About Instructional Engineer

From Flash to a Career in eLearning

I got into eLearning when Flash was the exciting new way to put interactive training on a screen. I spent those early years building multimedia: animations, clickable lessons and the kind of interactions that make learners pay attention. It was a great place to learn, because every project meant solving a new technical puzzle.

As online training grew, the big challenge shifted from making courses look good to making them work everywhere. During that period I worked on SCORM standardization efforts, helping courses talk to learning management systems in a consistent way. That work still shapes how I think about eLearning. A course is only finished when it launches, tracks and reports correctly.

Leading Teams and Building at Scale

Later I led an eLearning team, which taught me as much about people and process as it did about software. I learned how storyboards, reviews, QA and LMS testing fit together, and where projects tend to break down. Today I work as a senior software engineer specializing in eLearning, and I bring that engineering mindset to every course and consulting project.

Over more than 15 years in eLearning development, LMS integration and instructional systems design (ISD), I have personally worked on more than 400 online training courses. Those projects have served the TSA, the FAA, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Coast Guard, IMCOM-Europe, the 70th Regional Readiness Command and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. On the private side, I have built training for Halliburton, Chesapeake Energy, Schlumberger, Seagate, Encana Oil and Gas, Samson Energy, ATI Career Training and Sonic Drive-In.

Why I Call It Instructional Engineering

Good training needs two things. It needs sound instructional design, so people actually learn. It also needs solid engineering, so the course runs on every device, tracks in the LMS and can be updated without a headache. Most of my work happens where those two meet. I am just as comfortable writing a storyboard as I am building in Articulate Storyline or Adobe Captivate, or debugging an xAPI statement in JavaScript.

How I Use AI in My Work Today

AI tools have become a regular part of my workflow, and they have made me faster in practical ways. I use them to draft scripts and quiz questions, produce AI voice narration for early reviews, transcribe and clean up audio from legacy courses, help convert old code and check builds for errors. They also help me make sense of large sets of learner data.

What has not changed is the review. Every AI-assisted draft gets checked by me and approved by your subject matter experts before it reaches learners. AI handles the repetitive work, which leaves more time for design, testing and the details that make a course good.

Let's Work Together

I take on full projects, short contracts and temporary team roles. If you have a course to build, a legacy library to convert or a team that could use an extra hand, reach out for a free consultation. I reply within one business day.