Kristen Bourgault has attended faculty senate meetings at Quinnipiac University for years. She is an online faculty. Her students are online students. None of them are on campus. And still, she says, the conversations at those meetings routinely fail to acknowledge that there is an entire student body that will never see the campus they are paying to attend.
“I’ve always felt like we’re sort of the ugly stepchildren of the university,” she says. “It’s the last thing people think about.”
She has been making this observation for twenty-five years, across five or six institutions, in a variety of roles that have moved from student worker to instructional designer to full-time faculty to program director. The field has changed enormously in that time. The argument she keeps having has not.
Bourgault is the director of instructional design programs at Quinnipiac University, where she co-developed and now leads a 30-credit master’s program and a nine-credit certificate in instructional design, both fully online. She is also, by her own description, an educator who got into education precisely because she could not stand in front of a classroom. The graphic design and web design skills she had as an undergraduate student worker, building out courses in WebCT before most people knew what a learning management system was, turned out to be exactly what a field in its infancy needed. She has been building that field, and arguing for it, ever since.
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The Case She Should Not Have to Keep Making
Bourgault’s frustration with online learning’s credibility problem is not abstract. It is rooted in a very specific experience of watching well-designed programs get under-resourced, misunderstood, and treated as infinitely scalable when they are not.
“It’s seen as this easily scalable model where we could just infinitely fill our classes with students,” she says. “And that’s just not the case if we want to do it in a quality way.”
The case for online learning, when she makes it, is not a case that it is better than in-person learning across all contexts. She is careful not to overclaim. She does not think K-12 students should primarily be educated online, or that eighteen-year-olds should skip the campus experience. What she believes, and what she has watched play out across her own program, is that online learning in the graduate space is genuinely the right model for the people it serves.
These are working adults. They have careers and families and complicated schedules. They need flexibility about when and where they complete their work. They do not need someone to tell them that their credentials are less legitimate because they earned them in a digital space. Her program’s survey of graduates over the past three years found one hundred percent satisfaction or near-satisfaction with their education. Her alumni are in hiring positions. Some of them came back to tell her what they are now looking for in candidates.
Technology Is the Chair, Not the Classroom
One of the clearest articulations in the episode comes when Bourgault is asked how she keeps people and relationships at the center of online learning when technology is the medium. Her answer begins with a reframe.
“If we said that teaching in a classroom is all about relationships, people would say yes, absolutely. No one would say it is about the classroom building or the chairs. Those are just the vehicles.”
The same logic applies to online learning. The learning management system is a chair. The video platform is a chair. The discussion board is a chair. The relationship between the instructor and the learner, the effort to see each student as an individual with specific goals and a specific life context, is the classroom.
In her own teaching, this means using names consistently. It means sharing herself as a human being, including when she is out in her garden and why she will not be available. It means alternating between text-based and video discussions so students can see each other and be seen. It means fourteen-week semesters, which she will argue for until she cannot argue anymore, because building a real relationship with a learner takes time that six-week accelerated courses do not allow.
And it means, increasingly, making clear to students that the feedback they are receiving was written by a human. Not generated. Not summarized. Actually written, by a person who read their work.
The ChatGPT Moment
Bourgault opened ChatGPT for the first time in 2022, typed in a request for a five-paragraph essay, and received one in seconds. Her initial reaction was not alarm. It was something closer to relief.
She had spent her entire career trying to move faculty toward authentic assessments, the kind rooted in a student’s own life and context rather than the kind that measured regurgitation. Every time she made that case, she was swimming against a current of convenience: the quiz, the five-paragraph essay, the assignment that looks like assessment but does not actually require learning. ChatGPT, she thought, was finally going to force the issue. If any student could produce that essay in two seconds, teachers would have to design better assignments.
“That was my first thinking,” she says. “That’s not where it went.”
What happened instead was a rush to police. How do we catch the cheaters? What tools can detect AI use? Who is bypassing the system? Very few people asked the question she thought was more important: what am I doing wrong as an educator?
She did eventually have to ask it herself. An end-of-semester reflection assignment, one she thought was well-designed and built on genuine rapport with her students, produced five AI-generated responses out of fifteen. She sat with that. The students who used AI had not done it to be lazy. They had done it because she had not made it clear why the reflection mattered. By the end of the semester, they were tired. It felt like one more box to check. She had not given them a reason to believe that the reflection was worth their diminishing attention.
“The thing I thought would happen when I initially opened ChatGPT,” she says, “happened to me.”
What Discerning AI Use Actually Looks Like
When Bourgault talked to the ten alumni who came back in their leadership positions to tell her what they are now looking for in candidates, the answer was not what she expected.
The first bucket was AI literacy. But not the kind that comes from a prompt engineering certificate. What they described was something more like judgment: knowing when to use AI in instructional design work and when not to, understanding where AI output requires a heavy human hand before it is ready to go out the door, being able to assess whether the language, the branding, and the substance of what the tool produced are actually right for the audience.
“If you’re interviewing for an ID job and you can’t speak to AI at all, they’re probably not going to call you back,” she says. “But what they want is critical awareness. Not just someone who uses it for everything.”
The second bucket was core instructional design skills: theory, some working HTML knowledge, tools like Storyline, and video editing, which came up repeatedly as something hiring managers specifically need.
The third was project management and stakeholder communication: working with subject matter experts, managing timelines, communicating with people who do not share your frame of reference and need to be brought along.
Bourgault found this balance genuinely encouraging. Not the AI-everything narrative she had been bracing for. Not a wholesale dismissal of foundational skills. A realistic, three-part picture of what it actually takes to do the work.
What Quality Looks Like Ten Years Later
The question Brenda Boyd passed along from the previous episode, what does quality look like in what you do, lands in an interesting place when it gets to Bourgault.
