Stephen Ehrmann, Ph.D.
Vice President, The Teaching, Learning, and Technology Group
Director, The Flashlight Program
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

About
Steve Ehrmann is one of the founders of The Teaching Learning and Technology Group. For over thirty years he has been working on three related issues:

  1. how best to use technology to improve education --for what kinds of improvement can technologies be most helpful;

  2. helping educators use data to understand that improvement (including its costs and tradeoffs), guide it and accelerate it;

  3. designing programs to help faculty and their institutions improve learning by using computers, the Internet, and related technologies.

Since 1993, he has directed the award-winning Flashlight Program on assessment and evaluation. Flashlight's tools, training, consulting and external evaluations help educators guide their own uses of technology, on- and off-campus. As part of his work with Flashlight, Dr. Ehrmann edits a free online journal on evaluation and assessment, F-LIGHT.

Dr. Ehrmann is also well-known in the field of distance education, dating back to his years of funding innovative research and materials in this field when he served as a program officer with the Annenberg/CPB Projects at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (1985-96).  Before that he was a program officer with The Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) (1978-85) and as Director of Educational Research and Assistance at The Evergreen State College. (1975-77)

Dr. Ehrmann has spoken all over the world on hundreds of campuses, and at dozens of conferences on the uses and abuses of technology for improving education and on how to gather evidence to improve the outcomes of educational uses of technology. As a consultant, he helps design program evaluations and helps institutions develop strategies for improving teaching and learning with technology in programs and institution-wide. Steve Ehrmann has written or helped to write four books and over thirty articles in this field, on subjects as varied as the economics of courseware and the future of liberal learning. 

His Ph.D. is in management and higher education from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from which he also received bachelor's degrees in aerospace engineering and in urban studies.  He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, with his wife Leslie.