When I started to see the potential of online learning in the 90s, I became very excited about the worldwide

By the early 2000s I became discouraged when I saw how little online education programs were taking advantage of all the opportunities the Internet offered for expanding learning.

It became my goal to positively impact online education, earning my master’s in education degree in Instructional Systems Technology and working in the fields of online tutoring and instructional design.

Now I connect people to resources, ideas, and each other, helping online content creators design engaging online course learning experiences for those they serve.

Now, I use my “superpowers” for those connections. We all have superpowers, you know, those things we do well.

These are the abilities that at some point (usually not until well into adulthood), we have an experience that stops us dead in our tracks and we ask incredulously, “Wait! What? Doesn’t everybody do that?” Or, “You mean that doesn’t come naturally for everyone?”

For you, maybe it’s being able to coordinate and manage your family’s challenging schedules, having a vision for a creative project, or performing complex financial calculations. These are abilities for which you may exercise effort to hone and improve, but overall, they come more easily to you than others.

Even Quisp and Quake had superpowers!

Quisp had supernatural energy and would fly in from space proclaiming, "Quazy energy cereal… the best-selling cereal from Saturn to Alpha Centauri!"

Quake had super strength and would burst out from the center of the earth announcing that his cereal had “vitamins to give you the power of an earthquake.”

My superpowers are: Connecting, curiosity, and working backwards.

In my work for Connected Course Designs, I connect people to ideas, resources, and each other by sharing ideas and resources for creating online courses that engage learners. These are the methods I used while designing the courses for graduate programs in Project Management and Information Systems Technology for a major university.

I teach how to design learning into small, kindling-sized pieces that are easy to learn and integrate.

I encourage peer-to-peer learning opportunities that create community and places of belonging in the learning environment.

I’m also infinitely curious.

I was the kid in school who would bring teachers to a standstill with my unusual (er, weird) questions they weren’t expecting, like, “Could you put a frog in the freezer and then just thaw it out again later like my mom does with ground beef?”

My insatiable curiosity means I’m always learning. I explore new ways of presenting content, study research on how we learn best, and ask lots of questions.

I share the results of my inquisitiveness by providing resources and ideas for creating high-quality online courses that produce successful results for learners.

Perhaps my most unusual superpower is the one where my brain naturally uses an end point for a starting point. I use that approach to teach a Summit-First Framework, meaning starting at the final result and working back to the starting point.

Think of all those school classes where you started at the beginning instead of the end. In Week 1 of the semester you covered Chapter 1 in a textbook, and in Week 2 it was Chapter 2, and so on. You likely covered a lot of history of the subject which may or may not have been interesting and engaging, but more importantly, it may have had no impact on what you actually needed to accomplish in the class.

Using a Summit-First approach keeps educators from including anything in their course that doesn’t lead directly to learners being able to successfully accomplish the course’s end goal.

Superpowers, while second-nature, also take some development effort.

Coming up with ideas and gathering resources is like breathing to me – I can’t not do it. Connecting people with ideas and resources is also natural – I love to share everything I’ve ever learned!

I attended an open-concept school that engendered my love of learning. Classrooms without walls between them, team teaching, no letter grading, learning at one’s own pace, and learning from peers were all components of my elementary education.

I now curate and share the resources I discover with online content creators so they can design the highest quality courses possible: courses learners are engaged in and complete, courses learners are proud to tell others about.  

As a curious introvert, connecting with books and information was easier than connecting with people, and learning came easy to me. I read and synthesized different ideas, concepts, and information. Putting that information into writing also was natural for me. I wrote my first “book” when I was 10 or 11 years old.

When it came time to choose a focus in high school, I landed on journalism because I thought it presented the best way for me to continue to learn about all subject areas without having to choose just one.

In junior high school, I had a friend whose mom began homeschooling him and his brother. That launched a lifelong quest of researching how people learn, the structure of our educational systems, and teaching pedagogy.

By the time I had children, I’d already decided I would homeschool them.

Homeschooling was still illegal in the state where we lived when I started, but I was determined to provide my three sons with the opportunity to love learning as much as I did.

At the time, access to curriculum was limited, so I created most of my own curriculum outside of basic math, reading, and science – and the curriculum I used for those was non-traditional (math manipulatives, phonics programs, and experiment-based science).

In learning how people learn, writing curriculum for my children and others, earning a formal master’s degree in Instructional Systems Technology, and helping online content creators engage students, I have followed my curiosity as it continues to teach me how learners learn best.

My own way of using my learning, I’ve discovered, is non-typical – it can be described even as “backward.”

In high school, we used a writing process in which first we had to turn in an outline, then a week or two later note cards, next a rough draft, and finally, the final term paper.

I would write the entire paper before the due date of the outline and work backwards from there, turning in the outline and other pieces after the paper was written. My brain processed things in that order so I adjusted my term paper assignments for that.

When writing my children’s curriculum, I had a guide from the Encyclopedia Britannica (wow, I’m really dating myself here). The guide listed the expected concepts to be learned for each school subject for each grade, which had been compiled by nationwide studies.

I started any curriculum planning with the goals as my starting point and worked backward on what would have to happen to help my sons achieve those touch points.

When I entered the world of instructional design, I learned about the Understanding by Design Framework, which is often referred to as “backward design” because it starts with the end-goal and uses that to only include what is necessary in a course.

I worked for a large learning corporation as a lead instructional designer creating all the courses for several graduate programs as well as bachelor and associate courses where we followed these principles and best practices, producing courses for colleges and universities nationwide.

I created The Summit-First Framework to teach educators how to use this approach to create effective, tightly formed, courses.

I now use my gifts of connecting people to resources, my curiosity, and my backward brain processes to help solopreneurs leverage their superpowers to share their gifts with the world in high-quality online courses.

But what about Quake and Quisp?

Despite the fact that my Quake ultimately lost the cereal feud in 1972 when children voted to keep Quisp over Quake, I won an overwhelming love of learning that persists to this day.

I can’t wait to share my superpowers of sharing resources, curiosity, and my backward thinking processes with you as we work together to make the world of online content a place that brings people together.

Please Share Your Superpowers! 

Whether you have superpowers from outer space like Quisp or from inner space like Quake, message me what your superpowers are and how you are changing the world with your online content.