She does not answer it in terms of rubrics or standards or completion rates, though she respects all of those. She answers it in terms of a phone call.
“Quality looks like happy students,” she says. “And I don’t mean the student who fills out a course evaluation and says this was a fun class. I mean the student who tells me what they learned immediately applied to their work the next day. And then comes back ten years later to tell me what they are now looking for in the instructional designers they hire.”
The compounding effect she is describing is what makes this work worth doing. The instructional designer who learned to be more critical about technology is now running a program. The student who built their first authentic learning experience in her course is now designing learning experiences for thousands of people. The ripple does not stop at the edge of the course.
She has spent twenty-five years making the case that online learning deserves to be taken seriously. The evidence, if you look at who her students become, is fairly hard to argue with.
Listen to the full conversation with Kristen Bourgault on The LX Ops Show or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Podcast Transcript– Jason Gorman with Kristen Bourgault
Jason Gorman (00:01)
Welcome to the Learning Experience Ops Show, where we talk about making learning better that’s future ready. I’m Jason Gorman, the founder and CEO of Jackrabbit Learning Experience. I am really excited about today’s conversation. My guest, Kristen Bourgault, is on the front lines of bringing new people into our field, specifically into instructional design, which is where I started.
It’s a field that I had never heard of before I started until I was actually already doing it. And once I found it, I fell in love with it. I mean, it was a fascinating, I found it to be creative, and it enabled me to do work that actually added, actually mattered to me. And I had been interested in education for a long time and I had done some teaching, but I really was sure after a couple of years of that the teaching wasn’t necessarily for me, but instructional design was the right fit.
And the world in the last decades has really needed this work badly. You know, especially as online as online education has grown up and as hybrid learning has become better understood and more widely embraced. But because online education lives entirely in digital spaces and produces entire entirely digital outputs, we are kind of finding ourselves in a moment of unique threat. And actually, my guest today would push back.
On that word moment. Kristen believes that online learning has always been under some kind of threat, and that it has always had to fight harder than it should have to be taken as seriously as it deserves. Kristen is an instructional designer with 25 years of experience working in higher education and nonprofit settings. She’s currently the director of instructional design programs of.
At Quinnipiac University, which is a fully online program that offers both a 30 credit master’s and a nine credit certificate in instructional design. She co-developed the program 12 years ago and has been teaching in it as a full-time faculty for the past 10 years. As online faculty, Kristen has been a persistent advocate for online learning and extremely vocal about the need for high quality online learning experiences, both at the university and
And beyond. Welcome to the show, Kristen.
Kristen Bourgault (02:23)
Thanks
so much. Thanks for having me, Jason.
Jason Gorman (02:25)
Yeah, it’s really good to have you here. let’s just jump in with the quick questions, the lightning round questions. What’s the 30 second elevator pitch about what you do?
Kristen Bourgault (02:38)
So I am currently a full-time faculty in the School of Education at Quinnipiac University, which is a small private school in Southern Connecticut. And I’m also sitting in the director role for our instructional design programs, where as you mentioned, Jason, we have both a 30-credit master’s and a nine-credit certificate program. So I really first and foremost see myself as an instructional designer. That’s really, I still do instructional design work even as faculty.
and I always describe myself as an online educator because all of my teaching has been in online spaces. I can do a pop-up workshop in front of a group if I have to, but really my passion is online education.
Jason Gorman (03:19)
You may have just answered my next question, but what do you what do you love the most about your work?
Kristen Bourgault (03:24)
I think about the instructional design work and the teaching, the thing that I love the most is it’s just constantly changing. I couldn’t do something that was the same every single day. this field just continues to grow, the technology changes, the approaches that we use change. the as you talked about, the threats, I know we’ll get into the threats change. and so my work is different every single day, even if I’m teaching, you know, the same courses I’ve been teaching for the past several years.
Jason Gorman (03:50)
And when you’re totally dialed in at work, what are the kinds of things you’re most likely to be doing?
Kristen Bourgault (03:59)
So I think and the kid, the kid, you gotta update your language, Jason, because the kids would say you’re locked in when you’re locked. Yeah, when I’m locked in. yeah, mo make a note. when I’m locked in
Jason Gorman (04:04)
Locked in. All right. When you’re locked in. All right. Thank thank you for the note. Appreciate it.
Kristen Bourgault (04:11)
at work, it’s really developing new courses. I mean, that’s that’s where I can just lose myself. I go to bed sleeping about it, I thinking about it, I get up and that’s the first thing that I want to do is work on new course development, just researching topics, designing learning activities for my students.
And so I think that’s really the most rich intellectual work. But the other piece is that I absolutely love what will always love is give me a like poorly designed Canvas or Blackboard course and let me get in there and make the formatting consistent and add some icons and dress it up and put things in bullets. And I also could do that probably for hours and miss a meal, just cleaning up someone’s bad canvas course.
Jason Gorman (04:53)
Great. you have said before that you got going your first job doing this kind of work. You were right out of school. In fact, you were still at the school that you had gone to, and then you started doing this work. so it was really at the beginning, beginning, beginning of your career that you started. So I’m curious if you could turn back the clock, what advice would you give to?
that person who is doing her first instructional design work, what advice would you give her?
Kristen Bourgault (05:26)
Yeah, I I think at the time it really had no to probably like you said, you were doing it before you knew what it was. So I had no clue that this was a thing. I was just trying to help faculty put content online. so if I had to go back, I mean I’d say just just stay the course, man. Like this is a field. This there’s a whole deep body of research and history. and there’s gonna be work. This isn’t going away. This is actually you’re on the cutting edge of something that’s gonna keep evolving.
