Gain Experience for Good

From 2014 to 2020, Designers for Learning engaged instructional designers in professional development courses and real-world service projects. Over this time, participants created, implemented, and evaluated learning and performance improvement solutions customized to the needs of mission-driven organizations. These efforts included the design of learning experiences, the development of educational resources, and the use of instructional technologies to help nonprofits achieve their purpose. Over 4,000 people volunteered with us to gain instructional design experience while creating solutions crucial to the success of the social impact sector. In other words, our participants gain experience for good.

Our History

Founded in August 2014, Designers for Learning aimed to support underserved social needs through service learning by providing instructional design help. Participants engaged in our fully online service projects, which include small cohorts and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), to acquire instructional design skills while offering learning and performance enhancement solutions to the social impact sector.

Our service-learning initiatives involved college students, their faculty sponsors, and various instructional design and subject-matter experts. In 2014, the inaugural group of volunteer service learners created open educational resources for Grace Centers of Hope, a nonprofit in Pontiac, MI, dedicated to aiding homeless individuals who have yet to complete high school by preparing them for the General Educational Development (GED) test. In 2016, we expanded this project into large-scale open service MOOCs. Thanks to our participants, we’ve developed an extensive repository of free lesson plans and related open educational resources (OER) for adult educators and their students, referenced in alignment with the College and Career Readiness Standards (see our Adult Learning Zone on OER Commons). By 2017, we launched reduced-fee professional development courses designed for instructional designers who wanted to enhance their talents. All proceeds from these fee-based courses funded Designers for Learning’s nonprofit objectives.