About

I’m a learning experience designer and AI strategist, grounded in learning science. I prototype with frontier AI every day, and I design from how people actually think, learn, and adopt something new. The gap I keep working on is the one between what people are taught and what the work actually demands.

My method doesn’t change with the size of the audience. Write the requirements down before anything gets built, decide what success looks like before the pilot starts, then test it with real users and change it based on what they do.

The part that takes longest is the people. A tool nobody is trained to use quietly fails, so I plan the training and the support alongside it. I’ve done that for twenty years, starting with bringing a campus onto one learning management system. It’s the same work now with AI.

Colleges have remarkable resources; what breaks down is the connection between them and the students who need them most, most of them working adults. When students feel connected and supported, they persist, and that’s the problem I focus on now. I co-chair the Student Support and Success domain of the Maricopa district AI Resource Center and sit on its steering committee, working across all ten colleges on AI in non-classroom student services.

My background spans design, education, and educational technology: from web and graphic design, to UX, to product management at an EdTech startup, to seven years as Director of Instructional Technology for a campus Innovation Center inside IT, to faculty in Digital Media, where I teach design and was Program Director for over a decade. I hold a master’s in Educational Technology with an adult online-learning emphasis, and connectivism and personal learning environments are still the floor under everything I design. I convened a campus AI community of practice as a League for Innovation AI Fellow.

I start from measurable outcomes: what students need to be able to do when they graduate, including the AI skills their industries already expect. Because an AI model can now produce the artifact, students show what they can do through authentic, performance-based work that carries process evidence: portfolios, presentations, real job searches, networking. Experiential learning is central to how I teach. I built a design studio where students take on real client work with live briefs and hard deadlines, which grew past the course into a grant-funded paid studio I now advise, and I oversee the program’s internship, placing and mentoring students in real work with local businesses and industry partners. Giving young people genuine ownership, and watching them rise to it, is some of the most important work I do.