Jason Gorman (05:54)
And this is a question, it could be about work, but it could just be about life, anything outside of work. What is a skill you’re trying to pick up right now?
Kristen Bourgault (06:02)
Yeah, so I I mean I definitely am always trying to upscale for work, but I’m less interested in in that these days. I’m definitely less interested in spending time on the computer. So mostly what I’m trying to upskill is ways to get off the computer. so my my like pet hobby this summer has been foraging and you know, finding things in my yard. Yeah,
Jason Gorman (06:21)
wow.
Kristen Bourgault (06:23)
finding things in my yard that are safe to eat and finding ways to prepare them and make my family experiment and eat them. So anything that gets me outside.
And just away from the computer is really kind of where I wanna be right now.
Jason Gorman (06:35)
You have a very different yard than I do, I think.
Kristen Bourgault (06:38)
you’d be surprised. You’d be surprised.
There may be some things out there that you can eat.
Jason Gorman (06:44)
I’m gonna take your word for it. I’m I would end up absolutely killing myself if I tried to eat something. No.
Kristen Bourgault (06:47)
Yeah, b yeah. Don’t don’t just go rogue and try to eat things. No. No.
Consult the internet.
Jason Gorman (06:54)
- All right. You came into this work as a student worker. I mentioned this a minute ago. You had graduated from Simmons College. It was a college
Kristen Bourgault (07:04)
Yes.
Jason Gorman (07:04)
at the time. It’s now you it’s now university. And your work was you said it was making photocopies, editing PowerPoints. And then at one point you got asked to help put some courses together in WebCT. And for those
People who do not know what Web CT is, a learning manage was a learning management system. It was absorbed by back by Blackboard at some point. It was huge at the time. It was one of just a couple of them. anyway, you already had graphic design skills, you had web design skills, you had things that you were bringing to the table. I’m kind of curious what was it about your early work as an instructional designer, you know, putting these courses online that
Got you hooked.
Kristen Bourgault (07:52)
Yeah, so I kind of like you had mentioned earlier about yourself, I was vaguely interested in teaching. I’m not I’m
Jason Gorman (07:58)
Mm-hmm.
Kristen Bourgault (07:59)
very introverted. I’m not a a stand in front of a classroom person. So I had kind of ruled out education as like a field. and I was doing a lot of graphic design, web design work and as an undergraduate and piecing that together. And so as a student worker, as I was making photocopies, the faculty were asking me, Can you help me with my email? Can you
put some of these materials online. Can you format these PowerPoints? and so up until that point, I I didn’t know what I was gonna do, but I had all these web design, graphic design skills and I was using them to build like websites that were marketing or businesses. And and really this was sort of at the beginning of that, the it wasn’t the beginning of the internet, but when it was really picking up steam.
with becoming like e-commerce. And so it seemed to me like that I would have to be selling things if I you know, putting together websites to sell things. And I know you run a business, but for me the business is like the least interesting thing that I could possibly do. I didn’t want to be doing that. I was, you know, building like websites for a caterer and putting up prices and just was so boring.
So when I realized that I could use all of these skills and build websites and engage with technology and do graphic design and write copy for learning purposes, it was sort of like just eye-opening to me that I could use all those skills in service of teaching and learning. and that I somehow could weasel my way into being an educator without having to be a teacher, without having to command a classroom. And so that’s really what hooked it for me.
The the program I worked for was a doctorate, the bridge doctorate into physical therapy for people who are practicing physical therapists. They had busy careers and they needed to pick up some of the more administrative skills to get their doctorate so that they could stay practicing in the field and move up in the field. And the other thing that really drew me to it was that I was learning so much. The courses that I was developing were about negotiation, cultural competence. and so I realized that.
As
I was building these websites for the faculty, I was learning the content, you know, just picking up different things. And so to me it was like, wow, this is a place where so many of my interests meet and gets me into the field of education with skills that I already have.
Jason Gorman (10:19)
Actually, I’m kind of curious about those skills. You came in with those skills. They were clearly important in terms of getting you getting you started. Do you feel like there were some attitudes or skills or behaviors or anything that you had coming into this career that you have, if you look back, that have actually continued to serve you over the course of your career? And what are those?
Kristen Bourgault (10:49)
Yeah, I think a lot of people sort of shrug off like web design and HTML and graphic design as being instructional design skills and they think more about using the technology and clicking the buttons or the pedagogical approaches and and the needs analysis and evaluation pieces of instructional design. For me, I feel that having the visual design skills coming in really was helpful. And that’s kind of what gave me a leg up as I was able to design like
make the online courses look good in a way that I think is instantly appealing like to the faculty and the administrators who were looking for this program and brought them on board that this isn’t just going to be like flat text pasted up into Web CT, but to give it a little bit of visual interest. I really think it helped make my case for why I was right for that role and and it helps you to build a portfolio that looks good. and I think that
Having those skills is really a huge asset. I don’t think you absolutely need them. I think there’s lots of roles for instructional designers that don’t require the graphic design and visual design skills, but I think it’s really helpful if you have them. And I think it often can help you sell yourself into positions if you’re able to showcase those.
Jason Gorman (12:01)
And the reason that I asked the question is because
for people who do not understand our our work and aren’t thinking hard about it, the assumption with AI is that you can like push a button and it pops a course out. And I I think
The reality is n not only are there skills that are important that you know most designers should have, instructional designers should have, that each of us comes with our own unique background and stuff. That stuff is actually important to the work that we do. It’s not just about being able to do a single kind of task, that there are things that that we pick up and grow across our careers that are really important.
to our success and our ability to do our work well. And some of those are quite durable. So those things that you were using even before you started doing this work, you’re still, you still find value in them. So it’s just, I think worth, worth pointing out that, that that the world is not wipe is not wiping away the importance of these skills. So I’m curious to hear actually about your program, this program that you are the director there.
at Quinnipiac University. tell me, I’m curious who comes to your program. What does the program itself look like? What kinds of work do your graduates go on to do? And what’s your role in it every day?
