If you’re reading this, you’re either joining me from the start of this blog space, or you’ve really gone back into the archives. Either way, welcome! Consider this my goal-setting piece.
Who am I? I’ve been working in learning design for over a decade — as a practitioner, a researcher, a teacher, and lately as someone offering their skills to anyone working on interesting learning challenges — and I’ve wanted a space to share that’s completely my own. Not an employer-affiliated publication, not a conference paper, not a Canvas announcement. Just a place to think and work out loud, share what I’m working on, and contribute my voice to a field I genuinely care about.
A little background: I’m a learning designer with a Ph.D. in Learning, Design, and Technology from Penn State, where I also teach graduate courses and mentor the next generation of learning designers. My day job is a mix of traditional instructional design, design research, and consulting. I’m most at home conducting mixed-methods research initiatives focused on complex challenges in education, and I’ve explored topics ranging from equity in student outcomes to AI-supported assessment. My dissertation was about belonging: specifically, how instructional designers either support or undermine online learners’ sense of belonging through the decisions they make. That question still shapes how I think about design.
I care a lot about the learning design field, and the practice of instructional design. I believe fully that our work is a field of practice worthy of study and scholarship, and that those who do our work are change agents whose beliefs and practices deeply shape the learning experiences we produce, even when we are frequently not positioned as true owners of our design artifacts.
I also co-founded the Design Justice Network’s Instructional Design Working Group, which probably tells you something about the lens I bring to the field. I tend to ask questions like: who does this design actually serve? What assumptions are baked into how we’re approaching this problem? Is the process sound, or are we just making the output look good?
That last question is one I keep coming back to, especially right now. A lot of what I write here (at least in the beginning) will be about the tension between process and output in learning design — how that tension shows up in the classroom, in practice, and increasingly, in how we use AI. I’ll also write about belonging, equity, and what it looks like to bring a critical lens to design work without losing sight of the practical.
I’m writing for practitioners, for graduate students coming up in the field, and for potential collaborators and clients who want to understand how I think before we work together. I’ll keep it conversational — these are design notes, not journal articles — but I’ll bring the research when it’s relevant, because that’s kind of the whole point.
If any of this resonates, I hope you’ll keep coming back!