My learning design philosophy is anchored on four main focus areas: learning, openness, creativity, and inclusion.
Learning
I enjoy learning, and pursue professional development opportunities to stay up to date in my field. This means attending conference presentations or webinars, following learning design trends in academic and popular press, taking courses, and learning from my colleagues. I value feedback and reflective practice to learn from past experiences. In the past few years I became more involved in community engaged research and scholarship of teaching and learning. My goal is to continuously improve my knowledge in learning design to best serve students.
Openness
I believe that people should have open access to knowledge, and, as much as possible, I work to remove paywall barriers from courses and student resources. When creating content, I use Creative Commons open licenses unless there are reasons that prevent me in doing so. I share open educational resources (OER) and participate in collaborative efforts to adapt OER. I support and use open learning technology platforms like Moodle, WordPress, and PressBooks. Openness for me is about sharing, collaboration and access; I am actively engaged in on-campus and provincial OER initiatives, and plan to continue this work.
Creativity
Creativity and active learning are key focus areas of my professional practice. I look for ways that learners can directly apply newly learnt concepts to hands-on activities. Student-created resources, plans, artefacts, or knowledge repositories are some ways that I have been able to include active learning into courses. I enjoy working with students and faculty on creative sprints, and I have been experimenting with online studio and maker space environments. I like to think of ways to actively engage learners in their learning process, which can be further enhanced if students choose to share their final products in open spaces. I am currently working on developing student and faculty resources to support incorporation of student-created WordPress elements as classroom activities; a group of us received TRU’s Instructional Innovation Grant for this work. I was also honored to support a number of undergraduate research initiatives, in which I helped adapt existing curriculum to accommodate hands-on research activities. Making learning meaningful and interesting to students remains one of my priorities.
Inclusion
When designing educational experiences, equity, diversity, and inclusion are always on my mind. This may mean speaking with course subject matter experts about inclusivity of content and resources, or developing activities and assessments that give students choice of topics or modes of expression. I am learning from indigenous people at work and in the community what it means to decolonize my western thinking, and I think of ways of how my unlearning can translate into course design. I follow accessibility guidelines for the technological platforms we use and Universal Design for Leaning principles, making sure to include transcripts for any video resources needed to achieve learning outcomes, or adding text to images so that screen readers can access the visual information. Including visual and multimedia elements into learning resources is my special area of interest. Recognizing that many learners connect with visual material, I strive to communicate complex ideas not only through narrative, but also using multimedia approaches. I pay attention to the visuality as well as functionality of learning spaces; just as a physical room affects the way that we learn, an online environment does as well. As an artist, I also use graphic recording and facilitation to supplement communication and collaborative efforts with development teams. I have recently enjoyed working together with other visual enthusiasts to develop faculty resources on using visual strategies in the classroom, and would like to pursue this work further.
Responsibilities
As an Instructional Designer (ID) at Thompson Rivers University Open Learning, I lead teams of course-specific Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and provide guidance in the development of online course curriculum.
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My professional role consists of organizing and chairing SME selection committees, collaborating with respective campus departments to ensure learning outcomes alignment, and guiding SMEs through different stages of creating online content, activities, and assessments. When the curriculum development phase is completed, I work with OL (Open Learning) editors, intellectual property officers, media and production specialists, and materials and examinations colleagues to ensure that courses are produced in the most advantageous way for students. I sign off to indicate that courses are ready to welcome students, and liaison with OLFMs (Open Learning Faculty Members) as they start facilitating the new or revised courses.
In addition to workload, I take pride in serving the communities I work and live in. I share my professional expertise, artistic abilities, and general labor in a variety of university and community initiatives. The Service section of this portfolio has more information.
Projects
| Open Learning Courses | |
| BUSN 6081: Strategic Management | major revision |
| BUSN 6051: Supply Chain Management | major revision |
| BUSN 6031: International Business | major revision |
| BUSN 6951: Research Methods, Preparation, & Presentation | major revision |
| CMNS 3161: Media, Entertainment and Pop Culture | new course |
| CMNS 4241: Strategies in Crisis Communication | new course |
| BUSN 6071: Project Management and Consulting Methods | major revision |
| ECON 1901: Principles of Microeconomics | major revision |
| ECON 1951: Principles of Macroeconomics | major revision |
| HRMN 2821: Human Resources Management | major revision |
| HUMS 2231: Introduction to Mental Health and Substance Use | major revision |
| PSYC 1111: Introduction to Psychology 1 | major revision |
| PSYC 1211: Introduction to Psychology 2 | major revision |
| SOCI 3991: Sociology of Diversity : Issues for Canadians | major revision |
| TMGT 4021: Graduating Seminar | new course |
| Orientations | |
| Learning without Walls | student resource developed during Covid lockdowns |
| Teaching Unbound | faculty resource developed during Covid lockdowns |
| School of Business and Economics Open Learning Faculty Member Orientation | major revision |
| Case Studies (workload and service) | ||
| Gift ‘n Gab Trading Post | new | workload |
| Moccasin Trails | new | workload |
| Quaaout Lodge and Spa | new | workload |
| Spapium Little Prairie Farm | new | service |
| Spirit of the Lake Boutique | new | service |
| Be Inspired! | new | service |
| Books (workload and service) | ||
| Psychology-1st Canadian Edition | major revision | workload |
| Indigenous Businesses in the BC Interior: Case Studies in Marketing | new | service |
| Psychology of Language | new | service |
| Kweseltken Agriculture Guide | new | service |
Prioritizing Workload
Prioritizing workload is an every day activity for me, and there are number of factors I consider to help me organize large projects and daily tasks. Communication is a common denominator for all factors. Having to prioritize without asking questions and understanding a larger context would make prioritization more difficult for me. If I remember why something is important to expediate, I am better at achieving the deadline.
