Beyond the Beaker

A self-assessment that was more revealing than expected If someone asked me to rate myself as an evaluator right now, on a formal scale from 1 to 6, I would land at a 3. Not falsely modest, not overconfident. Just honest about where I actually am versus where I would like to be. I feel grounded in some foundational skills, especially the ones tied to reflection and growth, but I am still developing the more structured, theoretical side of evaluation: program logic, design frameworks, and the discipline of naming the assumptions that sit underneath everything we do. The interesting part of doing this self-assessment was realizing I have been doing informal evaluation for years without calling it that. It turns out that is both encouraging and a little humbling, because "informal" and "rigorous" are not the same thing, and the gap between them is exactly where my growth needs to happen. Where I feel most confident Two competencies stood out immediately because they ar...

Reflections on eLearning Development and Where It's All Headed There's a moment in every eLearning development project where you stare at the screen, question every decision you've ever made, and seriously consider a career in education administration. I had that moment. Probably more than once. And if the assignment prompt is any indication, that experience is less a personal failing and more an industry-wide rite of passage. So let's talk about it. The Process: What Went Well (and What Absolutely Did Not) Going into this project, I felt reasonably confident. I've worked with technology. I understand learning design principles. I've sat through enough bad eLearning modules in my career to know exactly what I didn't want to build. What I dramatically underestimated dramatically was the gap between knowing what good looks like and knowing how to make it. The parts that went well were, predictably, the parts most connected to what I already knew. Organizin...

The Classroom Has No Walls: What Online and Blended Learning Will Look Like in 2035 I've sat through enough strategic planning meetings to know that predicting the future is a fool's errand. But someone has to do it anyway. That's leadership. So here is my honest, slightly caffeinated take on where online and blended learning is headed over the next ten years, and what it will demand of those of us steering the ship. AI Will Be Our Co-Designer (Whether We're Ready or Not) Generative AI isn't coming for instructors' jobs... it's coming for their Saturday afternoons spent rebuilding course content. Within a decade, AI will function as a persistent design partner: flagging where learners are dropping off, generating adaptive pathways, and drafting assessments faster than any committee ever could. The real leadership challenge won't be adopting AI, it'll be governing it. Who audits the algorithm? Who ensures it doesn't quietly advantage some learners...

When I think about online and blended learning, I don’t define it by platforms, tools, or whether students are physically present. Instead, I define it by how learning is designed, supported, and experienced. Online and blended learning, at their best, are intentional learning environments that extend access, personalize learning, and challenge traditional assumptions about where and when learning happens. What Does Online and Blended Learning Look Like to Me? To me, online and blended learning look less like a digital replica of a face-to-face classroom and more like a carefully choreographed experience. It includes clear structure, predictable routines, meaningful interaction, and opportunities for reflection. As Conceição and Howles (2020) emphasize, effective online learning environments are intentionally designed with attention to learner engagement, cognitive presence, and instructor presence. In practice, this means learning activities that encourage dialogue (discussion boards ...

INTRO Most of my learning over the past several years has happened through a screen; sometimes intentionally, sometimes out of necessity, and occasionally out of sheer desperation. Like many professionals in the field, I’ve moved fluidly between formal digital learning environments (learning management systems, structured online courses, and blended programs) and informal spaces like YouTube. But one thing for certain is my relationship with digitally learning didn’t begin as a carefully designed experience grounded in learning theory. It began in survival mode. EXPERIENCE When schools shut down during COVID, I was teaching 5th and 6th grade science, and overnight, my classroom became a screen. There was no gradual transition, no professional development runway, and certainly no deep discussion of multimedia principles. The goal wasn’t  “effective digital learning”  it was: keep students connected, engaged, and learning enough to get through the week. At the time, I thought I ...

When Your Needs Assessment Needs… a Needs Assessment If there’s one thing I’ve learned while working through this project, it’s that conducting a needs assessment in, even in theory, is difficult. It feels like trying to assemble IKEA furniture with half the instructions missing and three people insisting you’re holding the wrong Allen wrench. The biggest challenge for me was accepting that a needs assessment isn’t a magical diagnostic wand. It’s messy. Humans are messy. Everything is interconnected. Low morale bleeds into communication issues. Communication issues reinforce training gaps. Training gaps cause safety concerns. And all of it loops back into morale like a self-feeding performance ouroboros. Another surprising difficulty? The balance between what leadership thinks  is happening and what employees *actually* experience. Trying to reconcile the two felt like translating between dialects no one admitted they were speaking. Leadership wanted to focus on equipment training....