Kristen Bourgault (13:34)
Sure. So our program at Quinnipiac, as they said, is a 30 credit, 10 course, 30 credit master’s program. And we have a set of foundational courses that we have students take, which really focus on the instructional design process, learning about, you know, ADI, but other processes that you can use to create instruction. Then some courses on cognitive science so that you understand the science behind how we learn and particularly how we learn with multimedia and technology.
And then we have a course on that kind of touches on graphic design and multimedia and a course on collaboration. So more about like working as an instructional designer, working remotely and collaborating with others.
Jason Gorman (14:18)
Mm.
Kristen Bourgault (14:18)
We then have some electives you can choose from, which go into the different technologies really. They’re more technology focused. So picking up kind of tech skills, web design, video production, online learning, which really focuses on the learning management system.
Accept we have a course on accessibility and accessible tech and a course on new technology. And then the final experience is either a capstone where you’re going to do one big project throughout the semester or internships. So we have the option for students. who comes into our program, that’s kind of one of the biggest challenges and also one I think of the benefits of our particular program is that we have everybody. So we have
Jason Gorman (15:00)
Hm.
Kristen Bourgault (15:01)
K-12
teachers coming in who want to upskill and use tech in the classroom or who want to now pivot out of K-12 and into instructional design careers. we have people, a lot of people working in higher ed. We have a lot of people from Quinapiac taking my courses while they’re, you know, while they’re working, because it just sort of, like you said, a lot of the skills do transfer to different, all different kinds of work. but we also have other people from universities, faculty,
People in instructional design roles or tech roles that are interested in the field. And then we also have like the corporate audience. So we have all people who are either in corporate instructional design jobs or looking to level up a lot of insurance because we’re in Connecticut. That’s a big market here. And then
Jason Gorman (15:44)
Mm-hmm.
Kristen Bourgault (15:45)
the fourth bucket has been really increasing over the past several year years is healthcare. So people coming from healthcare backgrounds.
who are interested in either patient education or training other people in their in their disciplines. Konipiac has a big health studies, nursing, and med school program. So we have a lot of those students, but we’ve also had students just independently come into the program from those disciplines. so a couple big things about our program, we’re really learner.
Learner focus, that’s really my lens of instructional design is you have to get to know your learners. You are designing for your learners. you know, we do a lot of like learner personas and empathy to understand who those learners are and what they need and how we can best reach them. and we also really couple the theory and practice because I know that just, you know, I kind of have always straddled the staff faculty role. I don’t have a PhD, I don’t have a research background, so I’m more of a practical hands-on person.
and so I know that just sitting through 10 courses worth of theory isn’t is great. That’s great, you know a lot about it. But if you can’t apply it, it’s just not going to take you very far
Jason Gorman (16:57)
Mm-hmm.
Kristen Bourgault (16:58)
in your career. So we do a lot of the theory, you know the theory, but then we apply it. Every single course has hands-on projects that you’re doing that are going to often we have students draw their own projects from like their work life or
organizations that they volunteer with and that type of thing to create actual instructional design projects that they can then highlight in a portfolio at the end of the program. I think that’s basically that’s the program. You want me to talk a little bit about my role? Was that the okay?
Jason Gorman (17:28)
Sure. Yes, please.
Kristen Bourgault (17:30)
So as as you had mentioned earlier, I I developed a program co-developed 12 years ago with another faculty member, her name is Dr. Ruth Schwartz.
She actually founded the program and brought me on. I’m very grateful to her and for her leadership over the past 12, I guess, years. She’s phased out into like a partial retirement. So she’s currently teaching in the program, but she stepped down from the director role and I’ve stepped in. So in that piece of it, in higher education right now, even as faculty, you’re asked to do a lot. So I teach a 332 load, which is three courses in the fall, three in the spring, two in the summer.
which is a pretty heavy role load to also manage the program because I am involved with marketing and how to best get the word out, admissions and interviewing incoming students and open house events and those types of things, all the way through advising, you know, ca a lot of counseling with students. So we have adult students, but they have lots of challenges, you know, as adults in their lives with managing coursework. So we do a lot of that, all the way through planning.
You know, online graduation and all of that. So just really soup to nuts the whole everything that you could do in an academic program. I have my hands in.
Jason Gorman (18:46)
I mentioned to this earlier. this is a big topic. You said that you’ve been fighting for the legitimacy of online learning for twenty-five years, the full span of your career. What what has your experience been like this over twenty twenty-five years? Say more about that.
Kristen Bourgault (19:04)
So
this this might be like a politically incorrect way to frame this, but I’ve always felt like we’re sort of the the ugly stepchildren of the university. And I’ve worked at, I think, five or six universities at this point. it’s like the last thing people think about. It is online education is left out of the conversations at the university level. I attend all our faculty senate meetings at Quinnipiac, and we have a long history at Quinnipiac of online education. We’ve been doing it for a really long time and still.
a lot of the conversations just fail to, you know, acknowledge that there are a whole group of us who are online faculty who are not on campus every day. and more importantly, that we have an entire student body that does not ever see campus. You know, my one of the biggest joys of my job is gradu when I attend graduation and my students come on campus and that is their first time meeting me and that is their first time
Jason Gorman (19:56)
Mm.
