Ensmann, Suzanne

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Education

1986 Florida State University, B.S.
2007 Indiana University, M.S.
2017 Morehead State University, Ed.D.

View CV (PDF)

Courses Taught

Advanced Seminar in Instructional Design (core)
Introduction to Instructional Design (core)
Inquiry and Measurement (core)
Seminar in Instructional Design (core)
Trends and Issues in Instructional Design and Technology (core)
Design of Online Collaborative Learning (elective)
Introduction to Distance Learning (elective)
Introduction to Instructional Games and Simulations (elective)
Introduction to Program Evaluation (elective)
Management of Change (elective)
Media for Instruction (elective)
Principles of Learner Motivation (elective)

Career Specialties

Suzanne Ensmann specializes in meaningful and effective instructional design (ID) delivered in both hybrid and online learning. Her specific academic interest focuses on incorporating students’ hyper-communication and ubiquitous computing skills (like gaming) into instruction to improve learning. Ensmann also believes students should experience the value of servant leadership and a global education with real-world project-based learning (PBL).

Professional and Community Activities

Ensmann is interested in how digital game-based learning (DGBL) often evokes empathy from learners to the point that these learners become advocates for improvement. For this reason, she developed a prototype of a game-for-change to teach about the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child treaty to begin the process of systemic change to afford all children basic human rights, currently being developed into a first-person Unity game. Ensmann has organized travel abroad to rebuild homes, care for orphans, and lead UT students to collaborate and produce games to improve learning for children in Haiti. Within the U.S., Ensmann has run marathons to raise money for cancer research. To support her interest and experience on the correlation of increased physical activities with educational gains and performance, she incorporated wearable technologies into her curricula to personalize data collection for students while having them get-fit-to-persist.

Honors and Awards

In collaboration with colleagues, Ensmann's awards include the UT Research Innovation and Scholarly Excellence (RISE) grants in:

The 2020-2021 year for Pandemics, Paradigms, and Disruptive Technologies: Exploring Student Learning with a Dynamic Discussion Community Building Platform Designed with Social Presence, Engagement, Interaction, and Gamification. Through a unique combination of disruptive innovation and social presence, teacher-scholars teamed up to explore the connections among social presence, disruption, engagement, and gamification coupled with pedagogy, research, and practice using a community-building platform. Based on findings from our previous research, The Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on Teaching and Learning (Ensmann, S. et al., 2021), which explored the disruptive shift to emergency remote learning (ERL), this new study emplyed deisruptive innovation theory as a lens. Diruptive Innovation theory posits the deiruptive technologies can foster positive changes caused by unforeseen interruptions to traditional learning.

The 2019-2020 year for Digital/Audio Interactives to improve Learning in a Developing Country to fulfill her PBL ID research with DGBL in Haiti.

Ensmann was also awarded special project funding by the Department of Education in:

• Fall 2019 for Measuring the Affective Domain with a Facial Expression Readerto analyze the emotions evoked during gameplay designed in the Introduction to Instructional Games course.
• Spring 2019 for Developing Graduate Students into Published Scholarsto support students to publish ID research completed during their Inquiry and Measurement course.
• Fall 2018 for Inspiring Inquiry and Measurement with Wearable Devices to acquire FitBits for her students to experience data collection and research competencies through personal applications.

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