The case library describes specific decisions in depth. This page provides a broader view of the contexts in which those decisions were made and the kinds of problems that prompted them.
Corporate and Organizational Learning
Much of this work began with a request to build training and ended with a different question: whether training was the right response at all. In corporate technical environments, the first task was often separating performance problems that learning could address from those rooted in process, tooling, or organizational structure. When learning was the right intervention, the challenge shifted to scoping it against real constraints on budget, learner time, and operational disruption.
- Determined whether learning was the right intervention before committing design resources, redirecting effort toward process or tooling changes when the evidence pointed elsewhere.
- Replaced high-cost vendor training with targeted curricula matched to actual job demands, building diagnostic capability rather than comprehensive product knowledge the role did not require.
- Designed technical training for distributed support teams across global operations, where consistency mattered but local conditions varied.
- Balanced immediate performance needs against longer-term capability development so that early-career staff built toward advancement rather than just meeting minimum requirements.
- Designed and delivered training for end users and fellow technology professionals during earlier career work in information technology, where the recurring problem was bridging the gap between system behavior and user understanding.
Higher Education: Course and Curriculum Design
Course and curriculum design work has spanned multiple institutions, disciplines, and degree levels. The common thread is a focus on shifting instruction away from content coverage and toward designs that require learners to reason, make decisions, and demonstrate applied capability. This work has included both building new courses and redesigning existing ones, often while navigating the distance between pedagogical intent and institutional reality.
- Designed and taught graduate courses in instructional systems design, including hybrid formats that combined in-person sessions with online work.
- Designed and consulted on undergraduate and graduate courses across IT, cybersecurity, computer science, data analytics, and software engineering programs, including courses in IT leadership, data administration, server and data center virtualization, and managing emerging technologies.
- Consulted on workforce alignment for curriculum design across multiple degree programs at both the bachelor’s and master’s level, ensuring that course outcomes reflected the demands of actual job roles rather than academic convention alone.
- Redesigned undergraduate courses around problems that required tradeoff analysis and judgment rather than procedural completion, across disciplines including engineering and social science.
- Designed assessments that surfaced reasoning and argumentation rather than recall, including rubric-based evaluation for large-enrollment courses where problems allowed more than one defensible answer.
- Navigated implementation constraints including faculty comfort with facilitation, grading systems built for right-or-wrong answers, and student expectations shaped by content-delivery instruction.
Faculty Development and Instructional Support
Supporting faculty who teach online introduced a different kind of design problem. Many instructors had deep subject matter expertise but limited experience with the pedagogical demands of asynchronous instruction. Needs assessment work in this area consistently revealed a gap between what institutions expected of faculty and what faculty had been prepared or supported to do.
- Conducted needs assessment that identified misalignment between institutional expectations for online discussion and the training faculty had actually received.
- Designed faculty development focused on pedagogical capacity rather than tool training, helping instructors understand why certain practices mattered and how to adapt them.
- Consulted on instructional strategy for online programs, including support for the transition from synchronous to asynchronous course models.
Community and Applied Learning Contexts
Some of the most useful design decisions involved recognizing when a course was the wrong format entirely. In community-facing programs serving adult learners with varied preparation and no recent classroom experience, the conventional instinct to move existing instruction online often missed the real problem.
- Identified when the real need was orientation rather than instruction, and designed accordingly.
- Built decision-support environments that helped learners figure out where they were in a process and what to do next, using familiar language and question-based navigation instead of lesson structures.
- Designed for populations with limited formal education backgrounds, where conventional course formats created barriers rather than access.
Research and Scholarly Contribution
Doctoral research in problem-centered learning and argumentation provided the analytical foundation for much of this work. The connection between research and practice runs in both directions: scholarly work informed design decisions, and applied work surfaced questions worth studying.
- Conducted doctoral research on how problem-centered learning environments support argumentation when problems allow more than one defensible answer.
- Translated research on ill-structured problem solving, case-based reasoning, and communities of practice into design and assessment decisions across corporate and academic settings.
- Contributed to research on interaction and learning behavior in virtual learning environments, examining how learners engage in 3D and online collaborative spaces.
- Co-authored peer-reviewed research on problem-based learning in undergraduate engineering and contributed to scholarly discourse in learning sciences and educational technology.
