Gain Experience for Good
From 2014 to 2019, 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
Designers for Learning was founded in August of 2014 with a charitable purpose to provide instructional design support to underserved social needs through service learning. Since 2014, over 4,000 people have enrolled in our 100% virtual service projects in both small cohorts and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to gain instructional design experience and provide learning and performance improvement solutions to the social impact sector.
Our service-learning projects involved college students, their faculty sponsors, and other instructional design and subject-matter experts. Our first volunteer service-learners designed and developed open educational resources for the adult basic education program at Grace Centers of Hope, a nonprofit based in Pontiac, MI that provides General Educational Development (GED) test preparation for homeless individuals who have not graduated from high school. We then expanded on this work within large-scale open service-MOOCs (massive open online courses) starting in 2016. Through the efforts of our participants, we’ve built a large repository of free lesson plans and associated open educational resources (OER) for adult educators and their students that are aligned to the College and Career Readiness Standards (see our Adult Learning Zone on OER Commons).
In 2017, we began offering reduced-fee professional development courses for those interested in building their instructional design skills. All proceeds of these fee-based courses supported Designers for Learning’s nonprofit mission. In addition to these opportunities, we also designed and facilitated service-learning projects to target specific identified needs.