Rebecca M. Quintana is the Learning Experience Design Lead at the Center for Academic Innovation at the  University of Michigan (U-M). She is also an Intermittent Lecturer at U-M's School of Education. 

In her role of Learning Experience Design Lead, Quintana uses a learner-centered approach to design and develop online learning experiences for diverse audiences of global learners. Partnering with faculty across the University, Quintana is involved in curriculum development, assessment design, and course strategy for a wide range of courses across U-M’s online portfolio. Central to this work is a commitment to design approaches that value both diversity and inclusiveness, which is based on the foundational principle of equitable use. 

Quintana leads several research projects, including exploring how design representations and practices can be used to support design teams, developing approaches that allow learners to take on a more consequential role in course design and iteration, and investigating the processes and resources that are needed to support hybrid and blended instances of online courses. Her doctoral research centered on the role visual representations can play in collaborative knowledge construction, specifically within rich simulation environments in middle school science classrooms. At U-M, Quintana has extended this work through the study of how technology-mediated role-based simulations can support multifaceted activity among participants who adopt different roles as they use and exchange multiple resources and information to explore sociopolitical issues within an experiential learning context.

Quintana is active in several research communities and has presented extensively in conferences such as the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS), the Computer-supported Collaborative Learning Conference (CSCL), and the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). Quintana’s research has been published in outlets such as Instructional Science, Online Teaching and Learning Journal, and the European Review of Online and Distributed Learning. Quintana and her colleagues were presented with a Best Paper award at the American Educational Research Association by the Online Teaching and Learning Special Interest Group in 2018.  

Quintana is a certified teacher with teaching experience spanning 20 years within a variety of K-16 contexts, including teaching core subjects at the elementary level and visual arts at the secondary level.