Diana G. Oblinger, Ph.D.

Manager, Academic Programs and Strategy
IBM North America

Dr. Oblinger is the Manager, Academic Programs and Strategy for the Higher Education division of IBM North America. She is known for her thought leadership in teaching and learning, including advancing the concept of student mobile computing and distributed instruction in the US, Canada, Mexico and Europe. She has consulted and spoken at numerous colleges and universities on delivering high quality distributed instruction and re-engineering higher education. Her satellite broadcasts on the use of technology in instruction reach thousands each year.

During the past four years, Dr. Oblinger has held several management positions within IBM including academic consulting and solution development for instruction. More recently, she led the announcement team for IBM Global Campus. Simultaneously she was responsible for IBM's collaboration with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Institute for Academic Technology.

Prior to joining IBM, Dr. Oblinger was on the faculty at the University of Missouri and at Michigan State University. In her administrative role at the University of Missouri, she was responsible for managing the academic programs of 17 departments with 250 faculty and over 2,000 students at the University of Missouri. During her tenure as an administrator, she was recognized for pioneering work in student recruitment, retention, teaching assistant language skill assessment, faculty development programs and support of student computing.

Combining her academic, administrative and information technology experience, she is uniquely qualified to address complex institutional problems involving both people and technology. Among the issues she has been asked to address are instructional effectiveness, distributed learning and institutional transformation. She serves on the steering committee for Educom's National Learning Infrastructure Initiative and on the technology advisory committee for the Calloway School of Business at Wake Forest University.

Dr. Oblinger is the editor of two books, The Learning Revolution and The Future Compatible Campus as well as author of numerous papers on distributed instruction, enhancing instruction with technology as well as academic advisement.

Dr. Oblinger has received three outstanding teaching awards, an outstanding research award and was recently named Young Alumnus of the Year by Iowa State University. She holds three degrees from Iowa State University: a B.S. in Botany, an M.S. in Plant Breeding and a Ph.D. in Cytogenetics. She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Phi Kappa Phi and Sigma Xi . She has received several corporate recognitions since joining IBM.