Purposeful Puzzles: Designing Mini Virtual Escape Rooms (A Block Party Breakout Session)
Thursday October 26, 2023 - 4:30 PM to 4:50 PM

Colette A. Chelf, Ed.D. serves as Director of Grants for the Online Learning Consortium where she scopes and manages a diverse portfolio of grant-funded projects. She brings over 20 years of experience to OLC as a project manager and learning strategist in the educational, corporate, and government sectors. Colette’s entrepreneurial spirit guides her work focusing on transformative change through creative problem-solving and teamwork. She is passionate about providing educational opportunities to all learners by building strategic partnerships to develop and scale inclusive educational resources and services. She holds an Ed.D. in Educational Leadership and an M.A. in Communication from Western Kentucky University and a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Kentucky.

Cody House serves as the Director of Online Learning and Instructional Technology with the College of Professional Studies at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Since joining the GW community he has spent his time constantly pushing to implement new and emerging technologies within the College of Professional Studies.

Pronouns: she, her, hers Twitter: @MaddieShellgren As the Director of Online Engagement, Madeline (Maddie) Shellgren serves as the lead innovator, designer, and project manager of the OLC's portfolio of online engagement opportunities. Known for her love of storytelling, play, and all things gameful, Maddie thrives on facilitating and designing meaningful ways for people to connect, learn, and grow together. Within the OLC, she has served on steering and operations committees for several of the organization’s conferences (including as Technology Test Kitchen and Innovation Studio lead, as well as Engagement Co-Chair) and has had the distinct honor of being the mastermind behind the OLC Escape Rooms. She looks forward to continuing supporting OLC community building efforts, is committed to sustainable, equitable, and anti-oppressive ecologies within education, and is genuinely excited to leverage her interdisciplinary scholarly and professional backgrounds as she helps lead the OLC towards truly innovative and transformative models for what’s possible for online and digital engagement. Maddie joins the OLC from Michigan State University (MSU), where she has served as the lead on numerous student success initiatives related to instructional design and technology, accessibility, and equity and inclusion. Over the past eleven years, Maddie has dedicated her professional life to teaching and learning related initiatives and has strategically sought out opportunities that give her a multi-dimensional perspective on teaching and learning, including working as a Standardized Patient training medical students, serving as Program Director for Teaching Assistant development, taking lead on a number of cross-institutional educator onboarding and professional development projects, and teaching across online and face-to-face contexts. She most recently worked as an Assistant Rowing Coach for the MSU Varsity Women’s Rowing Program. There she was given the opportunity to help redesign a community from the bottom up, story the team's new journey together in fun and multimodal ways, lead in the co-construction of community expectations and norms, help ensure alignment across a variety of stakeholders and initiatives, and develop and operationalize strategic structures for long-term sustainability (such as entirely new social media, marketing, communications, and content management strategies). She had the privilege of seeing the impact of her human-centered and equity-oriented approach each and every day as the team reimagined what it meant to be a Spartan on the MSU Rowing Team. With her move to the OLC, she will continue on as a volunteer coach, still supporting these efforts and the team, and is excited to get back on the water.