- Design and teach 15+ credit hours per semester of fully online and hybrid courses to diverse online learners spanning age, veteran status, and disability at a Hispanic-Serving Institution; have taught online for decades, redesigning each term from student-performance data, Canvas analytics, and structured feedback loops.
- Was commissioned to redesign AVC 100, the program’s highest-enrollment course, after analytics flagged a low student-success rate, rebuilding it from Qualtrics retention data and embedded student-support services to improve completion.
- Started an experiential, cross-disciplinary design studio as a course and led it for over a decade, students doing real client work on live deliverables for campus partners, from an award-winning student publication to a 90-foot mural and web, print, and video campaigns; it lives on as a grant-funded, paid studio led by other faculty.
- Lead the brand identity for the GCC Cares Hub, a consolidated basic-needs and student-support initiative, as a live experiential project: a student runs production through a paid 300-hour AmeriCorps internship with AI built into her workflow, doing real work on a real campus launch.
- Designed and taught a fully online faculty-development course, Web-Based Teaching and Learning, preparing community college instructors to design and teach online and grounding them in online pedagogy, assessment design, and the adult-learner experience.
- As Program Director from 2011 to 2022, set program strategy and developed competency-mapped curricula aligned to industry standards, and designed a stackable certificate sequence so learners earn credentials at each milestone; develop and refine curriculum across the program and on the Maricopa district Instructional Council, and contributed to district-wide Guided Pathways alignment across all ten colleges.
- As Program Director, led the program’s formal three-year program review, assessing enrollment, student outcomes, and course performance against objectives, and used the findings as the evidence-based case for budget, faculty lines, and resources.
- Build and embed student-facing AI tools across the program, from the AVC 100 foundation through the capstone, applying product design thinking to translate frontier AI into practical, student-centered learning, and demonstrate them to faculty, deans, and district leadership, translating model behavior, integration patterns, and data handling into plain language for non-technical decision-makers.
- Work with faculty to design assessments AI can’t do for the student, mostly hands-on simulations defended in a live role-play. Built and shared the first suite, now helping colleagues make their own.
- Helped plan and build a new campus XR lab for augmented and virtual reality alongside the dean, opening for instruction in Fall 2026.
- As a campus-wide Quality Matters and OLC/OSCQR lead course reviewer, conduct instructional-design and accessibility reviews across the college, write assessment reports, and coach faculty one on one.
- Led the emergency transition of more than 45 Art and Humanities faculty to fully online teaching during the pandemic, training and mentoring them to move their courses fully online in weeks.
- Rebuilt the program around industry advisory-board input, improving program completion, and advise more than 200 students a year with strong student-evaluation results.
- Apply WCAG accessibility standards and inclusive design throughout course and material development.
- Faculty representative on the GCC intranet redesign committee (2023 to 2024), evaluating information architecture and interface design as a UX practitioner.
- Coordinate the program’s employer internship (AVC 297), placing and supervising students in real client work with local businesses and industry partners and managing the agreements and evaluation behind it.
- Built the program’s degrees into the district’s first Near Z Degrees, fully open-educational-resource pathways with no textbook cost to students, recognized with the college’s Gaucho Globe Award.
- Serve as departmental eCourses lead and Canvas representative for roughly 30 instructors, and own each course end to end: build it backward from measurable outcomes to aligned assessment, author the instructional copy and video scripts, produce the media, and deliver all instructional video captioned through Canvas Studio for in-LMS access.
- Redesign each course every term from evidence, using Canvas analytics to reach students who have stopped participating or are falling behind before they withdraw, and feeding participation and grade-trend data back into the next build.
Michelle Blomberg
Curriculum Vitae
- Led the campus instructional-technology platforms and the teams behind them, selecting and standing up new tools, including a campus LMS evaluation and RFP, and driving adoption across faculty and staff during the Blackboard era; contributed to the district RFP that later led to Canvas adoption.
- Served as district LMS committee co-leader representing 250,000+ users across the ten-college Maricopa system; contributed to change control, upgrades, testing, and vendor relations.
- Established a single-point-of-contact instructional technology helpdesk, improving support efficiency and recognized with the Kudos Award.
- Defined requirements, created ITIL service agreements, and managed cross-functional development teams to deliver educational technology solutions on time and within budget.
