from Illinois State University. She was also a graduate of the 2017 Institute for Emerging Leadership in Online Learning Program.

Madeline Shellgren (IELOL Global Program Co-Director)

Madeline Shellgren is the Director of Online Engagement for the Online Learning Consortium. In this role, she serves as the lead innovator, designer, and project manager of the OLC’s portfolio of online engagement opportunities. Known for her love of storytelling, play, and all things gameful, Maddie thrives on facilitating and designing meaningful ways for people to connect, learn, and grow together. She enjoys continuing supporting OLC community building efforts, is committed to sustainable, equitable, and anti-oppressive ecologies within education, and is genuinely excited to leverage her interdisciplinary scholarly and professional backgrounds as she helps lead the OLC towards truly innovative and transformative models for what’s possible for online and digital engagement.

Maddie joined the OLC from Michigan State University (MSU), where she served as the lead on numerous student success initiatives related to instructional design and technology, accessibility, and equity and inclusion. Over the past eleven years, Maddie 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. She most recently worked as an Assistant Rowing Coach for the MSU Varsity Women’s Rowing Program. There she was given the opportunity to help redesign a community from the bottom up, story the team’s new journey together in fun and multimodal ways, lead in the co-construction of community expectations and norms, help ensure alignment across a variety of stakeholders and initiatives, and develop and operationalize strategic structures for long-term sustainability (such as entirely new social media, marketing, communications, and content management strategies).

Katie Fife Schuster (IELOL Global Program Co-Director)

Katie Fife Schuster is the Director of Global Events for OLC. In this role, Katie provides direction and leadership for the logistics and planning of OLC symposiums, the IELOL program, and the IELOL Global program. Prior to her current role, Katie held the position of Director, Conferences & Events for OLC, where she worked in conjunction with the Senior Director, Conferences & Events, and the Conference Service Manager towards the achievement of OLC’s annual conferences. She has also been OLC’s Director of Online Learning and the Director of Publications. She has experience from her years in the publishing industry prior to joining OLC and holds a BA from Tufts University in anthropology and Spanish.

Angela Gunder (IELOL Global Executive Advisor)

Dr. Angela Gunder is the Chief Academic Officer and Vice President of Learning for the Online Learning Consortium. In this role, she is responsible for gathering, curating, and leveraging the intellectual capital created by and disseminated through OLC. Her decades long career as a designer for higher education informs her instructional design practice, where she leverages her expertise in web design, usability, visual communication, programming, and standards-based online learning. Angela’s research focuses on open educational practices, digital literacies, narrative in online course design, and emerging technology for second language acquisition. She holds a B.S. in Computer Science and Fine Art from Fordham University, a M.Ed. in Education Technology from Arizona State University. Angela completed her Ph.D. in Teaching, Learning and Sociocultural Studies at The University of Arizona, where in 2020 she was named an Erasmus Scholar by the College of Education for her commitment to the college, the university and to the community.