Portfolio

When the university's Office of Accessibility Services flagged online course accessibility as a legal and equity risk, this project was commissioned to assess the full scope and build a remediation pathway.

Approach: Developed a tiered audit rubric covering document accessibility, video captioning, color contrast, alt text coverage, and navigation structure. Trained a team of student workers to conduct the initial audits. Built a faculty-facing dashboard in Canvas to show individual course accessibility scores and prioritized fix lists. Created a library of how-to guides and video tutorials for the most common remediation tasks.

Tools & Frameworks: Canvas accessibility reports, Ally by Instructure, Adobe Acrobat accessibility checker, Universal Design for Learning guidelines.

Outcome: 85% of audited courses reached AA compliance within 18 months. The process and rubric were adopted by two peer institutions through a statewide instructional design consortium.

New faculty teaching online for the first time consistently reported feeling underprepared, and student evaluation data confirmed inconsistency in online course quality across departments. This program was designed as a structured, cohort-based alternative to one-off training sessions.

Design Approach: The six-week program was itself delivered online — intentionally modeling the pedagogy it was teaching. Each week combined asynchronous content exploration with a synchronous cohort session for discussion and peer feedback. Participants built a real module for an actual upcoming course as their capstone project.

Theoretical Grounding: Garrison, Anderson & Archer's Community of Inquiry framework guided the program's emphasis on social, cognitive, and teaching presence. Adult learning principles (Knowles) shaped the self-directed, relevance-driven structure.

Outcome: Participant satisfaction scores averaged 4.7/5.0 over four cohorts. Courses developed during the program showed measurably higher Quality Matters alignment scores compared to a matched control group. 120 faculty trained annually.

This two-semester redesign project involved close collaboration with the biology department chair and three faculty members to completely rethink how BIO 101 was delivered. The original course relied heavily on traditional lecture delivery and high-stakes testing, contributing to one of the highest DFW rates on campus.

Approach: Applied backward design principles starting with clearly articulated learning outcomes, then restructured assessments, and finally redesigned instructional activities. Introduced pre-class video micro-lectures (3–8 minutes) freeing class time for collaborative problem-solving. Developed a suite of H5P formative assessment checkpoints embedded throughout the module sequence.

Outcome: The course earned Quality Matters certification in year two of implementation. The DFW rate dropped from 31% to 17% over three semesters.

Responding to student affordability data showing textbook costs as a significant barrier to enrollment and completion, this initiative paired instructional design support with a small stipend program to incentivize faculty adoption of open textbooks and openly licensed materials.

Approach: Developed an OER evaluation rubric to help faculty assess quality and pedagogical fit. Provided individualized design consultations to help instructors adapt and supplement OER materials to meet their learning outcomes. Coordinated with the library's subject librarians to curate discipline-specific resource repositories.

Outcome: 28 courses adopted OER in year one across eight departments. Student survey data showed no measurable difference in perceived content quality, and grade distributions were statistically equivalent to previous semesters. Program was recognized by the state system's equity and access office.