- Established the campus’s first design system: the standards, templates, and style guides for LMS course design, web interfaces, and digital communications across the college.
- Mentored instructors on active learning, hybrid course design, and technology-enhanced pedagogy; ran faculty professional development workshops.
- Co-authored the proposal to establish GCC’s Center for Teaching, Learning and Engagement (CTLE); visited Maricopa district centers, benchmarked models, and recommended a faculty-led structure in partnership with the Director of Training.
- Served on HLC Accreditation Committee and President’s Technology Advisory Taskforce; contributed strategic technology planning and budget recommendations.
- Directed the Innovation Center and a team that included three developers, the central function every teaching and learning tool on campus ran through.
- Introduced a modular content-reuse system on the campus enterprise learning platform so faculty could build a module once and reuse it across courses while keeping shared modules consistent across sections.
- Built a learning-object library with faculty subject-matter experts and student developers, producing interactive objects faculty dropped into their online courses; one let a fully online student assemble a computer from a 3D model, performing the task rather than answering questions about it.
- Reimagined siloed computer labs as one collaborative, peer-driven learning space, a more student-centered model that raised engagement while reducing duplicated staffing.
- Led quality assurance for every online course in one of the world’s largest Six Sigma online programs, designing hyflex structures that combined video, audio, and interactive content, a single program delivered in all three formats: online, in person, and live online.
- Supervised employees running video/sound production; maintained distance learning lecture capture facilities.
- Implemented and trained all staff on organization-wide incident and request tracking system.
- Served as instructional designer for the College of Engineering’s online professional and continuing-education programs, working daily with engineering faculty and subject-matter experts to design and build every course for a working-professional STEM audience.
- Worked alongside the college’s media team in a full production television studio, producing and shipping weekly course materials, including DVDs mailed to a student cohort in China, and supporting a live option so students could attend in person or remotely.
- Worked in a modular course system that let content modules be reused and rearranged from one course to the next and kept consistent across sections, an approach to reusable, templated course content carried forward ever since.
- Owned end-to-end product development for web-delivered educational software; authored detailed requirements engineers could build from, ran usability studies, and translated user research into structured product roadmaps.
- Partnered across engineering, sales, and marketing to prioritize the roadmap and advocate for user needs; presented at national EdTech conferences to gather feedback and drive adoption.
- Built hybrid product integrations with partner channels including AOL, Blackboard, and WebCT, learning early how institutional buying cycles, decision-makers, and pain points shape what higher-education customers will actually use.
- Designed identity, web, and print campaigns for clients including University of Michigan Business School, SIGGRAPH, ProQuest, The Annenberg Foundation, and the Ann Arbor Transportation Authority; managed client relationships, proposals, budgets, and vendor coordination.
- Worked on large-scale web projects alongside the authors of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (O’Reilly); contributed to user research and usability studies as part of cross-disciplinary teams pairing IA, design, and development.
- HTML
- Web Site Fundamentals
- Imaging for the Web
- Advanced Imaging for the Web
- Audio and Video for the Web
- Typography I
- Typography II
- Graphic Design I
- Graphic Design II
Render, AI Student Career Launch Framework
A connectivist personal learning environment for students developed in conjunction with Career Services. Gives final-semester students one place to use compartmentalized AI prompting to create their own projects and learning goals, track job search or freelance work, build their portfolio pipeline, and maintain career infrastructure after graduation. Seven modules map to a formal career-launch competency taxonomy. Owned end to end from discovery and user research through learning-experience and journey design, requirements, build, and usability testing. Students choose one real job on day one and build the environment against it across the term; at the capstone Render runs a skills-gap analysis between what a student actually built and what that job requires, then exports a portable career agent and a personal learning plan the student keeps and runs in any AI tool after graduation. It is a single self-contained HTML file with vanilla JavaScript, fifteen AI functions on the Claude API, Google Sheets and Apps Script for an anonymous Career Services data flow, and no student PII, first name only, stored on the student’s own device. Usability tested with students in March 2026 and refined from what it surfaced. Prototyping in HTML/CSS/Vanilla JS using Claude AI; student pilot underway Fall 2026. Overview →
UX Design for Interactive Media, New Course in Development
A new Digital Media Arts course in development introducing user-experience design for interactive media: user research, information architecture, wireframing, prototyping, and usability testing, with accessibility built in from the start. Under development.
