About
Dr. Angela Gunder is a transformative leader, speaker, and educator working to advance access to education globally. As the principal and founder of Opened Culture (OEC), a pioneering collaboratory and strategic consultancy dedicated to empowering stakeholders across the educational ecosystem to establish and sustain cultures of openness, she leads high-impact teams in solving the ubiquitous challenges facing the field in reimagining a more inclusive future of learning. Through leading-edge research, academic innovation, and community engagement, OEC guides institutions and communities in leveraging innovative strategies, pedagogies, and technologies to instantiate and sustain collaborative and engaged cultures of openness.
Prior to founding OEC, Angela served as the Chief Academic Officer and Vice President of Learning for the Online Learning Consortium (OLC), where she was responsible for leading the strategy and operations of a comprehensive portfolio of services and initiatives reaching educators at over 850 member institutions across the globe. This included guiding the Center for Professional Learning, the Research Center, strategic partnerships and consulting, grants, quality initiatives, programming and global events, and community engagement. From 2020 to 2024, she served as the OLC lead for Every Learner Everywhere, a solutions network funded by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation focused on advancing digital learning equity. In this capacity, she co-authored numerous open-knowledge products on high-quality digital learning, caring for students, and effective practices for culturally-responsive instructional design.
Recognition, Research, and Education
Angela’s contributions to the field have been internationally recognized, including her co-authored open framework for advancing digital learning change work, which was acknowledged by UNESCO in 2021. She has also been a principal investigator and project lead on five grants from the National Security Agency’s STARTALK Program, all aimed at empowering world language educators to leverage open educational resources and open technology to make learning pathways from K-12 through higher education to the workforce more accessible. She is also the recipient of two Online Learning Consortium Effective Practice Awards for the creation of a framework for personal learning networks, and for the creation of exploratory installations of education technology, respectively. In 2019, Angela was named an OLC Fellow for her dedication to service, innovation, and scholarship in support of student success in online learning.
As praxis informs her leadership, Angela is an online instructor for The University of Arizona School of Information, teaching undergraduate and graduate-level courses on instructional design, digital media, web design, and gameful learning. Her research focuses on open remix practices, opened culture, digital literacies, narrative digital learning practices, and emerging technology for language acquisition. She holds a B.S. in Computer Science and Fine Art from Fordham University, a M.Ed. in Education Technology from Arizona State University, and a Ph.D. in Teaching, Learning, and Sociocultural Studies from The University of Arizona, where in 2020 she was named an Erasmus Scholar by the College of Education for her commitment to the college, the university and to the community.
About the Artwork
The artwork featured on this website are a selection of the digital paintings and collages that Angela has created over the years. In her time at Fordham University, Angela studied black and white photography in the documentary style in New York City and Orvieto, Italy, as well as painting, drawing, and visual communications. She currently researches digital literacies, remix practices, and narrative digital learning practices as part of her academic work, which seamlessly blends into her creative practice as an artist and storyteller. You can explore more of her artwork and her reflections on creativity and identity on her website, Angela Remixes.
