Kelly Arispe has been selected to lead the School of the Digital Future as its new launch director. She will join Launch Associate Director Jon Schneider in continuing the strategic effort to establish the school and ensure its success.
“I’m honored and excited to step into the role of launch director for the School for the Digital Future,” Arispe said. “I’m especially eager to work collaboratively across disciplines, championing innovative programming that reflects the school’s mission and values while shaping transformative opportunities for our students and community in our increasingly digital and interconnected world.”
Arispe is a professor of Spanish in the Department World Languages. Her teaching and research have historically focused on computer assisted language learning, including hybrid and online language instruction, mobile-assisted learning and integrating personalized tutorial bots for language acquisition.
She is a community-engaged scholar and a leader of open educational practices who supports K-16 teaching communities across Idaho and the Pacific and Mountain West regions. She co-directs the Pathways Project, an open educational resource repository featuring over 900 ancillary materials, multiple Pressbooks and professional development tools to help teachers access teaching materials to support language learning and grow intercultural competence.
These and other initiatives have directly influenced Asripe’s teaching practices, including authoring an open educational resource textbook for upper-division Spanish courses and the strategic and careful integration of AI and other digital tools to enhance student learning.
About the School for the Digital Future
As a collaborative initiative under the College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Innovation and Design, the School for the Digital Future gives students new ways to master skills necessary for today’s evolving workplaces. It offers students opportunities to design their own degree programs, mixing and matching majors, minors and certificates to produce a flexible and valuable education that will lead them into the future.
Under Arispe and Schneider’s leadership, the School for the Digital Future will continue this excellent work by growing a structure that helps it accomplish its mission and goals.