Asa Olson, PhD

Asa Olson is the Director of the Learning Resources Group at the Earl E. Bakken Center for Spirituality and Healing. In this role, Asa steers Center-level initiatives for instructional design services, instructor development and training, non-credit and Coursera projects, and coaching, training, and troubleshooting for teaching tools, including the Canvas learning management system.

 

Asa is also the former Assistant Director of Academic Technology at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs and a former assistant professor of Modern Languages at Southern Arkansas University. He has won multiple awards for teaching literature and writing, including two awards for excellence in teaching and two awards for teaching with technology. He has published articles on pedagogy, instructional design & technology, and history of education. His work has been published in Educause Review, The Teaching Professor, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and Criticism. He has training in online instruction, accessibility, and Universal Design through Quality Matters and CAST/UDL-IRN.

Asa enjoys teaching, and he continues to teach in multiple departments at the University. He also enjoys supporting other instructors. He has taught courses on writing, literature, and survey technologies, as well as the innovative SEED (Seeking Educational Equity through Diversity) course at UW-Madison. He is passionate about literature and the arts. Besides teaching literature courses, Asa worked with folk artists for four years at the Wisconsin Arts Board, where he assisted a folk arts specialist in developing digital educational materials for a secondary-school audience.