James Levin

This is Jim Levin's third time back to UC San Diego, and he hopes that the third time will be the charm. He grew up in western Pennsylvania and earned a BA in Psychology from Swarthmore College in eastern PA. He first came to UC San Diego in 1969, where he earned a Ph.D. in Psychology. He set off for LA city, working at a computer science research institute in Marina del Rey as the token psychologist while living in Venice CA. After discovering that Venice is not Marina del Rey, he returned to UCSD in 1978, teaching in the Communications Program and the Teacher Education Program. In 1985, the University of Illinois made him an offer he couldn't refuse, and he and his wife Sandy and daughter Tera headed east for the plains of Champaign. He returned to sunny southern California in September 2003 as a faculty member in the Ed.D. program in Teaching & Learning.

He likes to take 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.