Current Position and Past Experience
Dr. Yakut Gazi has worked at higher education institutions in the United States, Qatar, Turkey, and Spain as an instructional designer, media specialist, IT consultant, faculty member, and technology leader since 1993. She currently serves as Inaugural Vice Provost for Learning Innovation and Digital Education at Duke University. She was also at Georgia Tech Professional Education for six years. Prior, she was the assistant vice chancellor for engineering remote education at Texas A&M University.

In this role, she provided collaborative institutional leadership, working with faculty and academic leaders to develop innovative, strategic solutions for online, blended, distance, and open programs and courses. Among her successes is her leadership of the evaluation, adoption, and implementation of a predictive analytics project tying together learner data sources from the student information system, learning management system, and student affairs systems to focus on and support the learner.

She was instrumental in shaping a continuing education system, which featured a learner record with federated identity management across a common education portal for the entire A&M System and its multiple campuses.

Dr. Gazi also led the distributed learning and classroom technology operations at Texas A&M University-Central Texas. Under her leadership, the institution’s online semester credit hours grew to 40% and the institution was awarded the 2013 Quality Matters Making a Difference for Students Award for online educational quality.

She has lived at Texas A&M’s campus in Doha, Qatar, where she made a significant contribution as a staff member. In addition to these roles, she has taught courses in educational technology, foundations of distance learning, psychology of learning, theories of learning, and predictive analytics in higher education.

Education, Honors and Achievements
Dr. Gazi has her Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from Texas A&M University, and an M.A. in Educational Sciences and a B.S. in Teaching Chemistry, both from Bogazici University in Turkey.

Gazi was instrumental in Texas A&M University’s award as the 2013 Quality Matters Making a Difference for Students Award winner for online educational quality.

Personal Details and Community Involvement
She is on the editorial review board of the Journal of Social Media in Society, Educational Technology, Research, and Development (ETR&D), and the MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching. She presented at regional, national, and international conferences and is the author or co-author of book chapters, journal articles, and proceedings. She is the co-author of a book titled, “Discourse Indicators of Culture in Online Courses: Designing Learning Environments for Global Success.”

Connect
You can connect with Gazi through the Georgia Tech Professional Education website and on LinkedIn.