Students may never meet Megan Connolly in the classroom. But they experience her office’s work in the structure of a course, the clarity of an assignment, the captions on a video, the organization of a Canvas page, and the way assessments connect to what students are expected to learn.
Connolly is an instructional design consultant within the Office of Curriculum and Evaluation at Washington State University College of Nursing in Spokane, WA. Her work happens largely behind the scenes, but it shapes the student learning experience across the college.
“I think a lot of the work that we do in our office is very visible to students, although it might not seem like that, because we work on the back end,” Connolly said. “Once students are in the classroom, they are experiencing the curricular structure that our office works on.”
Connolly joined WSU after a career in higher education, including faculty work at Indiana University Bloomington. Her background is in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) and she spent years teaching, designing curriculum, supervising instructors, and working with faculty on teaching practices.
That experience led her toward instructional design.
She found that she enjoyed helping faculty think through how courses are built, how students learn, and how teaching can improve. Her current role brings those interests together.
“I loved working with faculty,” Connolly said. “I loved helping solve problems and thinking through how to help students learn in the best way possible.”
In the College of Nursing, Connolly has a sharp focus on curriculum. Her role includes faculty professional development, course design, educational technology support, academic program development, and individual consultation with instructors.
That can include helping faculty use Canvas, Panopto, and other learning tools. It can also mean working through larger questions about course outcomes, assignments, assessments, accessibility, and student learning.
Sometimes faculty come to her with a specific problem. Other times, they need a place to think through what is happening in a course.
“Teaching can feel very isolating sometimes,” Connolly said. “I like to provide a place where faculty can talk about things in a no-judgment space, where we think about different things to try.”
That support matters because course design in nursing education carries added complexity.
Connolly is not a nurse, and she said joining the College of Nursing required “a crash course in nursing education.” Nursing programs must meet expectations from accreditors, licensing bodies, professional standards, and external stakeholders such as the American Association of Colleges of Nursing Essentials and the Washington Board of Nursing.
Still, Connolly said the foundation of instructional design remains consistent.
“The really interesting thing about instructional design to me is, good teaching is good teaching,” Connolly said. “Good learning is good learning.”
For Connolly, strong course design begins with outcomes.
What do students need to learn? What do they need to be able to do? Do the assessments align with those outcomes? Do students have opportunities to practice before they are evaluated?
“Good instructional design impacts the student experience in myriad ways,” Connolly said. “It’s about writing outcomes that are going to align with the assessments so that students can actually demonstrate what they’re learning.”
That includes formative practice, scaffolding, clear rubrics, and assessments that reduce bias and create more equitable conditions for students.
It also means thinking about the student experience as a whole.
Connolly does not work with students day to day, but she often thinks from the student perspective.
“What are our students going to need in this course?” Connolly said. “What are ways in which we could rethink this assessment to be more authentic for our students, something that they might actually experience in their nursing practice?”
That student-centered approach also connects to one of Connolly’s major areas of focus: digital accessibility.
Over the past academic year, Connolly helped lead work to train faculty on digital accessibility and provide practical resources they could use in their courses. The office developed a learning path of six asynchronous courses based on WSU’s core concepts of accessibility. The introductory course was required for faculty, and the remaining courses allowed faculty to focus on the areas most relevant to their teaching.
The goal was to move beyond a checklist.
Connolly said a checklist might tell faculty to add alternative text to images, but that instruction is not useful unless faculty know what alternative text is, why it matters, and how to add it.
“We know that we have to do this, we know that it’s important,” Connolly said. “But how can we give faculty the tools to be able to do this?”
Common accessibility barriers in online and hybrid courses include images without alternative text, videos without captions, inaccessible documents, and course content that does not work well with screen readers.
For example, if a student uses a screen reader in Canvas and an image does not include alternative text, the information in that image may not be available to the student.
“That’s a major barrier,” Connolly said.
But Connolly said digital accessibility is not only about supporting students with documented accommodations. It is also about creating more flexible, usable learning environments for all students.
She uses Universal Design for Learning as a guiding framework. The idea is to provide students with multiple ways to access content, engage with material, and demonstrate what they know.
Video captions are one example.
Captions are essential for viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing. However, they may also help students who are studying in a noisy space, caring for children, unable to turn on sound, or learn better when they can listen and read at the same time.
“If we make it more accessible, that’s going to help everybody,” Connolly said.
That approach supports equity in nursing education.
“Accessibility is so important for equity,” Connolly said. “Every student should have equal opportunity and access.”
For Connolly, accessible design is most effective when it begins early.
“It’s easier to incorporate digital accessibility as part of the initial design process than to go back and make it accessible later,” Connolly said. “It also saves time, because it’s way more work to go back and remediate than it does to just make things digitally accessible from the get-go.”
The same principle applies to strong online course design.
Connolly said people often underestimate the amount of planning required before an online course begins.
“Teaching an online course is almost the easy part,” Connolly said. “Building an online course takes an immense amount of work on the back end.”
That work includes structuring the course, designing learning activities, creating assessments, building the Canvas course space, developing materials, and ensuring the course is accessible and aligned.
The Office of Curriculum and Evaluation use Quality Matters, an evidence-based framework for online course design, to help guide that work. Connolly and her colleagues use the rubric to support faculty and evaluate key elements of a course, including alignment, accessibility, learner support, instructional materials, and assessment.
“It’s helpful to have that as a guide in course design,” Connolly said.
Even with strong frameworks, course improvement is ongoing.
Connolly said curriculum revision is a form of continuous quality improvement. Courses need to evolve as student needs change, evidence develops, standards shift, and faculty learn what works.
That creates one of the biggest challenges faculty faces: time.
“Building a good course can take up a lot of time,” Connolly said. “It’s very much an iterative process.”
Digital accessibility also takes time. Faculty need time to learn accessibility skills, update materials, and review older course content. Connolly’s office also works within its own resource limits, which means the team must focus on work that has the greatest value for students and faculty.
“There is always more that we can do, and we want to do more,” Connolly said. “But it’s also important to be realistic and to work within the constraints of what we are able to do.”
Faculty feedback helps guide that work.
After professional development activities, Connolly and her colleagues collect evaluations and feedback from faculty. That feedback helps the office understand what faculty need, what they want to learn, and how current resources are helping.
“Our faculty are great about giving feedback,” Connolly said. “It makes my job and our office’s job more clear, because it gives us guidance about what they need, what they want, and what they think about the things we’ve been doing.”
Connolly said College of Nursing faculty stand out for their willingness to learn and improve.
“Our faculty are really unique in their devotion to their students, but also in their willingness to learn,” Connolly said. “There’s a culture that’s been created where learning and improvement is encouraged and seen as a positive.”
That culture motivates her work.
“Watching someone learn and be excited about learning is incredibly rewarding,” Connolly said. “Whether that’s faculty who feel like they’re better able to teach, or students, being able to be a small part of that is really rewarding to me.”
For Connolly, success comes back to students meeting course outcomes.
A well-designed course can be engaging, interesting, and useful. But at its core, it must help students learn what they need to learn and demonstrate that learning in meaningful ways.
“It all comes back to the outcomes of the course,” Connolly said. “What do students need to be able to do?”
In nursing education, that question has real weight.
Courses prepare students for licensure, clinical practice, and patient care. The design work may be invisible to many students, but its impact shows up in clearer learning paths, stronger assessments, more accessible materials, and courses that better support future nurses.
As Connolly put it, instructional design is “the invisible work that becomes very visible when it’s actually being taught to the students.”