Linda B. Nilson is director emerita of the Office of Teaching Effectiveness and Innovation at Clemson University and author of Teaching at Its Best: A Research-Based Resource for College Instructors (Jossey-Bass), now in its fourth edition. She also wrote The Graphic Syllabus and the Outcomes Map: Communicating Your Course (Anker/Jossey-Bass, 2007), Creating Self-Regulated Learners: Strategies to Strengthen Students’ Self-Awareness and Learning Skills (Stylus, 2013), and Specifications Grading: Restoring Rigor, Motivating Students, and Saving Faculty Time (Stylus, 2015). Her next book, Avoiding Crickets: Strategies for Creating Engaging Discussions, coauthored with Jennifer Herman, will be published by Stylus.

In addition, Nilson coedited Enhancing Learning with Laptops in the Classroom (Jossey-Bass, 2005) and volumes 25 through 28 of To Improve the Academy: Resources for Faculty, Instructional, and Organizational Development (Anker/Jossey-Bass, 2007–2010), which is the major publication of the Professional and Organizational Development (POD) Network in Higher Education.

Nilson’s career as a full-time faculty development director has spanned over twenty-five years. She has published many articles and book chapters and has given over 450 keynotes, webinars, and live workshops at conferences, colleges, and universities both nationally and internationally on dozens of topics related to college teaching and scholarly productivity. She has also taught graduate seminars on college teaching.

Before coming to Clemson University, she directed teaching centers at Vanderbilt University and the University of California, Riverside, and was a sociology professor at UCLA, where she entered the area of educational development. After distinguishing herself as an excellent instructor, her department selected her to establish and supervise its teaching assistant training program. In sociology, her research focused on occupations and work, social stratification, political sociology, and disaster behavior.

Nilson has held leadership positions in the POD Network, Toastmasters International, Mensa, and the Southern Regional Faculty and Instructional Development Consortium. She was a National Science Foundation Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she received her Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in sociology. She completed her undergraduate work at the University of California, Berkeley.

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Ludwika A. Goodson is Associate Director for Faculty Development at the Center for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching at Purdue University Fort Wayne. Her career spans thirty years in instructional design, the last seventeen focusing on online teaching in higher education. Within this scope of work, she has created online course templates, conducted seminars on teaching with technology, and supported initiatives to advance the scholarship of teaching and learning.

After teaching at Iowa State University, Goodson enrolled in the educational technology program at Sir George Williams University in Montreal, Canada. Thereafter, she launched her instructional design career at Florida State University, where she and Dee Andrews wrote “A Comparative Analysis of Models of Instructional Design,” most recently reprinted in the third edition of Instructional Technology: Past, Present, and Future, edited by Gary J. Anglin.

Soon after, Goodson formed her company, Instructional Systems Design, supervising instructional designers and media consultants in education and evaluation projects for a dozen different agencies over ten years. She then returned to Florida State to conduct research and develop curricula in the Educational Services Program and design online courses at the Office of Distributed and Distance Learning. Her later role at Georgia Southern University encompassed collaboration with faculty in both classroom and online courses and in faculty learning communities. At Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s Worldwide Division, she produced online courses and taught an award-winning online course to prepare faculty for online teaching.

Goodson has served as an external evaluator for the National Science Foundation and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics faculty development projects and a contributor to the Encyclopedia of Educational Technology and Real-Life Distance Learning: Case Studies in Research and Practice. She participates in the Association for Educational Communications and Technology, SoTL Commons Conference, Georgia International Information Literacy Conference, and Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education (POD) Conference, where she and Linda Nilson first met.

Goodson earned her M.A. degree in educational technology at Sir George Williams University. Her instructors included BBC and CBC producers and education specialists who showcased the power of learning with instructional media. She completed doctoral courses and preliminary exams in instructional design and development at Florida State, where her instructors included Robert Gagné and Leslie Briggs.