Simulation-Based Assessment and Reusable Learning Objects
Designed and built an interactive, browser-based simulation that assesses applied problem-solving (diagnosing failure in a predictive-maintenance model), as a prototype for authentic, AI-resistant assessment. Developing OER-grounded course modules and openly (Creative Commons) licensed reusable learning objects (RLOs) for redesigned STEM courses, published to Canvas Commons for any instructor to import.
Student AI Explainer Video, District-Wide
Designed and produced a short explainer video introducing students across the ten-college district to responsible AI use in college, delivered as a Canvas-embeddable link any instructor in the district can add to a course. Wrote the two-voice script, generated narration with ElevenLabs, produced visuals with an AI whiteboard tool (VideoScribe) and generative imagery in ChatGPT, and assembled the piece end to end. In development toward a production release before Fall 2026 classes.
CopaMigo, Multilingual Student Support Routing Tool
AI triage tool designed to close the gap between resources that exist and students who don’t know what to call what they need. Students describe their situation in their own language, typed or spoken, and the tool responds in kind, routing them to the right human service with a handoff card showing contact info, hours, and what to ask for. Built around 14 service modules and 100+ hand-verified service URLs, with email human-handoff, low-level tutoring delivered inline before escalation, and a planned live chat staffed by social work interns. Designed for district-wide deployment with a campus picker for all 10 Maricopa colleges. In testing.
District Student Support & Success AI Strategy
Co-chair of Domain 5 (Student Support & Success) on the district committee chartered to identify where AI can responsibly improve the non-classroom services that drive student retention and well-being, across all 10 colleges and 140,000+ students. The work runs as three coordinated initiatives, grounded in the evidence on why students leave: a service inventory and cross-college crosswalk that maps 50+ student-facing functions across all 10 colleges (the same service is named differently at each); a student-journey usability study with three research personas, a full task roadmap, and a live capture instrument; and a prioritized, human-in-the-loop AI roadmap that answers simple questions itself and routes the rest to a person. Each barrier is scored on a Nielsen severity rating and confirmed by a second rater; the instrument set includes a 46-task taxonomy across all ten colleges, and a method pilot of twelve walkthroughs surfaced the first catastrophic finding, with fieldwork this fall. Framed as organizational change work that surfaces duplicated effort and unmet need and frees staff time for direct student support.
GCC Campus Cares Hub, Consolidated Student Support Services
Developing the brand identity and marketing system for a major campus initiative consolidating student support services into the former bookstore space: free grocery bodega, cafe seating, social work interns, community partners, laundry pickup, professional clothing closet, and a monthly farmers market. Working in partnership with a recent alumna, now at ASU, who is executing production through a paid 300-hour AmeriCorps internship that funds her bachelor’s, with AI integrated into her workflow. Also serving on the committee determining resource mix and design direction. Live brand development on a real campus initiative, with a current student leading production.
Faculty AI Community of Practice
Monthly faculty and staff gathering launching Fall 2026 through the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Engagement, with a kickoff during Accountability Week. Designed as a lower-stakes peer learning structure to surface AI use that is already happening informally across campus and build shared institutional knowledge. Sessions alternate between on-campus and online; each meeting has a focused topic and a show-and-tell so participants can share what they’re trying in their classrooms. Founded through the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Engagement, its first line of collaborative work is research into authentic assessment in the age of generative AI, starting from the premise that the answer is assessment design rather than detection software.
AVC100 Introduction to Digital Media, Course Redesign
Contracted redesign of the department’s highest-enrollment course, a 1-credit Digital Media Arts entry point with a documented low student success rate. Redesign grounds every module in retention research; each module directly introduces Student Services including Advising, GCC Cares, Tutoring, and Disability Services, embedding wellness into the learning experience. Built as IMSCC for Canvas import. Success is defined as learning, confidence, belonging, and connection to services rather than completion alone. In an end-of-course survey of the students who completed it, apprehension toward opening the software fell from a first-week average of 3.3 to 2.0, and “I know where to go for help at GCC” rose from 3.4 to 4.8; end-of-term averages included 4.7 for making something real in each program, 4.6 for being able to do it again unaided, 4.6 for wanting another course that uses the software, and 4.9 for believing someone here would help them. These are one strand of evidence, read alongside student reflection and the persistence research the design rests on.
