My instructional design practice is grounded in three principles. Design begins with the learner, not the content: outcomes, assessments, and activities are sequenced to build the specific capacities learners need. Equity is structural: it shapes what gets assessed, how it gets assessed, and whose knowledge is represented. Collaboration with subject matter experts requires a design relationship, not a content handoff.
This practice spans Queen's University, OISE, Charles Sturt University, First Nations Technical Institute, and Six Nations Polytechnic across Ontario, Australia, and the Philippines.
| Role | Instructional Designer, Curriculum Developer, Course Architect |
| Scope | 3 graduate credits | 7-week hybrid intensive | Canvas LMS | 6 integrated ed-tech tools |
| Learners | Graduate students in education: pre-service and in-service teachers, curriculum specialists |
| Format | Asynchronous (Canvas) + 2 synchronous sessions (Weeks 1 and 7) |
| Regulatory | Ontario AODA (2005); TRC Calls to Action 62–65; OCT professional standards; OCAP principles |
UDL in Ontario postsecondary contexts defaults to a technicist accessibility compliance model. Institutions implement CAST guidelines primarily to satisfy AODA obligations, with minimal interrogation of whose epistemologies are served by LMS architecture, rubric conventions, and content representation defaults.
The course required a design that teaches UDL critically while modeling it structurally, and that prepares learners to make analogous design decisions in their own practice. Three subsidiary problems were articulated before solution design began:
A complete asynchronous workshop package for instructional designers and academic developers. 5 modules, 3 hours total, self-directed. Mapped to the Ontario TLCP (Teaching-Learning Critical Pathway). Developed under Pantaleon Consulting, 2026.
| Module | Core question | Est. time | TLCP phase |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1: Orientation | What does Canvas actually track? | 30 min | Assessment |
| 2: Reading the data | What is my course telling me? | 45 min | Assessment / Instruction |
| 3: Intervention design | What do I do with this information? | 45 min | Instruction |
| 4: Equity and ethics | What are the limits and risks of this data? | 30 min | Learning |
| 5: Monitoring routine | How do I sustain this practice? | 20 min | Instruction / Learning |
AI-detection software is not a defensible assessment tool. The research record establishes that detection tools produce false positives correlated with non-native English writing, and the outputs they flag are not reliably distinguishable from human writing by trained readers.
| Mechanism | Function |
|---|---|
| Process portfolios | Collect staged drafts, annotated AI logs, and revision memos. Assess the quality of the process, not only the product. |
| Oral accountability | 5-minute debrief or live Q&A on submitted work. Students who cannot speak to their own work in real time have not fully owned their thinking. |
| Contextual specificity | Require institutional documents, named students (anonymized), specific classroom events as primary evidence. Cannot be generated by AI. |
| Peer review with accountability | Students submit peer review explaining their evaluative reasoning. Harder to delegate than the original assignment. |
| Reflective meta-commentary | 200–300 word section in each submission where students account for choices made in producing the work. |
| Criterion | Excellent (4) | Proficient (3) | Insufficient (1) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Contextual situatedness | All claims traceable to named documents, events, or interactions from the student's actual practice | Professional context present and relevant; some claims could be more precisely grounded | No meaningful connection to the student's specific professional context |
| Analytical depth | Identifies interacting causes; commands two+ theoretical frameworks as analytical tools; moves from description to structural diagnosis | Analysis moves beyond description; frameworks applied, not merely cited | Primarily descriptive; no causal reasoning; frameworks mentioned in passing |
| Evaluative judgment | Evaluates competing positions using explicit, justified criteria; recommendation argued against real constraints the student faces | Evaluation present and reasoned; position arrived at though justification could tighten | No evaluation; presents information without arriving at a judgment |
| Counter-evidence engagement | Actively seeks disconfirming evidence; argument demonstrably stronger for having been tested | Acknowledges some counter-evidence; engagement present but could be more sustained | No engagement with complicating evidence; argument self-confirming and untested |
| Use of course scholarship | Readings used as analytical tools; specific arguments applied, extended, or identified as limited | Readings present and relevant; connection between scholarship and analysis is clear | Readings absent, minimal, or incorrectly applied |
At Charles Sturt, post-placement data from three sources (supervisor reports, student reflections, in-class observation notes) showed classroom management gaps were not a content problem but an assessment design problem. The assessment tested declarative knowledge, not applied judgment.
The redesign moved from written analysis to a case-based scenario with a decision-making component. The following cohort received substantially stronger supervisor ratings in targeted competencies. The revised assessment design was adopted by a colleague teaching a parallel subject.
| TLCP phase | Core question | Module | Analytics tool |
|---|---|---|---|
| Assessment | What do we know about students' learning needs? | Modules 1–2 | Course Grade tab, Weekly Online Activity, Students tab |
| Assessment | What evidence will we use to identify need? | Module 2 scenarios | Section filter, last participation sort, grade trajectory |
| Instruction | What strategies are responsive to identified need? | Module 3 | Message Students Who, course redesign decision tree |
| Instruction | How do we design learning that addresses equity? | Module 4 | OEE framework, policy recommendations |
| Learning | What did students learn as a result of adjustments? | Module 5 | Weekly three-tab check, decision trigger calendar |
As VP Academic at First Nations Technical Institute (2018–2019), held simultaneous responsibility for program oversight, faculty development, quality assurance across multiple certificates and degree programs, and external accreditation compliance with no project management infrastructure in place.
