Dr. George Veletsianos (Γιώργος Βελετσιάνος) is a Cypriot-Canadian academic, born and raised on the divided island of Cyprus. He now lives and works on the lands of the Dakhóta Oyáte (Dakota People), in Mni Sota Makoce (Minnesota), where he is Professor in the Learning Technologies program at the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. He holds the Bonnie Westby Huebner Chair in Education and Technology, and prior to his current position he held the Canada Research Chair in Innovative Learning and Technology (2013-2023) and the Commonwealth of Learning Chair in Flexible Education (2019-2022). He is a former Fulbright scholar, a D’Arcy McGee Beacon fellow, a BCcampus Open Education and Advocacy fellow, and an early-career fellow of the EU Network of Excellence in Technology Enhanced Learning.

Dr. Veletsianos has been designing, developing, and evaluating digital learning environments for nearly 20 years. His research agenda is focused on addressing complex problems related to education and society, such as inequitable access and harassment that academics and knowledge workers are subjected to when they share their scholarship online. Because possible solutions to these difficult problems cut across multiple disciplines, his research has embraced collaboration, interdisciplinarity, and methodological pluralism.

His research agenda focuses on three strands: (1) design, development, and evaluation of online and blended learning environments , (2) the study of learning experiences and participation in emerging online environments, and (3) learning futures. In these contexts, he studies learners’ and faculty experiences with online learning, flexible education, networked scholarship, and emerging technologies and pedagogical practices.

Dr. Veletsianos wrote and/or edited four books, and has individually and collaboratively published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers, book chapters, and reports. His latest book is Learning Online: The student experience (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020). He is recognized as one of the most cited researchers in the fields of education, online learning, and instructional design and technology (Baas, Koyak, & Ioannides, 2021; Bodily, Leary, & West, 2019; Bozkurk et al., 2015; Ioannides, 2023; Ratnasari, Chou, & Huang, 2024), but is skeptical of metrics and concerned about their (mis)use. He has received funding from such organizations as the Canada Research Chairs Program, Canadian Institutes for Health Research, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, National Science Foundation, and the Commonwealth of Learning.