Penn State's College of Education is regularly ranked among the nation's best graduate schools by U.S. News & World Report, and the online courses for the master of education degree in adult education are taught by the same nationally recognized faculty.

You will benefit from frequent interaction with the faculty during your online courses.

Gary William Kuhne, DEd

Lead faculty member, MEd in Adult Education and Distance Education Certificate

Areas of Interest:

• Continuing Professional Education
• Human Resource Development and Staff Development
• Program Planning
• Action Research
• Adult Religious Education
• Distance Education

As lead faculty member for the online MEd program in adult education, Dr. Kuhne provides both coordination and leadership for the use of web-based learning and asynchronous learning in graduate-level education. He is also an active consultant to nonprofit, corporate, and government agencies on issues linked to staff development, continuing professional education, human resource development, action research, and distance education. The author of eight books and numerous articles and reports, Dr. Kuhne has been involved with adult learners for more than thirty years in a variety of settings, including adult religious education, human resource development, continuing professional education, and higher education. He is listed in Who's Who in American Education, is a member of Phi Kappa Phi National Honor Society. and was the co-recipient of the 1995 Award for Excellence in Research and Publication from the National University Continuing Education Association (NUCEA).

Melody M. Thompson, DEd

Areas of Interest:

• Distance Education Policy and Practice
• Social and Historical Issues in Adult Education
• Adult Education for Diverse Populations

Melody M. Thompson is associate professor of education in Penn State's Adult Education Program. In that role she teaches and advises masters' and doctoral students, with much of her teaching being done online through the Penn State World Campus. Her primary research interests include the ethical dimensions of online learning, and diversity issues in adult education, especially those related to religious identity. Dr. Thompson received her bachelor's degree in English from Bryn Mawr College and both her MEd and DEd from Penn State. Her past positions include director of planning and research for the World Campus and director of the American Center for the Study of Distance Education (ACSDE). She has also served as the U.S. project leader for the e-Learning Collaborative Research Project of the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) and as the faculty satisfaction editor for the Sloan Consortium's Effective Practices database. Dr. Thompson is the author of numerous articles and book chapters, as well as co-author of the McGraw-Hill Handbook of Distance Learning.

Dr. Thompson's honors include the 2003 Sloan Consortium Best Practices in Faculty Satisfaction Award, the 2004 American Distance Education Consortium (ADEC) Outstanding Educational Program Award, and the 2010 University Continuing Education Association (UCEA) Excellence in Teaching Award.

Eunice N. Askov, PhD

Areas of Interest:

• Workplace Literacy
• Technology for Instruction
• Family Literacy
• Special-Needs Populations
• Staff Development

As former director of the Institute for the Study of Adult Literacy, Dr. Askov provided leadership and research in adult literacy through various projects relating to applications of technology to instruction, workplace literacy, family literacy, special-needs populations, and staff development. She was the first Literacy Leader Fellow at the National Institute for Literacy in Washington, D.C., carrying out research related to skill standards and workplace literacy. She has also conducted research in adult literacy at the University of Western Australia under a Fulbright Senior Scholar Award (1983). She was named Distinguished Fellow at the Flinders University Institute of International Education in Adelaide, Australia (1998), and given the University of Wisconsin School of Education Alumni Achievement Award (1994).

Ian Baptiste, EdD

Areas of Interest:

• Political Economy of Adult Education
• Sustainable Development
• Social Equality

Dr. Baptiste was born and raised in the Caribbean—Trinidad and Tobago, and Grenada. He did his undergraduate work in agriculture at the University of the West Indies, Trinidad, and his graduate studies in foundations of education and adult and continuing education at Wheaton College and Northern Illinois University. He uses his expertise in agriculture and education to help build sustainable communities, especially rural communities. This commitment frames his research and consultative endeavors whether in the Caribbean, urban Chicago, rural South Africa, or rural Pennsylvania.

Michael Grahame Moore, PhD

Areas of Interest:

• International Adult Education
• Distance Education

Dr. Moore is a professor of education and the founding director of the American Center for the Study of Distance Education (ACSDE). Before joining Penn State's online program in adult education in 1986, he worked for nine years at the British Open University. Prior to that, he spent seven years in adult education in Kenya and three years as a professor of adult education in Nova Scotia. He is the founder and editor of The American Journal of Distance Education and has served for many years on the editorial boards of similar journals in Great Britain, Canada, India, and Australia. Originally trained as an economist, he takes special interest in adult and distance education in developing countries, undertaking various research and occasional training projects for the World Bank, IMF, and UNESCO.

Esther S. Prins, PhD

Areas of Interest:

• Adult and Family Literacy
• Civic Engagement
• Gender
• Participatory Research

Dr. Prins is the co-director of the Goodling Institute for Research in Family Literacy and the Institute for the Study of Adult Literacy. She was introduced to adult education through an adult literacy class in El Salvador, and later coordinated an adult education program in Chicago. She has conducted research in educational and community settings in Pennsylvania, New York, California, Washington, and El Salvador, including adult literacy programs, after-school programs, school-based community development projects, community-university partnerships, a union- and university-sponsored adult education program for Cornell University employees, ecumenical community development and organizing coalitions, and cooperative extension at Cornell University, the University of California, Davis, and Washington State University. Dr. Prins is a consulting editor for the Adult Education Quarterly and a peer reviewer for the Journal of Extension. She was a Professors for the Future Fellow at the University of California, Davis (2003-04), the recipient of the Cornell University Women's Studies Dissertation Fellowship (2001), and the Julian and Veta S. Butterworth Doctoral Research Prize from Cornell University (2000).

Fred M. Schied, EdD

Areas of Interest:

• Sociohistorical Approaches to Adult Education
• Workers and Workplace Learning
• Community and Nonformal Education

Dr. Schied has served as an administrator of a large, urban adult basic education program, taught English as a second language, and worked as a community educator in community development projects in Chicago. His research has addressed the questions of how workplace learning is defined and conceptualized, who does the defining, whose interest is being served, and what impact workplace learning has on workers. His book, Learning in Social Context: Workers and Adult Education in Nineteenth-Century Chicago, received the 1994 Cyril O. Houle Award for Outstanding Literature in Adult Education from the American Association for Adult and Continuing Education.