Factor #1: OL Context
Some of the questions I ask regarding the OL context are: Why is this course being revised? Are there any reports from the OLFMs? Is the course textbook out of print and we are not able to get more stock? If so, how much time do we have before we run out of stock? Is the course textbook going into a new edition? How much time is there to revise? Is this a routine yearly revision needed for a specific time (tax courses, as tax rules change yearly)? Is this a paced course that needs to be finished at a specific time in order for students to register? If so, how much time does editing and production need so that I can set timelines for the SMEs and me. How many students take this course every year? I also check student course evaluation data to see if there are any urgent issues from the OL student perspective.
Factor #2: TRU Campus Context (and Beyond)
Does the department with academic oversight need this revision/new course urgently? Is it because of a new program release scheduled at a particular time? Is this revision/development tied to accreditation? Are there funds that need to be used by a certain time? Is a specific course only offered on campus during certain semesters, and students need an alternative when the course is not offered on campus? Sometimes events outgrow the institutional context; for example, during the beginning of the Covid pandemic, priorities shifted as a result of provincial and federal directives, and it became most important for our team to provide online leaning workshops for faculty and to develop online learning resources for students, to quickly maximize the sharing of our expertise. The ministry of education may have goals to quickly address labor shortages by increasing training capacity through online learning, etc..
Factor #3: SME Schedule
As I prepare contracts and timelines, I speak to the development teams about Open Learning expectations, and how these expectations work with the SMEs’ existing commitments and schedules. Course development is often more involved than people expect, especially if they are new to online curriculum development. This prioritization factor is the most unpredictable one of the four, because SMEs are often also teaching faculty and have been, especially during the Covid pandemic, faced with unprecedented demands on their teaching practice and personal lives. I follow the timelines negotiated during the planning process, and update them with the teams as the development work progresses. I use an excel spreadsheet and an Open Learning database called D4P2 to keep track of where projects are at.
Factor #4: Amount of Effort Needed
I manage my own schedule in Outlook, and look for blocks of focused work time that I have available between meetings. As development work arrives from SMEs or as different Open Learning teams contact me for editing or production reviews, I estimate the effort needed to best utilize my time, keeping in mind factors one to three described above.
Success
Success to me is in impactful human service, and I am grateful to work in an environment which strives to fulfill a legislative mandate of providing open and accessible learning to students. Because this mandate resonates with my professional philosophy, I have been especially motivated to work on open, access-focused initiatives. Success to me is also working with others in ways that respect and celebrate everyone’s unique abilities and strengths.
- First Year Psychology – Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC)
I was given the opportunity to work on an adaptation of an open textbook with Dr. Sally Walters, and OL’s editing and production teams. The new open resource, Psychology-1st Canadian Edition, was then used for major revisions of two highly enrolled first year Psychology courses: Psyc 1111 and Psyc 1211, and I was the instructional designer facilitating the course revision process. The two courses see over 1000 student enrollments a year, which makes their ZTC status very impactful in student access to learning.
- Indigenous Businesses in the BC Interior: Case Studies in Marketing – Open Textbook
My first year at Open Learning saw me working on major revisions of graduate Business courses. Prior to my arrival, instructional designers worked with faculty and administration in TRU’s School of Business and Economics, and created a design framework to guide our revision work. The design framework identified high-level pedagogical strategies, including active, experiential learning and authentic assessments. Tied to place, local case studies were on a list of resources suitable to support the new vision for the revised program. I received project related funding and worked with a local indigenous business owner, Kathie Heard, and SME Dr. Biggi Weischedel to create the first case study in indigenous business marketing, Gift ‘n Gab Trading Post. We collaborated with TRU’s office of Indigenous Education and obtained Research Ethics Board approvals for all of our interactions with the business owners. OL’s media, editing, copyright, and production teams contributed an immense amount of their expertise and initiative to this project. The first case study has been so rewarding that we continued looking for grant funding to create more case studies, eventually publishing a suite of them in an open textbook compilation, Indigenous Businesses in the BC Interior: Case Studies in Marketing.
- Learning without Walls and Working with Campus Faculty
The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic brought an unprecedented sense of urgency to ensure that students are able to continue their learning away from physical classrooms. Being experts in online learning, OL teams planned how to help most people possible in a short amount of time. OL’s instructional designers welcomed campus faculty in webinars, offering tips and strategies in distance delivery. I worked with a number of faculty members individually, forming relationships that later evolved in Instructional Innovation collaborations (TRU WordPress in your course: Co-create innovative learning experiences with your students) and Scholarship of Teaching and Learning work (Multimodal Debates for Critical Thinking). But perhaps the most rewarding project of the very turbulent summer of 2020 was a resource that OL created for TRU campus students, Learning without Walls. Designed to help students succeed in alternate learning formats, I worked with OL colleagues and the TRU community to provide students with timely information about online learning technology, exams, learning strategies, and safe, remote connection with others in the university community and beyond. The resource is twinned in WordPress and Moodle (Moodle has additional hands-on Moodle activities); over 3700 students accessed the Moodle environment, and the number of visitors is still growing now.
Challenges
During the four years at TRU, my biggest challenge was the Covid-19 pandemic and its impact on my professional and personal life. Having described the successes of some of the pandemic time resources and projects, I need to acknowledge the backdrop that made that work possible. Along with millions of other people, my partner and I tried our best to homeschool and care for our two small children with the daycare and school closed, and work from home at the same time. The isolation, the stress, and the impossible task to respond to an urgent situation at work while being a full time caregivers and teachers is something that I wish we never have to experience again. All other work challenges and setbacks seem insignificant in comparison, and I have to thank my Instructional Design colleagues and the wider Open Learning community for their kindness, patience, and overall humanness.