Maaike Bouwmeester

For over 20 years, Maaike has held a variety of educational technology teaching, product design and leadership positions. Prior to joining the ECT faculty, she was Vice President of Product Development at Taskstream, an educational software company serving over 400 post-secondary educational institutions in the United States. Maaike led design research, strategic product development, planning, UX strategy, and Agile/ Lean software development. She was also responsible for hiring and managing product development teams who worked on the design and development of educational, productivity and outcomes assessment tools along with accompanying analytics and reporting capabilities.

As a faculty member in the ECT programs at NYU, Maaike has taught a wide range of courses including Foundations of Cognitive Science, Design Process for Learning, and User Experience Design. She has also led the internship and thesis components of these programs. 

As Program Director, Maaike developed three specializations now offered to all Master’s and PhD students: User Experience Design, Learning Analytics and Online Learning Design. Her teaching and research focus on effective and evidence-based active learning and teaching practices, examining their underlying theoretical basis (why it works), situational determinants (when it works) and applicability (what purpose and goals it serves).  Most recent examples include the use of media to support rich, hands-on STEM learning in elementary education in cultivating maker skills and dispositions, novel approaches to teacher professional development and fostering and scaffolding reflective practice. She has also developed the "RICH learning" approach (Relevance, Inquiry and Challenge in Higher Education) which aims to foster creative and effective problem-solving among novice designers wrestling with complex design challenges. In her teaching, she has explored how technology and media affordances can effectively support project-based and experiential learning approaches in sustainable, scalable and innovative ways.

Maaike is co-editor of Emerging Learning Design, and was recently awarded an IHDSC grant to explore various uses of media in supporting STEM learning at the elementary level. She is deeply committed to design that brings about effective and active learning to communities that often don’t benefit from these approaches. 

Maaike Bouwmeester earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan (Sociology and pre-med) and her M.A. and Ph.D. from New York University School of Education in the field of Educational Communication and Technology. Before moving into educational technology, Maaike served in the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping, where she was posted overseas in both Croatia and Bosnia.