CEP 800 · Fall 2024 · Michigan State University

Instructor: Dr. Brittany Dillman (dillmanb@msu.edu)

CEP 800 covered learning theory across behaviorism, cognitivism, social learning, and critical theory, then extended into neurodiversity, trauma-informed practice, choice, play, iteration, and assessment. The major deliverables included a theory of learning synthesis drawing on Freire, Vygotsky, Bandura, Lave & Wenger, Ladson-Billings, and Ryan & Deci; and “This Is Your Learner on ADHD” — a training for trainers and team leads that teaches them to identify silent steps in their own processes and audit for them, built entirely inside D2L. The Silent Steps framework was authored for this training because the concept did not exist in published literature and I needed a text for learners to engage with. I arrived at a working definition — that human learning is the socially situated building of consciousness — and a conviction that the designer’s job is not to choose one tradition but to know which conditions each one explains. My persistent pushback against philosophical behaviorism is not theoretical — it is practical: when I have trained people, I have never just shown them how to do things. I design experiences where learners construct their own justification for the how and arrive at the why that grounds it, because the why is what survives past short-term memory and actually supports performance.

EAD 861 · Fall 2024 · Michigan State University

Instructor: Dr. Emiko Blako (blalocka@msu.edu)

This course cracked my previous construction of learning as primarily only an act of emancipation when deployed in schools wide open. I found myself realizing that not only did adults deserve opportunities to learn for the rest of their lives, but that the quality of the designs with which they were required to engage, reinforces or suppresses their humanity. Learning designed for adults, not only can be, but must be emancipatory— especially in light of everything we examined regarding motivation and the need for self determination and autonomy among adult learners.

CEP 822 · Spring 2025 · Michigan State University

Instructor: Dr. Cary Roseth (croseth@msu.edu) & Sheza Mansoor (shezam@msu.edu)

In a word: humility. We read about the delicate nature of ethnographic epistemological practices, and the need for unconditional commitment of researchers to the agency of those from whom they hope to collect data. We practiced these principles when designing tools for conducting subject agency-forward field research qualitative interview questions and perspective-taking survey construction. First, this class challenged my previously held belief that scientific inquiry was about testing a hypothesis—a neutral framing. Instead, rigorous research actively tries to disprove a hypothesis. Then when a hypothesis is not sufficiently disproven at the end of a trial, academic integrity demands that the designers of the test or tests articulate every detail regarding the limitations of their testing before prescribing their best estimate of next necessary testing to pick up the torch where their own efforts to disprove their belief left off. After witnessing and occasionally taking part in more than a decade of humanity inventing new ways to prove their own untested hypotheses right or unceremoniously dashing the assertions of others on rocks comprised more often than not of elements amounting to especially dubious reasoning and especially unreliable sources— the contrast was literally moving. Quite unexpectedly, I found the content of study within this course to be among the most compelling in the program: math can indeed move one to tears.

CECP 6030 · [Semester Year] · Western Michigan University

Instructor: [Name]

[4-6 sentence learning summary goes here]

CEP 820 · Spring 2025 · Michigan State University

Instructor: Nicole Zumpano (zumpanon@msu.edu) & Anne Heintz (heintza1@msu.edu)

CEP 820 covered the full arc of designing and building an online learning unit — from learner analysis and alignment table construction, through RRTTTSL assignment design in two modalities, UDL integration, TPACK planning, WCAG 2.2 accessibility, and Quality Matters/OSCQR review, to a completed unit built in Canvas. The topic was open, and I used it to build a six-lesson online professional development course that helps professionals examine how their organization’s structures, norms, and processes function as unaudited learning designs — shaping how people inside them think and act whether anyone intended it or not. The final Canvas build integrated social annotation, concept mapping, and a consensus-building protocol I designed to move learners from individual analysis through genuine divergence into convergence.

