Thomas R. Christian, M.Ed. — an experienced training, instructional design, technical writing, knowledge management, and quality leader across regulated healthcare, insurance, and contact-center operations. ADDIE, SAM, Bloom's, and Kirkpatrick by training, with an AI-assisted design practice that ships faster without cutting rigor.
I've led training, instructional design, and quality functions inside large, regulated operations — healthcare, insurance, and high-volume contact centers — owning full-cycle learning from needs analysis through Kirkpatrick evaluation. When the field's usual tools fell short of what the work needed, I designed better ones: an AI-assisted design approach that cut course-build time up to 75%, and a knowledge platform that gets frontline staff the right answer fast. The samples below are original, interactive, and mine — instructional design first, technology in service of it.
Fully interactive, fully original pieces on neutral topics. Each is built the way adults actually learn: short, scenario-driven, with feedback at the moment of decision and a knowledge check that teaches rather than tests. Click any one and try it.
Curious how one comes together? View the storyboard behind “New Manager Essentials” → — the design document that maps the objectives, screens, interactions, and assessments before a line of the course is built.
Deliver clear, specific feedback with the SBI model, handle defensive reactions, and close with documented agreements — ending in a scored, scenario-based knowledge check that tests judgment, not recall.
Soft Skills · Rise 360Self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, and navigating difficult conversations for individual contributors and new managers — with an eleven-question scenario quiz that puts you in the moment and asks for the emotionally intelligent move.
Wellbeing · Rise 360Recognize personal stress triggers and early warning signs, apply in-the-moment coping techniques, set boundaries, and build sustainable habits — closing with a personal 30–60–90-day resilience action plan.
Management · Rise 360The core skills a first-time manager needs — clear communication, effective delegation, feedback and coaching, conflict resolution, and building trust — with an application-level final quiz built around real new-manager dilemmas.
Years of training guides, quick-reference guides, and SOPs taught me the user-facing half of technical writing; these samples show the developer-facing half, documented from the source of my own production software. Every sample was produced through a verification pipeline I built: each claim is fact-checked against the source material, style-linted, and review-gated before it publishes — the review trail travels in the document itself.
The full webhook surface of a production Twilio-facing Cloudflare Worker: request signing, per-endpoint parameters and TwiML responses, error tables, and honest side-effect notes — written from the source code and verified against it character by character.
RunbookAn operations runbook in the Rootly / ISO 27001 shape: triggers, live diagnostic steps with real commands, resolution paths, a rollback protocol, escalation thresholds, and copy-paste communication templates.
Decision record (ADR)An architecture decision record in Michael Nygard’s format — the context and forces, the decision in active voice, and the consequences listed honestly, negatives included. Distilled from raw founder notes.
How-to guideA task-oriented guide with verification steps and a troubleshooting table earned the hard way — including the trial-account failure modes that fail silently. Diátaxis how-to conventions throughout.
Every L&D team hits the same walls: build cycles too slow, assessments that measure recall instead of capability, knowledge no one can find. I treated those as instructional-design problems — and solved them. Same learning judgment, one step further.
Designers spend their best hours on first-draft scaffolding. So I created a design assistant that gives those hours back — it takes a learning need and structures it the way an instructional designer would, with objectives, modules, scenarios, and assessments grounded in ADDIE and Bloom's, keeping the designer's judgment in the loop rather than replacing it.
Every operation has the same problem: the answer exists, but nobody can find it — so the same questions get re-asked and tribal knowledge walks out the door. I designed a knowledge platform around how non-librarians actually look for answers: a custom taxonomy plus natural-language search, so a frontline employee gets the right answer in plain English, not a folder hunt.
Most eLearning ends in a multiple-choice quiz that measures recall, not capability. I designed a different capstone: a Socratic oral defense where an AI examiner drops the learner into a real dilemma, probes their reasoning, and scores the answer against a rubric aligned to every learning objective. It’s live in five of the course samples above.
Each one is a real L&D problem walked through the way I actually approach it — the framework that governs the decision, and how I use AI to move faster without cutting rigor. AI drafts the first pass; the judgment stays mine, and the method carries to whatever tools a team already has.
