AI and IT work
I’m Chief Digital Officer at Saylor University, formerly Saylor Academy. I lead technology, data and AI strategy for an accredited online university and an open-learning platform with more than 750,000 active learners in the past year and 2.7 million registered. I’m a hands-on leader who puts AI into production. Here’s some of what I’ve built:
- SOLA: an open-source AI learning assistant that tutors students from each course’s own content, across OpenAI, Anthropic and Google models, with encrypted keys and spend monitoring.
- Course Builder: an agentic AI pipeline that expands assessment banks and drafts course content from each course’s design document, checked against Saylor’s quality standards.
- Pulse Check: surfaces the forum topics students need help with, removes personal information before any AI processing, and sends data-triggered alerts on exam performance.
- PresenterAI: recorded presentations with AI rubric feedback in Moodle.
- Saylor Video Studio: generates Real-World Connections course episodes and narrated training videos.
I also lead the IT department. I set up AI spend governance, led our multi-factor authentication rollout, drafted our records and data retention policies, and manage our managed-hosting partner. On my own time I build smaller tools too, from a family-history helper to a coin-collecting app. You can see demos of all of it on my AI projects page.
EdTech innovation and leadership
I lead teams that try new models in education and make them work at scale.
- Growing remote teams: at Pearson Virtual Schools, I scaled nationwide online learning programs during the pandemic, and at WGU Academy, I doubled the design and development team from 10 to 20 in six months.
- Driving adoption: at Cengage, I built and led a learning engineering team that drove adoption of a SaaS learning platform at Yale, Arizona State, Harvard and other universities.
- Competency-based education: at Western Governors University, I led instructional design and delivered over 200 competency-based online courses to more than 40,000 adult learners through a rapid development process.
- Open education: leading the Open Course Library for the Washington State Board for Community & Technical Colleges, a $2.1M Gates Foundation open-content initiative that saved students more than $10 million in textbook costs in two years.
- Scaling online academic and workforce programs: at WGU Academy, I launched 15 certificate programs and grew enrollment to 10,000 students.
- Training innovation: as a consultant, I designed AI-powered coaching models and professional development for engineers, nurses and educators, and cut training time by 50% for a commercial drone company.
- AI in production: at Saylor, I lead technology, data and AI strategy and bring projects in-house by using AI to accelerate tool and course development, from an AI course tutor to agentic course building and automated student-success alerts.
Career and education
Before Saylor, I was Design and Development Manager at WGU Academy. Earlier, I led instructional design and learning engineering teams at Pearson Virtual Schools, Cengage and Western Governors University, directed the Open Course Library at the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges, and was a product manager at Utah State University’s Center for Open and Sustainable Learning.
I hold an Ed.S. in Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences from Utah State University, an M.A. in Educational Technology from California State University, San Bernardino, and a B.A. in French Teaching from Brigham Young University. I also taught high school French and computer science in Utah and California.
I’ve given keynotes at Blackboard World, Jackson College and Utah Valley University, and invited talks at MIT, EDUCAUSE, WCET, AECT and AERA. My publications include EDUCAUSE’s Game Changers (2012), MIT’s Online Course Design Guide (2013) and The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (2008).
Consulting
I’ve been a consultant for 18 years. That includes designing AI-powered coaching models and professional development for engineers, nurses and educators, and cutting training time by 50% for a commercial drone company. Past clients include MIT, the Open CourseWare Consortium, Creative Commons and the Open University of Catalonia. For more, please visit my consulting page.