I am an instructional designer and learning professional with nearly two decades of experience creating learning experiences that challenge, engage, and genuinely serve the people they are built for. My background spans higher education, K–12, workforce development, and professional learning, which means I have designed for AP English Literature students and first-generation college learners, for linguistically diverse learners, and for new faculty navigating an unfamiliar institution or for faculty in Biology, Japanese, and Nursing who needed help translating deep expertise into effective digital courses. That breadth has made me a more precise and more adaptable designer: I know how to enter an unfamiliar content domain, ask the right questions of the right people, and produce learning that reflects both what the expert knows and what the learner actually needs to do.
My practice is grounded in established instructional design frameworks, ADDIE, backward design, Bloom’s Taxonomy, Kirkpatrick evaluation, UDL, but I use them as thinking tools rather than templates. I am currently completing an EdM in Instructional Design, Technology, and Organization at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (graduating December 2026), which has deepened my formal grounding in learning science and expanded my technical toolkit. I build across modalities: instructor-led programs, asynchronous eLearning, blended learning, microlearning, video tutorials, job aids, and facilitation kits. I use AI tools actively in my design practice and stay genuinely curious about what new technologies make possible for learners.
What has always mattered most to me is whether the learning works: not just whether it looks good or checks a compliance box, but whether it changes what someone can do. That commitment to measurable impact, combined with a creative approach to instructional problems and a deep belief that well-designed learning is an equity issue as much as a performance issue, is what I bring to every project.
Karen McCurley's Portfolio 