Kristen Bourgault (19:57)
on campus. and they’re kind of like, wow, this place is so cool. I you know maybe I should have come
visited in the past two years. so I think it’s just I
Jason Gorman (20:06)
Mm-hmm.
Kristen Bourgault (20:07)
think we could do more to make those people feel included and connected to our campus. And it’s just it’s not it’s not being done. It’s it never feels like it’s being done enough. in my experience, I I spent the first half of my career supporting online faculty as an instructional designer and they’re often under resourced.
The work is not understood, which I know is is across the board. Instructional design work is not understood. people don’t know what it takes to teach online. It’s a 24-7 job to teach online in a graduate program. and we just don’t get the resources. We don’t get the technology resources. We it’s it’s seen as like this.
easily scalable model where we could just infinitely fill our classes with students and that’s just not the case if we want to do it in a quality way. And I just don’t think it’s worth doing if you’re if you’re not gonna do it in a way that results in student learning at the end of the day. So yeah, I mean I could talk for hours about this. I don’t know if you have a specific yeah.
Jason Gorman (21:17)
I do. I mean,
I’m I I’d love for you to make the case for online online education then. what do we know about how effective online education is versus traditional education? yeah.
Kristen Bourgault (21:30)
Yes. So this is where my
lack of research background is gonna fail me because I I and I could have looked before we had this conversation to support my case. I can’t give you numbers. I can’t give you evidence or statistics about online education being I I don’t think it’s better. I think it it can be as good. And in in a lot of cases, I think it is better. And all of that evidence that I have is just from talking to people. I know a lot of people who have extremely successful careers having
Earn their degrees online. I don’t think online education is a model for for everything. I don’t think everything should be online. I really see value in K-12 students being together in public education settings for a multitude of reasons physically. I think that there’s huge value in sending our 17 to 22 year olds off to college campuses to try to get along in the world and learn things about who they want to be.
but I think where online education really shines is in the graduate space. I think that the reality is that everybody’s working, even those 18-year-olds, some of those 16-year-olds are working. And we need ways to help those people get educated and the flexibility of online learning where you can really get your work done any time of day.
You know, my courses still stick to a strict schedule. We’re on a weekly schedule. They have deadlines, but there’s so much flexibility in when they get that work done, where they get that work done. and so I think it’s just in terms of accessibility, making education accessible for more people. I think it’s it’s a really important model that shouldn’t be overlooked. In terms of efficiency, I can really speak to my own program. I mean, my my graduates go on to do great things.
They get jobs, they are in all kinds of roles, they move up in their organizations. And so I know that they’re getting what they need out of the program. you know, we did a survey. Here’s my one statistic. I can I can say we recently did a survey of the graduates over the past three years, and they were a hundred percent either, you know, satisfied or extremely satisfied with their education. so I think if we invest in
teaching people how to do it well if we invest in the faculty and if we do more, particularly in higher ed, to create a community for our online learners. I think this is a great opportunity to reach more people. And as we’re all looking at enrollment challenges, it’s it’s from a business perspective a great opportunity to stay afloat.
Jason Gorman (24:08)
Turning to the technology a little bit, you’ve said that online learning is actually not about the technology. It’s about people and relationships. And I I don’t think I could agree any more than 100%. So I will say that I agree a hundred percent. In your work, can you talk about how you keep people and relationships at the center when technology is both the medium, but I think it’s also for people who don’t know as much about this work.
It is the thing that they tend to latch on to. It’s the thing that they tend to think it that it is all about. But I think for folks that have been students in a program like yours or have done the work of instructional design, we know that technology is necessary, but it is not the ballgame. I’m curious if you could just talk about how do you design the human element into what you do.
Kristen Bourgault (25:05)
Yeah, I think I think that is the biggest misconception that it’s just all about the technology. I think it’s funny because if we said like teaching in a classroom is all about relationships, people would be like, Yes, absolutely. No one would say, No, it’s about the classroom building or it’s about the chairs. Like those are just those are just the the vehicles.
Jason Gorman (25:23)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Kristen Bourgault (25:25)
so yeah, I think in my own teaching, those human relationships are what’s absolutely most important. I
really take the time to get to know each of my students. I have the luxury of having them over multiple courses. I also have the luxury of 14 week semesters. I will
Jason Gorman (25:42)
Mm-hmm.
Kristen Bourgault (25:43)
I will go to my grave arguing for a 14 week semester. I think that another way that online learning has sort of made itself look bad is really shortening up the the timeframe to complete course content. It’s just unrealistic. So I think it does take time to build those relationships.
but I do and I think the other misconception is that you’re only communicating in text-space medium. And I think you can make personal connections
Jason Gorman (26:10)
Mm.
Kristen Bourgault (26:10)
with people in text. you know, I have great relationships with people I’ve only really interacted with online and have text-based conversations or emails or on discussion boards. but I think pulling in video is really, really important in our current online space.
I have my students do a lot of videos. I have them do a video introduction. I can see their face with their name. I have them do video, I I alternate kind of between the traditional text-based discussion boards and video discussions, so that again it can just see them in in a different format. and I I also give, you know, audio feedback and just lit little tiny things like always using their names when addressing them, and always making myself
available and also human to them in in my teaching and in who I am, why I’m here, and also when I can’t be here, why I’m not here, when I’m out in my garden, you know, that those things I think help make me more than just a talking head or just a text, you know, a a typed up comment. and I think especially now as obviously AI, we’re seeing more and more AI, I think that it’s going to become even more important because
Students are gonna wanna know that it’s not a bot that’s teaching their class, it’s not a bot who’s giving them feedback, but that it’s really an actual human who is there behind reading their papers, giving them comments, and helping them grow throughout the course of a semester.
Jason Gorman (27:42)
Well s perfect segue here. In twenty
Kristen Bourgault (27:44)
Good.
