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...