Tamara Michele Powell

Dr. Tamara Powell is the Director of the Kennesaw State University (KSU) College of Humanities and Social Sciences Office of Distance Learning. She is also an associate professor of English at KSU where she teaches technical communication, interdisciplinary research methods, and American literature. From 2004-2009 she was the Coordinator of the Electronic Graduate Certificate in Technical Writing and Communication, or ecert program, at Louisiana Tech University, the fourth such program in the United States in 2004. The ecert program was created from a grant that Dr. Powell wrote. She designed the program, trained the involved faculty to teach online, and directed the program until leaving for her current position at KSU. At KSU, her office has gained national and international recognition for its faculty development program, "Build a Web Course Workshop" which teaches faculty how to create and teach excellent online courses built to Quality Matters standards. Recent publications include “Increasing Student Engagement and Assessing the Value of an Online Collaboration Tool: The Case of VoiceThread" with Dr. Solomon Negash in Journal of Interactive Teaching and Pedagogy and “Faculty Perceptions of ‘The Project’: An Advanced Faculty Professional Development for Online Course Building” with Vanessa Slinger-Friedman, Joe Terantino, Griselda Thomas, Chris Randall, and Philip Aust.