Jason Gorman (27:45)
twenty two you used Chat GPT for the first time. You immediately thought, you said, you’ve told me that this was going to change education for the better. That was your initial your initial take.
What in that moment, we’ll just linger on that moment back a couple years ago, what did you think was going to happen?
Kristen Bourgault (28:03)
So as an instructional designer for my entire career, I’ve been trying to move faculty towards authentic assessments that really are measuring student learning and not just regurgitation or their ability to take a test or a quiz. And developing assignments and activities that are rooted in the students’ lives or their values or the things that they’re interested in in order to make the learning meaningful, which we do know is how students learn best when it’s connected to the context of their lives.
So when I, you know, typed in to Chat GPT, like, hey, write me a paper. What, you know, what is who’s George Washington? And in two seconds it gave me a, you know, nice five paragraph essay. I was like, well, there it goes. You know, if any kid can get access to this, then teachers aren’t going to be able to make these kinds of assignments anymore. They’re going to have to really root the students’ assignments in their own the students context in order to understand if they’ve learned or not.
Because every kid’s gonna be able to give you this exact same paper. To be fair, that was possible before. I mean, you could Google papers, but it just the the it made it so much easier. and
Jason Gorman (29:15)
That’s interesting. So you saw the technology as a challenge to a weakness that we have put up with in the educational system, right? Or that that isn’t yeah. Interesting. Sorry. Sorry to interrupt you, but that’s fascinating. Yeah.
Kristen Bourgault (29:24)
Yes. I actually no. Yes, that’s good
rephrasing. And I actually was sort of excited. Like this is it. This is it. All of education. I think, you know, we could have another chat about what’s wrong with K twelve education. But I was like, this is gonna change everything and faculty aren’t gonna be able to get away with it. but yeah, that was that was my first thinking. That’s not where it went.
Jason Gorman (29:51)
And then and then what did happen? How’s your thinking evolved since twenty twenty two?
Kristen Bourgault (29:57)
So two things happen. One is that the immediate reaction from faculty and teachers was, we need to police this. Like these kids are bad. They are just shortcutting the system. We need to figure out how do we how do we know if this is Chat GPT? Well, AI, I guess we should call it by its by its name. you know, how can we ensure that that this is authentic student work? What tools could we use? Let’s
Jason Gorman (30:20)
Yeah.
Kristen Bourgault (30:21)
let’s find some tools. I want to know how to catch the cheating.
How to catch the cheaters? How do we cut down on this? Like I said, in both the K-12 and higher ed space and less reflective, what am I doing wrong as an educator? What could I do better? I think we’re seeing more of a a move towards that now, but it’s slow. and I think we’ve been trying, people like me and you have been trying to raise awareness about this for 25 years. So
The change I think is still going to be slow, but the technology is just really outpacing us. And I think something really dramatic is going to have to happen. The other thing that I saw that was equally disappointing to me was that assignments that I thought I had really designed that were AI proof because I’m so clever, students were still cheating with AI. And
Jason Gorman (31:11)
Mm.
Kristen Bourgault (31:11)
so I had to reflect on.
Why am I doing these things? last semester, I have an assignment at the end of the semester. I have great relationship and rapport with my students. but their final assignment was to post what they learned from my class at the end of the semester. And five out of 15 just used Chat GPT to re reword the previous post on the discussion board. And I thought, wow, if
Jason Gorman (31:37)
Mm.
Kristen Bourgault (31:37)
these students aren’t even interested in reflecting on what they learned and posting.
you know, kind of what am I doing here? after I really thought about it, it was clear that hadn’t made it apparent to them why that process was important, why it was going to help them, why I didn’t really care if they used complete sentences or if they spelled things correctly. It was just more about them thinking back. and that they retired at the end of the semester. And this was just one last thing they had to check off the list and it wasn’t worth their time.
other things that they wanted to do in their lives to sit down and and really write this. So I had to think about how I would restructure that or really the purpose of an assignment like that. and so it it the thing I thought would happen when I initially opened Chat GPT happened to me, you know, questioning why am I
Jason Gorman (32:29)
Yeah, yeah.
Kristen Bourgault (32:30)
doing this and what can I do better.
Jason Gorman (32:33)
Yeah. if there was a little playbook that you or I don’t know, piece of advice for anybody who’s designing any kind of any kind of assignment that could conceivably be partially done with AI, what’s a good principle that you might you might promote that would help somebody in their thinking through of
How do I make this still engaging for the person who’s doing the work? So they’re actually doing the work. They are doing the thinking. They’re doing the hard and necessary work of the learning process. Is there anything in the in the mechanics of or the structure of building an assignment that you think is a is a good one to consider when you’re putting together an assignment?
Kristen Bourgault (33:28)
I I think there’s a lot of things and I could probably talk to this for a long time, but I’ll I’ll try to keep it a little focused. I I think a couple big picture things. One is that a lot of assignments assignments shouldn’t happen in isolation. I mean, it’s gotta be kind of tied to everything else that’s happened in the course. If you have something
Jason Gorman (33:44)
Mm-hmm.
Kristen Bourgault (33:45)
that’s just in isolation, that’s a very easy thing to cheat on. But if students have been working towards something all semester or over a couple of weeks or whatever, and they see the value in it, in
completing that assignment and how it connects to everything else. I think that that makes them more likely to do it. I think this is like counterintuitive, how to get them to do the hard work. I think you have to make it easier. You know, they they shouldn’t have to go out and and research an article and find five articles and pick the best article and we have to sort of streamline like here’s a really great article I’ve edited for you. Here’s what you need to get this done. Read it, really digest it, give them the tools and talk to them about how to do that.
