Biography

Teshia Young Roby, PhD, MBA serves as the Assistant Vice President of Learning & Research Technologies in the Division of Information Technology & Instructional Planning. In her current role as an administrator, Dr. Roby serves as the business lead for campus-wide learning technologies such as the Canvas Learning Management System and leads the teams that design the technology-enriched classrooms and video creation spaces on campus and support faculty-lead instructional and data research. Dr. Roby also leads two initiatives that center student ingenuity, service learning, community partnerships, and career readiness: the Community Gardens Data Sensors Initiative that provides growth conditions data for healthful food growers in community gardens, particularly in urban food desserts; and a cybersecurity outreach program and educational pipeline to attract Black and brown female students to the cybersecurity field. Dr. Roby also serves as the co-chair of the Black Thriving Initiative at CPP. 

Prior to her current role, Dr. Roby served as an associate dean, department chair, and lead for Institutional Research, with research interesting in student success among underserved and minoritized student populations and equity opportunities. She is also a founding member of the Educational Leadership doctoral program, Cal Poly Pomona’s first doctoral offering. 

With scholarly interests in digital equity, inclusive pedagogies, and humanizing the online learning experience, Dr. Roby taught courses in Educational Multimedia and Ethnic and Women’s Studies programs in multimedia development and instructional design; equity and advocacy; and the intersections of culture, identity, gender, and technology. Later, she created and taught courses in the Ed Leadership program on leading minoritized populations, digital equity, K12 school equity data, and data-informed actionable insights and equitable and inclusive practices.

As an innovator, Dr. Roby was an early adopter in teaching fully online and blended learning courses at Cal Poly Pomona; she embraced universal design for learning (UDL) pedagogies and designed her course content to meet accessibility standards and ensured all course materials for all courses – traditional and online – were available to students within the campus’s learning management system. Dr. also created a course in digital storytelling and designed a graduate course on the topic of immersive, experiential, and alternative learning environments where students experienced a portion of the course in SecondLife, a fully immersive virtual environment and precursor to the emerging Metaverse.