Learning Design Portfolio

A look at two courses I've built from the ground up: designing curriculum, materials, and assessments to fit the learners actually in the room.

Real Analysis / Advanced Calculus

Built and taught at Texas Woman's University · Online, asynchronous lecture + live weekly problem sessions

Learner population

Upper-level undergraduate and graduate mathematics students making the transition from computational to proof-based mathematics — a shift that trips students up on reasoning style far more often than on content difficulty.

What I built

  • A full course built from scratch: sequencing, materials, and assessments, co-designed with a colleague
  • Two recorded lectures released weekly, paired with a live Thursday problem session to work through proofs in real time
  • Weekly ungraded homework sets designed to build proof-writing fluency through repetition, backed by weekly quizzes and two midterms to check retention
  • Learning outcomes centered on non-formulaic problem solving and persuasive, precise mathematical writing — not just correct answers

Design decisions

I deliberately separated practice from assessment: homework stays low-stakes and ungraded so students engage with hard problems without fear of penalty, while quizzes and exams measure what actually stuck. The two lowest quiz grades are dropped to absorb the normal bumps of learning a new reasoning style without distorting the signal on mastery.

Canvas module structure for Real Analysis, showing Course Information and a Lecture Videos & Problem Session Videos module organized by week
The course built out in Canvas: a Course Information module up front, then weekly modules pairing recorded lecture content with the live problem session for that week.
Handwritten Day 1 lecture notes introducing injective, surjective, and bijective functions with a concrete diagram example
Sample lecture notes. I introduce each new logical concept with a concrete, slightly playful example before the abstract definition — here, injectivity and surjectivity via a diagram before the formal statement.
Online quiz question pair: first identify the intersection of two sets, then prove the identification is correct
A scaffolded quiz pair: students first identify a set intersection, then immediately have to prove their answer — pairing computation with the proof-writing skill the course is really teaching.

Business Analysis (Business Math) — OER Curriculum Redesign

Texas Woman's University · Internally grant-funded redesign, course coordinator

Learner population

Business undergraduates with limited math backgrounds, taking a required course covering functions, matrices, linear programming, probability, and finance applications — material that only matters to most of these students once it's tied to a real business decision.

What I built

  • Led a full audit of the existing curriculum and required materials against the course's stated learning outcomes
  • Won an internal grant to rebuild the course around open educational resources, cutting required-material costs for students
  • Rebuilt materials and assessments to close gaps between what was being taught and what was being tested — e.g., aligning matrix and linear-programming instruction directly to the optimization problems students were expected to solve
  • Coordinated the redesign across a 16-week course calendar spanning three unit exams and a comprehensive final

Design decisions

Because most students in this course won't go on to take more math, I prioritized material that ties directly to business decisions — cost/revenue/profit modeling, optimization, and compound interest — over abstract treatment of the same topics, while keeping the course's core learning outcomes intact.

An old Canvas quiz built question-by-question by hand, showing a single static word problem with no auto-generated variants
Before: each homework question built by hand in Canvas — static, one variant per problem, and slow to build or revise at scale.
MyOpenMath practice assessment embedded in Canvas via LTI, showing a graded practice attempt interface with reset and preview controls
After: homework rebuilt on MyOpenMath, an open-source platform integrated into Canvas via LTI — auto-generated problem variants, built-in practice mode, and no license cost to students, in place of hand-built one-off questions.