Saadia Ali
Responsibilities
Saadia serves as the Graduate Assistant for Global Programs in the Office of Global Engineering, Education and Research (GEER). She supports the activities and initiatives of GEER and assists with program management and evaluation of the office's international programs.
Education
Saadia holds a M.S. Degree in Bilingual & Multicultural Education & TESOL (Teachers of English to the Speakers of Other Languages) from Southern Connecticut State University and a M.A. in English Linguistics & Literature from National University of Modern Languages (NUML), Pakistan. She holds a B.A. in English Literature, Islamic Studies & Persian (Liberal Arts) from the University of Punjab, Pakistan. As a specialized ESL Instructor she has worked with immigrant students including adults, graduates and undergraduates with a determination to empower them in each class.
Research
Saadia is a motivated mentor with over 16 years of teaching and research experience in Higher Education. She is an adjunct faculty member at University of Northern Colorado (UNCO). Her areas of research are accessibility, assistive technologies, online educational resources, translanguaging practices, bilingual and multicultural education, linguistics, instructional design & technology, social emotional learning, community engagement & distance learning, artificial intelligence and multilingualism. She is fluent in English, Urdu, Hindi and Punjabi languages. As a lifelong researcher and learner, she has been engaged in Online Educational Resources and how to make online content comprehensible and easily accessible. She is also planning to explore Artificial Intelligence (AI) and gamification in educational areas, social emotional learning with an emphasis on digital dependence with keen attention to detail in curriculum development through digital and immersive technologies. Saadia is also working as a project manager for creating an Open Educational Resource (OER) textbook.
Background
Saadia is pursuing her doctoral degree in Instructional Design and Technology in the College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences at Virginia Tech. She served as a Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA) in the Graduate School’s Preparing the Future Professoriate Program at VT in Spring 2023. In Fall 2023, she worked as a Graduate Assistant in the School of Education. She is passionate about advocating for students, and ambitious to build interactive platforms for students, teachers and parents to reinforce community engagement and help students reach their full potential.