Digital Media Arts Discord Community, Student Services Integration
A closed, cross-program community connecting students across all Digital Media Arts courses. Currently used for peer critique, class announcements, job postings, and events, with tutoring access embedded. The longer goal is connectivist: extending the network beyond the classroom into real industry, employers and advisors participating in portfolio reviews, guest speakers from the field, career services and library integrated as active partners, and students building professional relationships as part of their studies rather than after. That outward reach into industry is what makes it a genuine learning network, not just a discussion board. Research and precedent document: Discord Community Building in Higher Ed →
ART280 Design Studio, Cross-Disciplinary Capstone
Designed and led a cross-disciplinary studio environment where students worked with real campus clients on live deliverables: the award-winning Traveler publication, app interfaces, a 90-foot mural, web and print design, and video campaigns. Each project ran on a written brief, a student project manager, a client proof cycle, and a deadline; one was a silent animated explainer for the district open-educational-resources program, storyboarded and animated to read on sound-off campus displays. It lives on as a grant-funded, paid professional studio led by other faculty.
The Traveler Literary and Visual Arts Publication, Faculty Advisor
Faculty advisor for GCC’s nationally award-winning annual student literary and visual arts publication. Coach the student design team through the full production cycle: branding theme, design and typography, print production, and launch. Three-time recipient of the College Media Association Pinnacle Award for College Literary Magazine (2015, 2016, 2025) and a repeat selection in the Best of Phoenix Design Show by AIGA (2017 to 2022). Long-running model of student design leadership and authentic creative production embedded in a credit-bearing course.
Cultivate, AI & EdTech Professional-Development Hub
A connectivist personal learning environment and the first AI build in this portfolio, the experiment the rest grew from. A set of linked HTML pages with no backend and no build step, offline-first with local caching, that keeps AI-in-education professional development, trainings, and conferences in one place. Its most involved piece is a curated news feed running a custom keyword classifier over sixty-two RSS sources, with a multi-proxy fetch waterfall so feeds still load when one proxy fails. Built with Claude. Stable and in daily use. Overview →
Dial Your Course, Canvas Course-Quality Auditor
Prompted by a regional accreditor’s seat-time finding for online courses, where the course package is the only evidence the promised student hours were delivered, it is a drop-in tool that reads a Canvas .imscc course export and runs nineteen checks against it: seat time and workload, measurable objectives and their Bloom’s Taxonomy level, outcome and objective alignment, alignment to institutional learning outcomes, accessibility, and how AI-resistant the assessments are. It can also enforce a course style guide so pages and formatting stay consistent. It reports only what it can compute, names the standard and the location for every finding, and writes approved fixes back into a package ready to reimport. Nothing is transmitted and no account or server is used, since a Canvas export carries no student data. Automates the countable part of the Quality Matters and SUNY OSCQR reviews Michelle performs by hand as a lead reviewer. In testing across Digital Media Arts; product requirements written for a model-assisted second version. Overview →
Syllabus Checker, Automated Compliance Review
Faculty submit a syllabus through the department’s existing Google Form and receive a response within seconds: confirmation of completeness, or an itemized account of what is missing against the MCCCD Regulation 3.6 required elements, program additions, and the approved seat-hour and Regular and Substantive Interaction language, with the correct wording supplied inline. Results write back to the form’s response spreadsheet as status columns, giving the department one sortable view of compliance without an inbox of individual reports. Built read-only on Google Apps Script and Sheets; nothing leaves the district environment and no student data is implicated, since a syllabus contains none. Complete, awaiting installation on the department account. Overview →
AI Pilot Governance Framework, Prototype to Production
Developed the framework the district AI Resource Center can use to take a faculty-built AI prototype off a personal server and run it as a safe, district-hosted pilot with real faculty, staff, and students, then move a successful pilot into production. It defines a one-page intake and registry, isolated sandbox hosting in containers, an approved-API path, clear guardrails (data minimization, FERPA, human in the loop, transparency, a sunset date), and a concrete evaluation-to-production gate so a tool is never left in “pilot forever.” Adapts the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, EDUCAUSE AI governance guidance, WCET, and ITIL practice into a lightweight faculty path, every option screened against a hard no-student-data line. Draft for the district AI CIO’s input. Overview →
Rough Cut, Program Recruitment Newsletter & Outreach Pipeline
A twice-yearly outreach newsletter for the four GCC digital media programs, Animation, Digital Media Arts, Film and Media, and Photography, aimed at regional feeder high schools to reach future students before for-profit and private colleges lock them in. The whole visual system was designed with AI on purpose, to learn from experience how far a model can be pushed on a real design problem with a real deadline. The harder half was the targeting: working with AI to research every high school in the priority zone and build a living contact list of more than 200 named CTE instructors, art and media teachers, yearbook advisors, club sponsors, and counselors who actually talk to students about where to go next. Runs on Google Apps Script and a Google Sheet, with a visit form for schools that want to tour the studios. Live. Overview →
Digital Media Jobs Board, Automated Daily Agent
An AI agent that posts a few new, verified, entry-level jobs and internships in the students’ fields to the Digital Media Arts Discord every day, Glendale and Phoenix first and remote where the field calls for it, so opportunity comes to students rather than the other way around. Part of the connectivist through-line: keep the learning network reaching outward into the industry students are about to enter. Career Services workshop links are planned for the board.
