Curtis J. Bonk, Indiana University, School of Education

Instructional Systems Technology (IST) Department

Longest Bio

 

Longest Bio:

Curtis J. Bonk is Professor in the Instructional Systems Technology Department in the School of Education and Adjunct in the School of Informatics at Indiana University (IU) where he teaches courses in psychology and technology. Curt received his B.A. in accounting from the University Wisconsin-Whitewater back in the Stone Age of Accounting making tabulations of rows of data on sheets of paper. He quickly became a budgetary projection wizard using impressive “killer apps” like VisiCalc and then Lotus 1-2-3. Unfortunately, management would not believe anything spit out of a personal computer; in those days, only data from “True Blue” IBM mainframes were to be trusted. Soon he shifted to learning technology tool tinkerer with WordPerfect and later a full-scale software designer and start-up company founder with SurveyShare and CourseShare. Across his career, Curt is a former software entrepreneur, certified public accountant, corporate controller, and educational psychologist who presently is an educational technologist, award-winning writer, highly published researcher, statewide and national awardee in innovative teaching with technology, and internationally acclaimed presenter.

 

After becoming sufficiently bored with his past life as a corporate controller and CPA in the mid-1980s, he relied on distance education to take correspondence and television courses as well as outreach face-to-face courses at night to qualify for graduate school. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. in educational psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison; the latter took him less than 18 months to complete. With this background, Bonk offers unique insights into the intersection of business, education, psychology, and technology.

 

After graduation in 1989, Curt Bonk spent three years on the faculty of West Virginia University in the department of educational psychology. He arrived at Indiana University in August 1992 exactly when the new IU School of Education building was opened to demonstrate and research the latest technology in education. A few years later, he was named the first and only faculty fellow for research in the Center for Excellent in Education (CEE) in that building. In the late 1990s, he was a founding member of the Center for Research on Learning and Technology (CRLT), which opened in the late 1990s to replace the CEE. In the first decade of the 2000s, Curt founded SurveyShare and CourseShare and created six other “share” sites such as TrainingShare, InstructorShare, PublicationShare, LibraryShare, QuizShare, and UniversityShare as an experiment. At that time, Bonk was also a Senior Research Fellow with both the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Lab within the Department of Defense as well as the Army Research Institute.  His academic interests are in online learning, massive open online courses (MOOCs) in the Global South, open education, collaborative technology, writing pedagogy and writing technologies, technology-enhanced global education, informal learning, emerging learning technologies, self-directed learning, online language learning, and blended learning.

 

Bonk has been honored with a number of awards, including the Burton Gorman Teaching Award from the IU School of Education in 1999, the CyberStar Award from the Indiana Information Technology Association (2002), the Most Outstanding Achievement Award from the U.S. Distance Learning Association (USDLA) (2003), an Alumni Achievement Award from the University of Wisconsin (2004), and the prestigious Mildred B. and Charles A. Wedemeyer Award for Outstanding Practitioner in Distance Education in 2014. In 2016, Curt Bonk received the AACE Fellowship Award from the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education for his leadership and service to the field. Exactly one year later in November 2017, he was fortunate to be awarded the Online Learning Journal Outstanding Research Achievement Award in Online Education from Online Learning Consortium in Orlando, Florida.

 

From 2012-2018, he was listed by Education Next and Education Week as a top 100 contributor to the public debate about education from more than 20,000 university-based academics. He was the first recipient of the Wilbert Hites mentoring award from IU in 2000, and, 20 years later, Curt was awarded the IU President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and Learning Technology in 2020 (short video, text); he was selected for both awards across the entire IU system of nine campuses. In November 2021, Curt was honored to receive the David H. Jonassen Excellence in Research Award at the AECT Conference in Chicago. In April 2022, the American Educational Research Association named him a 2022 AERA Fellow for his exceptional contributions to, and excellence in, education research and the following week he was honored with the International Engagement award from the IU School of Education. Most recently, he and his podcast team at Silver Lining for Learning (SLL) (https://silverliningforlearning.org/) were named the 2022 recipients of the Distinguished Development Award from the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) and Educational Technology Research and Development (ETR&D). The SLL team also received an Outstanding Digital Learning Artifact Award at AECT in October 2022.

 

Curt is the author of over 400 publications, including more than 150 journal articles as well as nearly 70 book chapters and 20 books. He has authored many widely used technology and learning related books, including the bestseller in 2009/2011, The World Is Open: How Web Technology is Revolutionizing Education. He has had three books published in 2022, including “Transformative Teaching Around the World: Stories of Cultural Impact, Technology Integration, and Innovative Pedagogy” which contains 41 short and emotional stories of transformative educational innovation and change in 22 countries from Curt Bonk’s former students. Other books include Engaging Online Language Learners, Empowering Online Learning, The Handbook of Blended Learning, and Electronic Collaborators. Bonk has also authored two free books on motivating online learners. The first free book was, Adding Some TEC-VARIETY: 100+ Activities for Motivating and Retaining Online Learners (http://tec-variety.com/) which he self-published in 2014. An update to that book came out in 2022 which was published by the Commonwealth of Learning, Motivating and Supporting Online Learners; it is also a free book (http://hdl.handle.net/11599/4481) and there is an associated free course available: https://colcommons.org/welcome/coursedetails/8; https://www.colvee.org/. In addition, during the past decade, he and his colleagues have edited three books on MOOCs and open education, including: MOOCs and Open Education Around the World (2015) as well as MOOCs and Open Education in the Global South (2020) (www.moocsbook.com/).

 

Across his career, Curt Bonk has given close to 2,000 presentations around the globe related to online teaching and learning, including over 300 keynote and plenary talks in places like in places like Bangkok, Thailand, Melbourne, Sydney, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Beijing, Toronto, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, Madrid, London, Manila, Seoul, Tel Aviv, Edinburgh, Dublin, Coimbra, Tampere, Barcelona, and Arequipa, Peru. In addition to dozens of radio and television appearances, he has also been interviewed for articles and reports from the Wall Street Journal Online, The New York Times, China Daily, The Boston Globe, Education Week, US News and World Reports, Delta Sky Miles Magazine, AARP, The Seoul Economic Daily, The Central Intelligence Agency, the APA Monitor, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Sydney Morning Herald, and much more. He co-hosts the weekly podcast show, Silver Lining for Learning (https://silverliningforlearning.org/). Curt can be contacted at cjbonk@indiana.edu. His homepage is http://curtbonk.com/. His mobile is 812-322-curt (2878).