Most institutions accumulate learning tools without a coherent strategy – an LMS here, a video platform there, a polling tool adopted by one faculty and unknown to the rest. The result is redundancy, shadow IT, poor integration, and no clear process for evaluating, adopting, or sunsetting tools.
When someone asks “should we adopt this new tool?” there’s no good process for answering. When a vendor contract comes up for renewal, there’s no structured way to assess whether the tool is still earning its place. When a privacy question arises, there’s no governance body with the mandate to make the call.
What an engagement looks like
Platform ecosystem audit. A review of your institution’s learning technology landscape – what tools you have, who uses them, how they’re governed, where the gaps and redundancies are. Delivered as a strategic assessment with prioritized recommendations.
Governance development support. Helping your institution build the committee structures, decision criteria, and evaluation processes needed to make coherent technology decisions – including terms of reference, roles and responsibilities, and review cycles. Good governance makes decisions faster, not slower, because people know where to go and what criteria matter.
Platform selection support. When you’re choosing a new LMS, video platform, or other core learning tool, I can help structure the evaluation – defining requirements, managing vendor demonstrations, facilitating stakeholder input, and ensuring the decision accounts for pedagogy, accessibility, privacy, and integration.
I worked with university leadership – including Provosts, Vice-Provosts, and CIOs – to build the University of Calgary’s learning technology governance structure, including the Learning Technologies Advisory Committee and D2L Steering Committee, governing an ecosystem spanning D2L Brightspace, Zoom, YuJa, Top Hat, Gradescope, Explorance Blue, and more. I’ve also conducted comparative analyses of governance models at Canada’s research universities, so I can help you learn from what others have done without reinventing the wheel.
This work requires understanding institutional politics as much as technology. I’ve been navigating both for over thirty years.