Formerly, she was the Director of the Open Learning Initiative (OLI) at Carnegie Mellon University, a position she held since the program�s inception in 2002. She was also the co-director of OLnet. Jointly run by Carnegie Mellon and the Open University in the UK, OLnet is an international open educational research network.Thille's focus of research and development is in applying results from the learning sciences to the design, implementation and evaluation of open web-based learning environments. She served on a working group at the U.S. Department of Education to write the National Education Technology Plan for the Obama Administration and is currently serving on a working group for U.S. Department of Education to evaluate of the effectiveness of online courses for secondary students.