Michael L. Sanford

I transitioned into Learning and Development over time through working on Knowledge Management projects, Process Reviews and Performance Evaluations as a manager. My first interaction with an Instructional Designer was as a stakeholder who persisted in asserting that every last detail I was communicating was absolutely relevant to the content and there wasn’t any way to trim one more word from the pages. Yes, I was that SME once upon a time. That project, and the constructive tension between my colleague and me over the scope of the program we were creating together, gave me the drive to become an instructional designer myself.

That perspective drives how I work. I start every engagement by asking whether the problem is actually a training problem. When I work with SMEs, I come prepared to make the case for restraint: working memory is finite, cognitive load is real, and a learner’s patience runs out long before the content does.

I’ve worked with technology startups disrupting established industries, Fortune 500 multinational corporations, small businesses and not so small privately owned businesses. Each of those settings taught me that even the most straightforward-seeming performance issue can conceal problems that no eLearning module alone will solve.

The relationship building and communication skills, as well as the adaptability I developed across those roles has been essential to my work as an Instructional Designer. In my current role at Georgia State University’s Robinson College of Business, I have the opportunity to work with subject matter experts who are unquestionably the experts in their fields, and who are also SMEs in exactly the sense I knew from every project in the private sector. Helping an instructor who has taught the same way for thirty years move from “sage on the stage” to facilitative instruction is the definition of a challenging conversation.

My role also allows me to design the training and just-in-time support systems for a 67-person student technology team supporting 84 hybrid course sections across Robinson’s graduate programs. I build in Articulate 360, apply WCAG accessibility standards, and use AI-assisted design tools where they earn their place, including development, evaluation and deployment of a production Copilot Studio system delivering procedural guidance to frontline student workers in the flow of work.