CEP 813 · Summer 2025 · Michigan State University

Instructor: Dr. Brittany Dillman (dillmanb@msu.edu)

CEP 813 covered formative, summative, creative, and technology-enhanced assessment design, including data analysis and the relationship between measurement validity and organizational decision-making. The major deliverables were a blog series, a creative assessment, and a data analysis project. Across these, I kept arriving at the same question: what happens when you turn assessment tools around — when you use them not to evaluate individual performance but to evaluate whether an organization’s own structures and policies are aligned with its stated goals? The creative assessment used AI to co-design a self-evaluation rubric for organizational leaders, and the blog series examined how invalid assessment practices persist not because people don’t know better but because organizations haven’t built the feedback loops to catch them. The course gave me the technical language for something I’d been doing instinctively for years: designing measurement systems that make organizational misalignment visible.

UX 835 · Summer 2025 · Michigan State University

Instructor: Louise Stauffer (stauff82@msu.edu)

UX 835 covered WCAG 2.1 compliance auditing across automated, keyboard, screen reader, and magnification methods, along with the history of the Disability Civil Rights Movement and its implications for inclusive design practice. The major deliverables were a multi-method web accessibility audit, persona-based design rationales, and peer review of audit methodology. I audited a public-facing organizational website and uncovered compounding exclusion patterns — failures that affected not one population in one way but multiple populations simultaneously, with each barrier amplifying the others. The course repositioned accessibility in my thinking from a compliance obligation to a design precondition: if the people an experience is built to serve cannot perceive, navigate, or demonstrate within it, the experience is not underperforming — it is producing deceptive data about its own effectiveness.

CEP 856 · Fall 2025 · Michigan State University

Instructor: Blair Stamper, EdD (chamb300@msu.edu)

CEP 856 covered organizational change management frameworks, leadership philosophy development, coaching and feedback models, community diagnostic methods, and evidence-based intervention design. The major deliverables were a personal leadership philosophy, a community canvas mapping an organization’s authority and operating structures, a coaching and feedback plan, and a change proposal with stakeholder communication strategy. The topic was open, and I used it to conduct a diagnostic of a real organization I had been embedded in for years — mapping its authority structures, resource flows, and the gap between its stated values and its operational patterns. This was the course that gave formal language to what I had been building instinctively in every open assignment across the program: organizational change management tools designed to surface misalignment and create pathways for the people inside the system to correct it themselves.

CEP 857 · Fall 2025 · Michigan State University

Instructor: Candace Robertson (candacem@msu.edu)

CEP 857 covered current research and practice in learning design, including empathy mapping, stakeholder perspective-taking, project management for design initiatives, and authoring tool proficiency development. The major deliverables were stakeholder empathy maps, a project management framework, design iterations on an active intervention, and the Bad Design Remix — a redesign of a flawed e-learning module that became the origin of my LXD Essentials framework, authored in Articulate Rise and Storyline. Taken concurrently with CEP 856, the two courses bled entirely together: 856 provided the organizational diagnostic and 857 required the perspective-taking and design execution that fed directly into We See Us, the integrated organizational change methodology that my instructor identified as working at a scale multiples greater than course expectations.

CEP 857 · Spring 2026 · Michigan State University

Instructor: Dr. Andy Saltarelli (saltarel@msu.edu)

CEP 858 is structured around self-directed skill acquisition: identifying a capability gap relevant to your professional trajectory, selecting resources, documenting the learning process, and reflecting on how constraint shapes design thinking. My upskilling focus areas include Camtasia for microlearning video production, Articulate 360 Rise for transforming what was originally a high-friction, D2L-as-hub-style learning experience into a fully integrated, immersive experience wherein users can interact with content from sources four sources without following a single link. The course’s reflective journal structure surfaces something I’ve found consistently true across my work: constraints — whether externally imposed or internally embraced as an expression of commitment to inclusivity — do not limit design quality. They produce it, forcing the designer to identify what actually matters.

CEP 807 · Spring 2026 · Michigan State University

Instructor: Matthew Koehler (mkoehler@msu.edu) & Megan Eikey (harrimeg@msu.edu)

CEP 807 is the synthesis course — where the annotated transcript, showcase, and synthesis essay come together as a portfolio that must serve both an academic committee and a professional hiring audience. The major deliverables are this portfolio, the synthesis essay, and a capstone presentation. The work of this course has been the work of making the pattern across two years of coursework legible: every open assignment produced an organizational diagnostic tool, every design centered the people most affected by the problem, and every solution was built from within existing constraints rather than alongside them — before I had any formal language for what that pattern was.

CECP 6040 · Western Michigan University

Instructor: