Dr. Stella Porto
Until 2014, Stella Porto was for 9+ years the director of the Master of Distance Education & E-Learning program, having also had roles as Program Director for the Master of Information Technology, Associate Chair and Acting Chair in the Information and Technology Systems Department in the Graduate School at UMUC. She has been working as a faculty member and staff at UMUC since January 2001. She has taught in the Graduate School in several different programs.
Since September 2014, Stella has taken the role of Learning & Knowledge Specialist at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in IDB's Institute for Economic and Social Development (INDES). Stella oversees all the phases of planning, development, management, marketing, delivery and quality assurance of INDES online courses to all stakeholders (people in the bank and public officials in areas of economic and social development in the partner countries in the Americas). This includes courses using virtual classrooms and offerings through EdX, with whom INDES have recently partnered.
She received a BS in Electrical Engineering in 1986 from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio). She obtained her Master's and Doctoral degrees in Informatics (CS at PUC-Rio) in 1991 and 1995, respectively, from the same institution. In May 2008 she also completed her Masters degree in Distance Education from UMUC.
Stella initially worked as a hardware designer and moved to academe in 1989. As a researcher in CS for 10 years at the Computing Institute of Federal Fluminense University, her work focused in the fields of parallel processing and heuristic methods for combinatorial optimization problems. In teaching, her experience ranges a variety of different courses in Computer Science, including: algorithm design, parallel programming, computer architectures, parallel and distributed computing and parallel algorithms. In the DE field, her teaching mostly focuses on distance learning technologies.
In terms of research, her interests are in the Distance Education field, primarily including topics related to new technologies, new media, and course development models. She also has special interest in the education of Information Technology topics.
Since September 2014, Stella has taken the role of Learning & Knowledge Specialist at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in IDB's Institute for Economic and Social Development (INDES). Stella oversees all the phases of planning, development, management, marketing, delivery and quality assurance of INDES online courses to all stakeholders (people in the bank and public officials in areas of economic and social development in the partner countries in the Americas). This includes courses using virtual classrooms and offerings through EdX, with whom INDES have recently partnered.
She received a BS in Electrical Engineering in 1986 from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio). She obtained her Master's and Doctoral degrees in Informatics (CS at PUC-Rio) in 1991 and 1995, respectively, from the same institution. In May 2008 she also completed her Masters degree in Distance Education from UMUC.
Stella initially worked as a hardware designer and moved to academe in 1989. As a researcher in CS for 10 years at the Computing Institute of Federal Fluminense University, her work focused in the fields of parallel processing and heuristic methods for combinatorial optimization problems. In teaching, her experience ranges a variety of different courses in Computer Science, including: algorithm design, parallel programming, computer architectures, parallel and distributed computing and parallel algorithms. In the DE field, her teaching mostly focuses on distance learning technologies.
In terms of research, her interests are in the Distance Education field, primarily including topics related to new technologies, new media, and course development models. She also has special interest in the education of Information Technology topics.
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