You know, give them maybe an organizer to break down here some of the key points I want you to look for, and then give them a fairly easy assignment. It shouldn’t be a hundred page paper. You know, it’s gotta be give me a couple paragraphs. so I think in in making it easier, actually we’ll get them to engage more deeply in the work that we want them to do. You have to be realistic that these people are very busy, no matter what age they are. There are other things that they wanna be doing with their time.
we only can grab their attention for a short amount of time. And how do we make the most of that time for them so they can get the most out of it? And the third thing is I think thinking about other delivery formats. I had students do some reflections this week that were similar to my my other reflection assignment, but they did it in video, and I got really robust responses that were rooted in their own experience. students are often uncomfortable at first getting on video.
but by the end of a semester with me, you’re doing it. It’s, you know, it’s very just it comes more easily. or if they’re not comfortable in video doing the audio piece. And I think that people will say to me, like, well, they still could have Chat GPT write their thing and then read it. Okay. But at least now if they’re reading the script to a camera, at least I know they’re they’ve given it one read through and maybe parts of it have gone into their brain. So
Jason Gorman (35:46)
Despite the fact that you know that some students are using this technology in ways that you don’t want them to, most of them are not, some of them are. You have mentioned to me that the vast majority of your students have developed a pretty critical, even negative view of AI technology. I’m kind of curious what you see when you see that.
Kristen Bourgault (36:13)
Yeah, so I think a lot of people come into instructional design. I’m gonna talk a little more broadly about tech, just tech in general and being critical of tech.
Jason Gorman (36:20)
Yeah. Yeah.
Kristen Bourgault (36:22)
I’m pretty tech critical. You know, I use a lot of technology, I love technology, but I really think that we need to be really mindful and intentional of how we use it. And I think I don’t need to list examples of how that’s gone awry in society when we’re not thinking about how we’re using it. That’s another yeah, we all know that.
Jason Gorman (36:38)
You you sure don’t. We we all we all
have our own examples in our heads, yes. Yeah.
Kristen Bourgault (36:43)
We all know that. Yes. so
the students that come into my program, you know, our title is the Masters in Instructional Design and Technology. I think I get a lot of students who are super excited about technology and using it and bringing it into their teaching. but I really work hard to make them be more critical in thinking about why do you want to use this tool in your teaching? I by the end of the
When they graduate, they are not chasing any shiny new thing. None of my students will ever chase the next shiny new thing because we’ve talked about the long history of educational technology and where people thought this was the next big thing that was going to change it all and how money has been wasted and invested in those things that f that fail out. I we really work hard to understand how the impact of technology on us, on our thinking, on our learning and
where it makes the most sense to leverage it in our teaching and where it just becomes a distraction. And we also talk a lot about, you know, it it the ethics of it, the the access. You know, this is great. I have I teach a course in emerging technology. And at the beginning of the module, everyone’s so excited. Like virtual reality, this is going to be so cool. But once we dig into it and we look for examples of it in education or in any kind of training and learning spaces.
And we all often come up short by the end, finding really good examples of it being done well. It’s expensive. How, okay, how are you going to pay for it? How are you going to get your district to pay for this? What happens when your district can pay for it, but other districts can’t? and so we talk about access and we talk about accessibility. and I think looking at tech through all those different lenses by the end makes my students much more critical. They are definitely
Jason Gorman (38:32)
Mm.
Kristen Bourgault (38:32)
very tech savvy.
I would still say they most of them love technology, but I think that they’re wise to its allure and its false promises by the end of the program and they try to think really much more intentionally about how we bring it into teaching and learning spaces.
Jason Gorman (38:52)
You mentioned before that you have a lot of alumni who go on to build careers, obviously, in this space. And I would imagine some of those people are now hiring instructional designers. You probably keep up with those folks. I’m curious when you talk to people out in the market, businesses or nonprofits or other kinds of organizations, and they are thinking about.
instructional designers and hiring, what are they telling you they want and need in candidates?
Kristen Bourgault (39:24)
Yeah, I I came to the realization this year when I stepped into the director role that I haven’t been in an instructional designer role for quite some time and it made sense to talk to people doing the actual work and in particular people doing the hiring so I can make sure that our curriculum is aligned with what our students are going to need to land jobs. and I was fortunate that had about 10 prior students come back and talk to me from their leadership positions. And so they really talked about three key things. The first is AI literacy.
obviously, you know, and that doesn’t mean just having a certificate in prompt engineering or knowing what the different platforms are. what they were talking about really was knowing again when to pull in AI and when not to, and when is it appropriate for an instructional designer to
Jason Gorman (40:10)
Mm.
Kristen Bourgault (40:10)
use AI in their work or to help with their work, and when it’s inappropriate. And a lot of those conversations came around,
making sure that the the correct language was being used in the copy that was being put out, that branding was being upheld in the in the products that the AI was producing. So really being again critical of of the AI output and understanding where to use it, where not to use it, and that it really still involves a heavy human hand before rolling something out the door. So I don’t think if you were up interviewing for an ID job right now and you couldn’t speak at all to AI.
that they are even gonna give you a call back. I think you have to really have a big awareness about it. So yeah, go ahead.
Jason Gorman (40:57)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I I well actually there’s something that you said that’s a little different from what I’ve heard to answers to similar questions because we hear a lot about business leaders and hiring managers having this like frothy
Kind of monolithic belief that everybody has to be using AI all the time, that that just, you know, we need to just be pouring AI all over our problems, and the AI is going to make those problems go away or get easier. It’s nice to hear a little bit more discernment from the people that you’ve been talking to about.
