Keynote Speaker

Matthew Gunkel

Chief eLearning Officer
University of Missouri

Transforming the Student Experience through partnerships and analytics

Time, Date, and Location: 10:00 - 11:30 a.m., Thursday, March 12, BCH 125

Explore students' evolving digital experience. How will technology change the way campuses recruit and retain students and communicate with alumni? How will digital technologies affect administrative and academic day-to-day tasks? In addition to facilitating students' interactions with the school, faculty, and each other, digital advances can potentially increase student engagement and academic success.

Learn about my history and experience at IU in building strong partnerships with Learning Technologies, Student Services, and campus academic programs. Indiana University has created multiple sets of collaboratively developed digital resources to support a seamless student experience that delivers student support and degree completion paths and resources across face-to-face and online student, staff, and faculty communities.

  • Identify eLearning’s role in creating new strategies/models to best leverage cross-team collaboration on institutional projects
  • Describe elements of a productive academic/IT collaborative project

Chief eLearning Officer, Matthew Gunkel leads the systemwide effort to develop, design, build, and operate an online and digital-learning platform that will ensure a superior academic experience for students and lead us toward meeting enrollment goals. Gunkel is closely collaborating with university leadership and faculty at each of the four universities as they work to expand and align online programs and service initiatives and launch appealing eLearning programs.

Gunkel joins us from Indiana University, where he most recently served as the Director of Teaching and Learning Technology and led eLearning strategy, services, operations, and investments for the entire nine-campus system. During that time, he helped grow Indiana University’s reputation as a nationally recognized leader in online learning, with the university’s US News ranking for best online bachelor’s program climbing from 72 to 20 over the past four years. Gunkel focused efforts in developing collaborations among programs from the different campuses, driving course quality and excellence, student online orientations, and in developing faculty development programs for digital education. In his role, Gunkel streamlined tools to drive the cost of creating and delivering a new online course from $30,000 to less than $7,000 and spearheaded efforts that quadrupled the number of courses created annually from the program’s beginning in 2014. His work to negotiate contracts for solutions and services established ground-breaking partnerships with key players in educational technology, such as Examity, Canvas, Top Hat, Zoom and Google. Gunkel earned a Master’s in Information Science from Indiana University and a Bachelor’s in Computer Technology from Purdue University.