James Levin

This is Jim Levin’s third time returning to UC San Diego, and he hopes the third time will be the charm. He grew up in western Pennsylvania and earned a B.A. in Psychology from Swarthmore College in eastern Pennsylvania. He first came to UC San Diego in 1969, where he earned a Ph.D. in Psychology.

He then moved to the Los Angeles area and worked at a computer science research institute in Marina del Rey as the institute’s psychologist while living in Venice, California. After discovering that Venice is not Marina del Rey, he returned to UC San Diego in 1978 to teach in the Communications Program and the Teacher Education Program.

In 1985, the University of Illinois made him an offer he could not refuse, and he and his wife Sandy and daughter Tera moved to Champaign. He returned to Southern California in September 2003 as a faculty member in the Ed.D. program in Teaching and Learning.

He enjoys taking walks on the beach with his wife.

Swarthmore College

Psychology, B.A., 1969

University of California, San Diego

Psychology, Ph.D., 1976

Dr. Levin's research focuses on distributed learning and on ways to help people learn better using powerful distributed learning environments. He has developed several innovative models of learning, including the concept of teleapprenticeships. He has been studying "teaching teleapprenticeships", instructional frameworks that allow education students to learn within the context of remote K-12 classrooms. He is currently developing multi-mediator models of learning.