Leadership at the intersection of pedagogy and strategy.

Sean Michael Morris is an architect of digital learning and credentialing strategy whose career has joined executive leadership to a deep commitment to pedagogy. Beginning in 2012, he helped to surface the research field of critical digital pedagogy — an approach to teaching and technology as a practice of freedom — and that intellectual foundation has shaped every role since. Across edtech, corporate, and academic settings, he has defined operating models and program architecture where none existed, building credible, rigorous learning that scales globally while keeping educators and students at the center.

He currently serves as Director of CCA University at Complete College America, the national nonprofit working to dramatically increase college completion for low-income, first-generation, and historically underserved students, where he designs micro-credential and certification pathways and leads a professional learning platform for the student-success educators who serve them. In 2025 he brought the same rigor to the frontier of artificial intelligence as a fractional leader — as Head of Pedagogy at GPTZero, where he launched the company's inaugural AI literacy initiative, and as Director of Learning Design and Innovation at Propero Learning Systems, designing capability-based AI training for workforce learners.

From 2022 to 2025, Sean served as Vice President of Academics at Learneo, the multi-brand learning platform behind Course Hero, serving more than 100 million monthly users. There he redefined academic strategy across business units, grew the educator community by more than 150,000, and delivered AI Academy programming that earned the Anthem Award for Best Use of AI in Education. Earlier, at the University of Colorado Denver, he served as curriculum and design lead, launching one of the first Critical Digital Literacy certificate programs in the United States; as Director of Digital Learning at the University of Mary Washington, he made digital pedagogy a pillar of institutional strategy; and he held senior roles at Middlebury College and at Instructure, maker of the Canvas LMS.

As founder and executive director of Digital Pedagogy Lab from 2015 to 2022, Sean built an internationally recognized institute from the ground up, growing it from seventy-five participants to more than five hundred educators across over twenty countries and securing partnerships with institutions including the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the American University in Cairo, and the University of Mary Washington. His service to the field runs deeper still: he served as a curriculum consultant for the Gates-funded #RealCollege Curriculum at the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice; as an International Fellow at the Warwick International Higher Education Academy; as a reviewer of a pedagogical competency program for the Norwegian University of Science and Technology; and as a juror for the Falling Walls Foundation in Berlin.

A recognized thought leader, Sean is the co-author of An Urgency of Teachers: the Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy, editor of Voices of Practice: Narrative Scholarship from the Margins and Critical Digital Pedagogy: A Collection, and a contributor to volumes including The Ends of Knowledge (Bloomsbury) and Virtual Identities and Digital Culture (Routledge). His expertise has been featured by The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, Times Higher Education, Fortune, Forbes, The New York Times, and NPR, and he has delivered keynotes on six continents — at ASU+GSV, Open Education, OEB Global, EdCrunch, the Quality Assurance Agency in Scotland, and Aga Khan University. He holds an M.A. in English from the University of Colorado Boulder and a B.A. in English from Metropolitan State University. Across credentialing, scholarship, service, and leadership, his work returns to a single conviction: that education is a practice of imagination, and that the future of learning is something we make together.