Wayfinder, Agentic Road-Trip Planner
A single-page road-trip itinerary planner that pulls the scattered logistics of a long drive, weather, fuel strategy, road clearance, fire restrictions, campsites, and backup plans, into one page that stays usable on the road and off-signal. A companion generator takes a traveler’s interests and builds a tailored itinerary in the same format, so a personal build becomes a tool anyone can use. A self-contained HTML file, built with Claude. Overview →
Claude (daily use: prompt engineering, LTI integration, AI workflow design), Gemini Notebook, BigInterview, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Fathom (AI meeting notes and transcription)
Figma, Miro, HTML5, CSS3, GitHub Pages, WordPress, Squarespace, Drupal, SharePoint; Python (basic); Unix command line
Canvas LMS (administration, LTIs, Studio, Outcomes, Course Analytics), IMSCC course packaging, Blackboard, SoftChalk, Open Educational Resources tools, TeamDynamix
Adobe Creative Suite (InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, After Effects, Captivate), Adobe Firefly (generative AI in Illustrator and Photoshop), AI image generation (ChatGPT/DALL·E), AI-assisted explainer video (VideoScribe, ElevenLabs voiceover, ChatGPT), OBS, Camtasia, Procreate, storyboarding, Zoom, Microsoft Teams
Slack, Basecamp, Microsoft Project, Discord
Google Workspace (Docs, Sheets, and Calendar appointment scheduling for student meetings); Gmail Templates and Text Blaze snippet automation for repeatable communications; connecting live HTML pages to Google Sheets through Apps Script for lightweight, no-database data flows
Qualtrics, PeopleSoft, Tableau, Jotform; WCAG 2.1 AA guidelines, Section 508, ADA remediation, Yuja Panorama, Cidilabs UDoIt; Quality Matters and SUNY OSCQR course-quality review
Spec-driven development: writing a full PRD before building, then building against it. Prompt and system-prompt engineering, including tiered routing and persona-scaffolded prompts. Model API integration (Anthropic Claude and Sonnet API) with provider-portable request layers and server-side proxy patterns that keep credentials off the client. Agent development and orchestration: multi-agent systems with a coordinating orchestrator over specialist agents, demographic-grounded synthetic-user agents for usability testing, and scheduled autonomous agents. Agent evaluation methodology: golden-set regression checks, template versioning, multiple-run consistency, human-in-the-loop validation, and drift monitoring. Authoring reusable Claude skills. Retrieval-augmented generation and grounding against a curated corpus. Workflow automation via scheduled tasks and webhooks. Data-sovereign, no-PII architectures that collect no student data. Front-end builds in single-file HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript; Google Apps Script and Sheets integrations; IMSCC and Canvas LTI packaging.
Product discovery and user research, journey mapping, personas, service blueprinting, information architecture, heuristic evaluation, task-based usability testing and severity rating, WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility
Backward design and constructive alignment, ADDIE and SAM, Universal Design for Learning (UDL), andragogy and adult-learning theory, Bloom’s taxonomy, authentic and process-based assessment, competency-based design, Quality Matters and SUNY OSCQR course-quality standards
Simulation-based assessment design; OER curation and authoring; Creative Commons licensing; reusable learning objects (RLOs); interactive HTML and JavaScript learning tools