Response: introduced milestone-based tracking mapping each program through development, review, and approval stages with named owners and buffer dates. Bi-weekly check-ins with program leads. Risk flagged three weeks ahead of hard deadlines, not at the deadline. Triage by accreditation pressure versus absorb-delay. All external accreditation deadlines met that year. Faculty leads had better workload visibility; last-minute submissions reduced.
Concretely: assessments are designed with multiple modalities. Reading lists are audited for epistemic representation. Content at FNTI and Six Nations was built with and through community partners as co-authorship, not consultation. Rubrics make evaluation criteria explicit and transparent, reducing bias and giving marginalized learners clarity rather than ambiguity.
The Onto-Ethico-Epistemological (OEE) framework, developed from Indigenous methodological traditions using the Medicine Wheel architecture, asks three questions of any knowledge system:
| Dimension | Question | Applied to Canvas analytics |
|---|---|---|
| Ontological | What does it recognize as real? | Course Analytics renders the student as a data subject: a collection of trackable behaviours. This is an ontological reduction. The student is a relational being whose engagement is distributed across family, community, land, and institution. |
| Ethical | What obligations does it carry? | Transparency (does the student know this data exists?), proportionality (is the action warranted by the data?), relational accountability (does the intervention strengthen or damage the instructor-student relationship?). |
| Epistemological | What does it count as knowledge? | Analytics embeds a behaviourist theory of learning. Incompatible with constructivist, relational, land-based, or oral-tradition pedagogical frameworks. A structural mismatch that must be named explicitly. |
| Population | Why standard patterns mislead | Designer response |
|---|---|---|
| Students with print/visual disabilities | Screen reader navigation not captured; page views may be lower even with deep engagement | Check whether accessibility accommodations affect navigation paths in Canvas |
| Intermittent broadband (rural, remote, low-income) | Access gaps appear as disengagement; late-night spikes may reflect shared household bandwidth | Do not interpret access timing as motivation data |
| Students with caregiving responsibilities | Activity at unusual hours; submissions near midnight; page views clustered on weekends | Submission timing is not evidence of poor time management |
| Indigenous students in land-based or community learning | Community practicum and land-based components not captured; student may appear inactive during most educationally significant weeks | Supplement analytics with qualitative check-ins during practicum periods |
| International students navigating language and system transition | High page views, low participation; may view pages many times without posting | High access with low participation may indicate language processing, not disengagement |
The critical technology evaluation framework in Week 6 requires graduates to assess any educational technology against OCAP principles (Ownership, Control, Access, Possession) for Indigenous data sovereignty. This criterion is operationally absent from standard instructional design curricula and from most LMS vendor evaluations in Ontario. Its inclusion positions graduates to make defensible technology recommendations in Indigenous education contexts including midwifery programs, community colleges, and band-operated schools.
| Manuscript | Target / status | Core argument |
|---|---|---|
| Racialized Heteroglossia and the Postcolonial Professional Body | AlterNative (SAGE), under revision — MS ID ALN-OM-26-0222 | Extends Bakhtin through Mignolo and Fanon; racialized diglossia in colonial professional contexts |
| Five Years On: Indigenous Research Sovereignty in Canadian Funding Governance | IIPJ / CJIS, multiple drafts | Inclusion versus jurisdictional transfer in post-UNDRIP Canadian research funding |
| UDL critique for decolonizing pedagogy | Canadian Journal of Education, in preparation | UDL is insufficient for decolonizing pedagogy; OEE framework as alternative design architecture |
Established publication record in science education, decolonial curriculum, Indigenous education governance, and autoethnographic methodology.
| Question | Primary artifact | Tab |
|---|---|---|
| Q1: Tell us about yourself | Career trajectory table; positioning statement | Profile |
| Q2: End-to-end course/curriculum project | EDUC 6420 full case study; Charles Sturt subject coordination | Course Design; Curriculum Map |
| Q3: Collaborating with a subject matter expert | NSERC Indigenous STEM project at Queen's; co-design process narrative | Profile; Course Design |
| Q4: EDAII in instructional design practice | OEE framework; OCAP integration; multimodal rubrics; UDL Disclosure | EDAII |
| Q5: Managing competing priorities | FNTI VP Academic accreditation management case | Curriculum Map |
| Q6: Resistant faculty and new technologies | No dedicated artifact; use Canvas Analytics workshop framing and trust-over-compliance approach | Course Design (workshop logic) |
| Q7: Using data to improve a course | Charles Sturt practicum redesign: three-source data, assessment redesign, measurable cohort improvement | Assessment |
| Q8: Copyright compliance | No artifact needed; openly licensed resources first, copyright librarian liaison, build review into timeline | — |
| Q9: Why Continuing Teacher Education? | No artifact needed; expert-practitioner learner profile; underinvested intersection of teacher professional learning and online design | — |