A request lands as “we need a course.” Before designing anything, I diagnose the real performance gap — environment, incentives, and skills — so we don’t build training for a problem training can’t fix. I use AI to draft the intake questions and a first-pass gap statement, then pressure-test the conclusion.
Fuzzy goals like “improve communication” can’t be designed or measured. I convert them into observable, criterion-based objectives at the right cognitive level — then use them as the spine every module and assessment has to map back to.
From the objectives, AI drafts the outline, scenario-first modules, and assessments in one pass, structured against ADDIE and Gagné’s events. I review and reshape — what to cut, where the real friction is, which scenario will land. Roughly 75% less time on first-draft scaffolding.
Most courses end in a recall quiz. Mine end in an AI oral defense: the learner applies the skill to a real dilemma and defends their reasoning, scored against a rubric aligned to every objective. It measures transfer, not recognition.
Not every gap is a course — sometimes people just need the right answer mid-task. I design performance support around how non-experts actually search: raw notes become structured, tagged articles, retrievable in plain language at the moment of need.
Before anything ships, I map outcomes against assessments and activities in an alignment matrix, so a taught-but-never-measured outcome gets flagged before learners find it. After launch, evaluation data feeds the next iteration.
Two short walkthroughs of AI I designed for the learning lifecycle: generating a full, framework-based course from a plain-language need, and proving the learning actually transferred with an AI oral-defense assessment. The design judgment stays human — the AI does the first-draft heavy lifting.
A plain-language need becomes a full, framework-based course — needs analysis, outline, modules, and assessments (ADDIE, SAM, Bloom’s) in one pass.
Proof the training transferred: an AI examiner probes the learner’s reasoning and scores it against an objective-aligned rubric — not a recall quiz.
What began as tools to automate the tedious parts of my own instructional-design work became four working, AI-powered platforms. Each is live — click through and try it.
AI course generation: a plain-language need becomes a full, framework-based course — needs analysis, outline, scenario-first modules, and assessments (ADDIE, SAM, Bloom’s) in one pass, with the designer’s judgment in the loop.
Higher Ed · Course DesignCourse design and alignment for faculty and instructors — aligning objectives, content, and assessment so a course holds together by design, with the instructional-design rigor most educators never had time to learn built in.
Knowledge ManagementAn AI knowledge base built around how non-experts actually search: a custom taxonomy plus natural-language search, so a frontline employee gets the governed, current answer in plain English — not a folder hunt.
Assessment · Applied AIAI assessment and oral defense: an AI examiner drops the learner into a real dilemma, probes their reasoning, and scores it against an objective-aligned rubric — proof the training transferred, not a recall quiz.
The methods behind the work, the standards I build to, and the tools I design across — authoring, media, LMS, and delivery. AI accelerates the drafting; the frameworks keep it sound.
I design to WCAG 2.2 AA and the principles of Universal Design for Learning — because the choices that help learners with disabilities make the experience clearer for everyone.
Sufficient color contrast, captions on every narration and video, alt text for meaningful images — and never color alone to carry meaning.
Every interaction works by keyboard with a visible focus state; no timing traps; drag-and-drop always ships with an accessible alternative.
Plain language, consistent navigation, and deliberate cognitive-load management — chunking and scenario-first design so the content, not the interface, is the challenge.
A summary of real programs and results — the story, without the protected material.
Led training, instructional design, and QA for the internal teams supporting Guardian’s national dental benefits operation. Administered the Workday Learning LMS, built AI-assisted development workflows, and turned QA insights into targeted, data-informed training.
Owned instructional design, knowledge management, and leadership development enterprise-wide. Built eLearning, blended, and ILT programs; managed the LMS and structured knowledge repositories; measured effectiveness and iterated.
Designed onboarding, systems, and product training for 200+ agents across 20+ biopharma programs. Built eLearning, microlearning, and performance support; directed onshore and offshore teams using ADDIE/SAM.
Training & QA at CIE Tours; Training & Development / Contact-Center Manager at TMP Direct (30+ national accounts); Customer Support & Training Manager at LiveProcess (SaaS). The contact-center floor is where the instinct started.
Healthcare, insurance, contact-center, or anywhere learning needs to move performance — and AI needs to be used with judgment, not hype.