Or or wanting more discernment from the people that are in their organizations about how, when, and why to use AI in their work, that they’re looking for the ability to understand its strengths and weaknesses and be able to think critically about where it fits into the work as opposed to just like brute force, just just jam AI in everywhere and it’s gonna make it everything better. That’s that’s great. I haven’t heard a lot of what you just said, so I’m I’m heartened.
Kristen Bourgault (42:10)
You have to talk to students who graduated from my from my program. I think that comes with that critical the critical assessment of tech. We’re not just gonna chase the next tech and add it onto everything. and I I I
Jason Gorman (42:22)
Mm-hmm.
Kristen Bourgault (42:23)
talk to people to be fair too across construction management, medical device technology, tr insurance, of course. I always have insurance people, and higher ed. So all all in different spaces where they were.
saying, yeah, we are using AI, but we want to use it really mindfully. and we want to hire people who understand that and who aren’t just gonna use it to just do everything. So yeah, that was that was the big it so AI literacy. the second was still core instructional design skills. You know, you need to understand
Jason Gorman (42:55)
Mm.
Kristen Bourgault (42:56)
the theory. They even said you need to understand like basic, like some HTMLs you can get in and tinker with things. You need to have the tools like storyline and
They talked a lot about video. Video editing was a big one that kept coming up. So you have to have kind of those tech skills, the b basic level tech skills. And then the third big bucket of what the instructional design hiring managers were looking for is like more of the project management, working with subject matter experts, communicating with stakeholders and managing, you know, timelines in projects. So those were the things that they felt were were what they needed. and those are
A lot of those things carry strongly through our program, but it’s definitely areas that I’m gonna continue to try to really build up.
Jason Gorman (43:41)
That’s that’s wonderful. That’s refreshingly balanced.
Kristen Bourgault (43:44)
Yes,
yes. Yeah, I was expecting just all in on AI or all in on tech, but it really was those three those three buckets and the need for all of it. it’s a complex field, you know, we talked about that at the beginning. It you you need to know a lot of things. You don’t need to know everything to be successful in this space. If you’re deep in one area or a couple, I think you can be successful,
Jason Gorman (44:05)
Mm-hmm.
Kristen Bourgault (44:06)
but you need to have an awareness about a lot of things, I think, to be a really effective instructional designer.
Jason Gorman (44:12)
Yeah. Yeah. And you know, this this next we just have a couple questions left. This next question is framed nicely by your last answer. I’m just gonna ask it, but I I feel like I’m asking it in a different way than I thought I would be. So, based on everything, what your students are experiencing, what employers are asking for, and where the field is right now, what are your biggest fears for the future of instructional design and what are your biggest hopes?
Kristen Bourgault (44:40)
So I think my biggest fear is probably everyone’s fear that AI, the the some of the people you’ve talked to where they’re saying, I’m just being told use AI for everything, that AI is going to be used for everything, that people in upper administration are going to say, Hey, we can build training. We’ll just use AI. And just more and more AI slop taking over the space where we’re just seeing so much garbage and and it checking off a box that, you know, we developed some e-learning for you and it’s just not effective and people are not.
being well trained or well prepared and really having people say, like we develop these things with AI and that’s instructional design and it sort of cheapening the name instructional design. and devaluing it, that’s my worst my worst case scenario and AI just taking all of our jobs. That’s why I have my my background skill of gardening and and being out in my yard as a fallback.
I don’t think that’s gonna happen. I don’t think we’re gonna go that far. my absolute most hopeful ideal is that as we’re in this space where things are changing so rapidly, new tech is coming on board so fast. there’s just a constant need to learn and upskill. And we see that people need to really engage in lifelong learning, that there’ll be a renewed demand for instructional designers for well-designed instruction and effective learning. and
in that ideal space, people are leveraging AI to help them do the work. But again, with that just critical eye, thinking about how we can use it to help us, but not forgetting that our human minds are much more effective at figuring out what’s going to work best for human learners.
Jason Gorman (46:25)
Okay, I have one last question, one last question for you. And this is from my my last guest. Her name is Brenda Boyd. Brenda worked at Quality Matters for many years. We had a really good conversation about quality and online learning, but quality in general. And I asked her to give me a question to ask my neck net my next guest. And here’s her question. she asks, What does quality look like in what you’re doing?
Kristen Bourgault (46:54)
So
I’m gonna go with sort of what does quality look like in online learning and making creating effective online learning experiences. I think it looks like happy students at the end of the day. And I don’t mean
Jason Gorman (47:08)
Yeah.
Kristen Bourgault (47:08)
the happy student who just fills out their course evaluation and says, this was a fun class. It was so easy, I had a great time. but happy students who say what you taught me.
in this course immediately applied to my life. I was able to put the things I I learned into practice the next day in my classroom, in my corporate training workshop, in my, you know, working with my patients to educate them about their conditions. it’s the work being immediately applicable to them. It’s them feeling like they were seen and heard and that their personal goals were met within the framework of the course.
And then them coming back ten years later to tell me what they’re looking for and instructional designers that they’re hiring. I think to me, like I said at the beginning, those relationships are what’s most important in the work that we do. And being able to reach out to those students years later or have them reach back out to me, I think that that’s really what what quality looks like in in my teaching.
Jason Gorman (48:11)
I can’t think of a better possible way to end this conversation, you know, by really talking about the long-term payoffs and benefits for your learners and for the people that they impact in their work. I mean, this is one of the great things about this work is that there is this compounding positive snowball of good stuff that happens when we do our work well. Well, Kristen, I really want to thank you for coming on the show.
Thank you. It’s really been a delight talking to you.
Kristen Bourgault (48:42)
Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Jason. And thanks for your really thoughtful questions and all you’re doing to promote instructional design and learning and development out in the world. I appreciate it.