Meet the OSLA Staff

Director
	Bill Murry wmurry@usfca.edu X 5486 William D. Murry, Ph.D. is currently the Director for Student Learning Assurance at the University of San Francisco (USF). His involvement in learning outcomes assessment spans nearly 12 years and he is currently responsible for all survey, measurement, and reporting of institutional student learning; collaborates on program review and assessment; and collaborates on course level assessment with all faculty. Dr. Murry developed the university guidelines for planning and reporting of program learning assessment and course learning assessment. He received his doctorate from Virginia Tech in Management with a focus on leadership and human resource management with minors in industrial psychology and psychometrics. Dr. Murry is a Wabash Teagle Scholar, a graduate of the prestigious Assessment Leadership Academy sponsored by the Western Association for Schools and Colleges, and was a practicing Architect before moving into academics. Prior to coming to USF Dr. Murry taught at several universities for 13 years on topics that included leadership, human resources, compensation, corporate strategy, and organizational behavior at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. He has published in many top rated journals and made presentations at numerous conferences and symposiums on the topic of learning outcomes assessment.
Senior Research Analyst
	Renate Otterbach otterbach@usfca.edu X 2999 Renate Otterbach, Ed.D. started her career by teaching inner-city gifted and at-risk minority junior high and high school students in Texas. Guided by her desire to maximize each student’s potential, she first became an Educational Specialist for gifted and talented students and later pursued a doctorate in education. As Education specialist at the regional level, she worked with 28 school districts on planning, implementing, and evaluating gifted and talented programs. Her responsibilities included student identification, teacher training, and curriculum design. This experience provided her with a deeper understanding of the complexity of education and the importance of research-based decision making. An increased appreciation for theory and a deepened interest in the cognitive processes that facilitate learning led her to pursue her doctorate in learning and instruction at University of San Francisco, followed by a post-doctorate at Yale University with Robert Sternberg, where she worked on a large scale project funded by the National Science Foundation. The goal of the Yale project was to compare the effectiveness of instructional methods based on three distinct theoretical models. Her responsibilities included designing the project’s science curriculum, including appropriate assessments, providing teacher training, and supervising the implementation of the curriculum. In 2001 she returned to San Francisco to work in the Office of Institutional Research as a Senior Research Analyst. In addition, she taught evening and weekend classes in both qualitative and quantitative research methods at San Francisco, San Francisco State University, and St. Mary’s College of California. Currently, she is working as a senior research analyst for the Office of Learning Assurance. Her goal is to integrate her educational knowledge to design a model that maximizes students’ educational experience at the college level.