Sean Hobson is Chief Design Officer and Assistant Vice President at EdPlus at Arizona State University, where he helped build ASU Online and design the university's first fully online degree programs — now serving more than 112,000 online degree-seeking students.
As Clinical Assistant Professor, Sean co-designed and co-teaches The Agentic Self, a course on agentic AI created with will.i.am, launched in spring 2026 as part of a collaboration among ASU, FYI.AI, and NVIDIA developing AI tools for learners. He is also the creator of DesignedChange.ai, a free assessment measuring how intentionally organizations design their approach to change.
As ASU's first Chief Design Officer, Sean has directed many of the university's most significant design and partnership initiatives, including Study Hall, a credit-bearing learning platform built with YouTube and Crash Course, and education partnerships with Uber and Starbucks, and the University of Tennessee with work covered in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and NPR.
Sean holds a Ph.D. in University Design and Learning Innovation from Dublin City University; his dissertation, Learning Innovation Departments as Transformational Change Agents for Higher Education, examined how learning organizations understand, adapt, and change through a study of EdPlus at ASU. He advises universities and educational technology companies on organizational design and learning innovation.