Hello! 안녕하세요! Salut! السلام عليكم

Hello and Welcome! I’m Maria Widmer, a tech-minded teacher and instructional designer working in online higher education.

As a coder, cellist, and educator, my passions and professional interests meet at the intersection of arts, technology, language, and learning sciences.

I have worked in online education since I was an undergraduate at Penn State, where I studied French, Arabic, and Teaching English as a Second Language. From Central PA, I hopped 14 time zones to Chuncheon, South Korea. There, I taught language and critical thinking skills to hyper tech-savvy students at an after-school academy.

I believe that teachers should meet students at their level as the starting point for learning. In a world increasingly touched by interactive technology, this means engaging students in the web-based environments and digitally-mediated forms of communication encountered in their daily lives.

As a Masters student in Penn State’s Learning, Design, and Technology program, I’m working to gain a critical framework for systematically identifying instructional problems, developing research and theory-based solutions with technology, and evaluating the impact of those solutions on learner outcomes.

My big picture goal is to create opportunities for others to become active, self-sustaining learners and critical thinkers.