Rate My Professor Julie Schell

Dr. Julie Schell serves as Assistant Vice Provost of Academic Technology and Director of the Office of Academic Technology at The University of Texas at Austin. In this role, she oversees the university’s technology-enhanced learning ecosystem and advances teaching and learning through strategic use of academic technology. She has led the rollout of responsible AI initiatives for teaching and learning at UT Austin, including founding UT Sage, a generative AI tutor grounded in responsible AI and learning science principles. Dr. Schell is also an Assistant Professor of Practice in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy in the College of Education and in the School of Design and Creative Technologies in the College of Fine Arts. Over the past eleven years at UT Austin, she has taught graduate and undergraduate courses on technology, pedagogy, and learning experience design. In her current studios, she and her students partner with generative AI to prototype speculative objects and environments designed to improve teaching and learning.

Dr. Schell earned her Ed.D. in Higher and Postsecondary Education from Teachers College, Columbia University in 2009, an M.S. in Counseling and Educational Psychology from the University of Nevada, Reno in 2000, and a B.S. in Health Sciences from the University of Nevada, Reno in 1997. She completed a four-year postdoctoral fellowship focused on the science of teaching and learning in the Mazur Group at Harvard University. Prior to her current positions, she served as Assistant Dean of Instructional Continuity and Innovation at the College of Fine Arts, where she led the transition to online learning for over 200 arts and design faculty and staff during the COVID-19 pandemic, and held positions at Yale, Stanford, Columbia, and Harvard. She previously served as an Adjunct Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her professional interests center on AI pedagogy, instructional design, academic technology, technology-enhanced learning, online education, college teaching and learning, design thinking, design pedagogy, and learning experience design. Dr. Schell received the Provost’s Teaching Fellowship from The University of Texas at Austin in 2021 and the Dissertation of the Year award from the American Educational Research Association’s Postsecondary Division in 2010. She has facilitated hundreds of interactive talks, workshops, trainings, panels, and keynote speeches on generative AI in education, design thinking, interactive teaching, learning science, and technology-enhanced education across multiple countries. She is a member of Anthropic’s Higher Education Advisory Board and led the learning design of Grammarly’s Faculty Guide to Getting Started with Generative AI. In 2026, she was named a top 25 ed-tech influencer by EdTech Magazine and a Digital Learning Pioneer.