About
Stephen Bronack, Ph.D.
Professor, Instructional Design and Technology · California State University, San Bernardino
I'm a professor in the Instructional Design and Technology program at California State University, San Bernardino, where I teach graduate courses online in educational research, instructional design, and emerging learning technologies. I started out in a high school English classroom, and nearly three decades later I'm still at the same work: helping people design learning that meets learners where they are. I am particularly interested in distributed learning — the places people learn, and the relationships, human and machine, that make it possible across formal, informal, and non-formal settings. I live in the Coachella Valley region of southern California.
Eddie
Eddie is my Lead AI Assistant. He runs the prompts I write for my courses, one question at a time, with a guide beside the chat so each learner can see where they are. My students use Eddie through a class code. Anyone else can get Eddie or the prompt PDFs in the store.
I test every prompt in my own classes
My graduate students run these prompts live on class nights. They tell me where they get stuck, and I revise the prompts and their guides from what they tell me.
Experience
I have spent nearly three decades designing learning for people who study online, and I wrote every prompt here from what I learned doing it. At Appalachian State University, our graduate Instructional Technology program taught in the AET Zone, a 3D virtual world where students and faculty in the United States, Mexico, Canada, and Australia met as avatars, took courses, and worked together. My colleagues and I called our approach presence pedagogy and published what we learned about helping people learn together at a distance. In 2012, I introduced avagogy in a TEDxGreenville talk. Avagogy is the art, science, and practice of teaching and learning via our mediated selves, and I have studied it ever since. I put all that into each prompt, one task at a time. You work through it step by step, the way I teach it in my own classes.
Education
- Ph.D., Instructional Technology, University of Virginia
- M.S., Instructional Technology, Appalachian State University
- B.S., English Education, Appalachian State University
My full CV, writing, and resources are at bronack.net.