Across institutional contexts, Tanya’s contributions reflect a consistent model: she enters complex, multi-stakeholder environments, conducts or synthesizes rigorous needs assessment, and produces strategic frameworks that move institutions from fragmented, reactive practice to coordinated, equity-conscious, evidence-based digital education ecosystems. Her work consistently bridges research, policy, faculty development, and organizational design in ways that are both locally responsive and nationally scalable.
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM)
Tanya’s work at UWM established the institutional foundation for much of her national reputation. She led strategic planning for the Learning Technology Center, chairing the LTC’s own strategic planning process and shaping how faculty support for digital and blended learning was structured and delivered. She developed and administered a Faculty Support Survey to assess instructor technology use, training preferences, and support satisfaction — an instrument that became a model for similar efforts at other institutions and that informed her broader faculty development philosophy.
She co-chaired the Teaching and Learning Working Group for UWM’s Digital Future Strategic Planning initiative (2010–2011), a campus-wide effort to envision how emerging technologies would reshape instruction, student engagement, and institutional infrastructure. Goal 1 of that plan — promoting digital technologies for active learning with explicit attention to access — reflects her ongoing equity-centered approach. Her unit produced the Instructor Support Blog (uwmltc.org) and contributed to the Virtual Teaching Commons, both designed to provide faculty with accessible, pedagogically rich, just-in-time support.
At UWM, she also co-founded and co-directed the National Research Center for Distance Education and Technological Advancements (DETA), which became her most significant and enduring institutional contribution. DETA produced a globally adopted Research Toolkit to support evidence-based inquiry into distance education and digital learning, now used across all 50 U.S. states and more than 50 countries. Her research on compound inequity in digital learning, developed through DETA, became among the most downloaded work in the field.
University of Wisconsin System
At the UW System level, Tanya chaired the Learn@UW Executive Committee Roadmap Planning process — a system-wide, year-long strategic visioning effort. The process engaged representatives from across the UW System through surveys and a face-to-face summit, ultimately producing recommendations that included maintaining a unified LMS and increasing cross-campus collaboration and sharing. This effort demonstrated her capacity to lead complex multi-stakeholder planning processes that balance institutional autonomy with system-level coherence.
She also served on the UW System Shared Academic Technology Executive Committee (Learn@UW), which provided strategic oversight for learning technologies across institutions — including planning, budgeting, advocacy, fostering collaboration, and aligning CIO decision-making with faculty and academic mission priorities. Her involvement in the State of Wisconsin Superintendent’s Digital Learning Advisory Council extended this systems-level influence into K–20 policy contexts.
These experiences shaped her signature approach: using structured stakeholder engagement, empirical research, and cross-institutional coordination to move institutions from reactive technology adoption toward coherent, evidence-based digital strategy.
University of Nebraska System
During the 2015–2016 academic year, Tanya was contracted by University of Nebraska Online Worldwide (NUOW) in three primary capacities: faculty development and training on emerging technologies and pedagogies (with particular emphasis on social media and engagement); advisement on quality assurance practices for blended and online programs; and consultation with instructional design staff across all three campuses.
Her activities during that engagement included presenting on engagement strategies and course design best practices, meeting individually with instructional design and technology staff at each campus, and conducting a DETA Research Toolkit webinar that resulted in 24 faculty and staff accessing the toolkit. She worked with instructional designers to conceptualize a system-wide community of practice for instructional support and consulted on research design and data collection methodologies with faculty and staff across the system.
Her findings from that engagement painted a consistent picture: each campus shared a commitment to instructional excellence but operated with distinct visions, support models, and staff backgrounds. System-wide collaboration was undervalued or its purpose was unclear, and support efforts were heavily technology-focused with less attention to cohort-based, program-level faculty development. Faculty engagement remained a persistent challenge common across institutions nationally.
Her recommendations to NU were both strategic and operational in scope. At the strategic level, she called for a system-wide digital education initiative to establish a unified vision, measurable goals, and coordinated action through genuine stakeholder engagement. She recommended developing a shared pedagogical model for technology-enhanced, blended, and online courses to create curricular coherence and strengthen the Nebraska brand. She advocated for a system-wide quality rubric, a random sampling review process for digital courses, and program-level (rather than course-level) faculty development delivered through cohort-based models.
At the programmatic and research level, she recommended launching a system-wide empirical research initiative on digital teaching and learning practices, establishing an emerging technology pilot program grounded in evidence-based methodology, and building national research and development capacity through government and foundation funding. She also proposed a digital innovation award to recognize faculty and staff, a centralized “one-stop shop” for showcasing effective practices and research initiatives, and a commitment to international dissemination of Nebraska’s work to elevate the system’s national profile.
The proposal for NU’s comprehensive Digital Education Strategy — which drew directly on her recommendations — described her as a “nationally recognized expert” and positioned her findings as the intellectual foundation for the planning initiative that followed.