Hey everyone, how you doing today?

I have an incredible episode for you.

In this conversation, I sit down with no other than Whitney Kilgore, the powerhouse cofounder of I Design and a true champion for educators everywhere.

We talk about her inspiring journey from the classroom to the forefront of instructional design and educational technology.

Whitney opens up about what it was like navigating both K to 12 and higher Ed, the major shifts that happened during the pandemic, and why now more than ever, educators deserve to have their skills recognized and celebrated.

Suppose you're in the middle of a career pivot, trying to figure out what's next or just need some encouragement.

In that case, this episode will remind you that your teaching experience matters and that with the right community and support, you can absolutely thrive in the world of learning design.

Let's dive in.

Hi, we're ispring, an international team of e-learning enthusiasts who help more than 60,000 clients across the globe succeed with better online learning.

Our two flagship solutions are ispring Suite and ispring Learn LMS.

Ispring Suite is an intuitive, all in one authoring tool for creating engaging e-learning content, and ispringlearn is an innovative online training platform for onboarding, upskilling, and certifying your teams.

We also provide tons of free resources for aspiring and experienced e-learning professionals, conduct weekly webinars with top industry experts, and organize annual e-learning conferences, challenges, and championships.

We'd be happy to get to know you and pick a solution that fits your needs best.

Go to www.icebringsolutions.com to learn more about us, download our resources and connect.

Hello everyone and welcome to another fabulous episode of EDUP LND.

My name is Holly Owens and I'm your host and I'm really excited.

I'm really honored.

I'm really humbled to have this guest on the show today.

Whitney Kilgore is here.

Hi, Whitney.

Hi, Holly, how are you?

Long time no talk.

Long time no talk synchronously.

We talk asynchronously sometimes.

That's true.

Yeah, well, I'm excited to have you here and you for you to tell us about eye design and all the different projects that you've been working on.

But first tell us a little bit about your story.

How did you become the Co founder?

You know all the different things that you're doing.

Tell us your story because we have a lot of people who are looking to transition into this sector.

Fantastic.

Thank you, Holly.

Gosh, it's funny.

I remember using the phrase.

Let me make a long story longer go.

I got into education kind of accidentally and actually my entire career has been somewhat the accidental step down the path.

But I was headed into Med school.

I thought for sure I was going to go into the world of medicine and, and kind of a last minute made a change into education.

And it's been such a journey.

I, you know, I've taught first grade before I moved into higher education, in case anybody didn't know.

And I really enjoyed working with six year olds.

It was Absolutely Fabulous.

They're so creative in their imaginations.

And they just love life, right?

As adults, we sometimes get in our own way of finding joy.

And so I'm, I'm reminded of that occasionally, but, but after I spent some time in the 1st grade classroom, I, I made the move into instructional technology within a school district because of course, I had all of my curriculum available online for my 6 year old's parent.

I mean, like it was the late 90s, early 2000s.

I just assumed that was normal.

Yeah.

But I was the nerdy kid that went to computer camp when I was 12 and computers were brand new.

So I've kind of always been on that tech journey.

I just didn't realize how much those worlds would collide and I was recruited out of K12 into higher Ed to a company called Sungard Higher Education, which is now a Lucian, and they had a remote academic.

I didn't know that that's what it used to be called.

No, that's brand new information to me.

That's awesome.

Wow.

So I was on a remote academic services team building online degree programs in higher Ed way before it was cool.

I mean, it was probably 2005 when I made that leap and I got the chance to go out to universities all over the US and and help faculty understand how they could embrace the affordances of the LMS in order for their students to have opportunities that they wouldn't have otherwise because they had kids and jobs and, you know, couldn't make the track to.

Campus, all the things.

Oh, the flexibility of an online offering just absolutely was the sweet spot to allow them to advance their careers.

And so that's been the passion project that I've been focused on for the last 20 years.

And that journey led me to a lot of places.

I worked on campus at the College of Southern Nevada out in Las Vegas for a couple of years, and I was director of academic technology out there, which also meant all classroom technology and computer labs and, oh, by the way, the TV studio and, you know.

Whatever else they can add to the.

This falls under technology category, right?

Yes.

Events and video of everything, right.

So it was just it was quite the learning experience and then I made made the trip back to Texas, right.

So I left South Texas to go on that journey to to Las Vegas.

But we had family here and children, little children that really miss their grandparents.

So we made the trek back to Texas, which landed me at academic partnerships.

Which is not.

I know we share that.

And I, I am so lucky that I had the opportunity to be a part of building programs then globally, because I had the chance to build programs in Beijing and Australia and the Philippines and Spain and the UK and all over Latin America.

So it couldn't have asked for a better education all while getting my doctorate at UNT.

So I was doing that crazy travel.

And then I had all these synchronous sessions that were at all times of the day and night.

I mean, if you've lived in the central time zone, they were always at 7:00 PM, right?

But if you're in the UK, it's 3:00 AM, let's it's time for class.

So yeah, I learned about a lot of things just by having those experiences in life.

And then one of my Co founders at at I design and I actually worked together in academic partnerships way back in the day.

And when he was ready to start the company, he asked me to go on the journey.

And I've never once hesitated or looked back.

This has been the adventure of a lifetime.

So oh.

My God, I love your story so much.

It's just like it just like the steps, like you're like in the classroom and then you're in higher Ed and then you're going international and then you're doing all these different things.

It's really a great journey.

And I think the listeners really appreciate the fact that as former educators, because I used to teach high school, that we can make these journeys, that these things are possible.

And people don't realize how much like we don't stay in one job anymore.

The career isn't 30 to 40 years in one position.

It's 30 to 40 years in various positions.

And hopefully you're, you're going higher and higher or just, you know, following your passion.

So I really appreciate that about your journey.

And you know, The funny thing that I didn't share is I'm still a haunted journey of like personal discovery to.

Yes.

And the adventure that we're on right now started about four years ago.

And I, I started out calling it scope creep.

We could, we got into yard work during the pandemic, like a lot of people, right, right yard.

And so we decided to buy a piece of property, larger piece of property, and started planting grapevines.

And so my husband and I, every night and every weekend for like 2 1/2 years, we were drilling holes in the dirt and setting end posts and drilling tea posts into the ground.

And we now have a four acre vineyard up in North Texas and grows 7 different varietals of of grapes.

And my husband is an assistant winemaker in the Texas Hill Country and we have a little winery here on property and.

It's been.

Such a fun adventure.

It's the joy thing I mentioned earlier with first graders.

I get now at this point in my life to watch adults.

Just pure unadulterated joy.

But it's adults now.

Right, right, right.

No, we need that so much as adults.

I think we focus a lot on work and like paying bills and stuff, but gosh, that is unbelievable.

And I've watched your journey on Facebook and like building your beautiful home and your vineyard and all the things.

And I'm like, that's what who I want to be like when I grow up.

How would it be like Whitney?

Because it's so it's so inspirational.

Like you have this great way of like balancing everything.

And I know sometimes people, especially listeners, can feel like, Oh my God, I, I'm, I'm changing jobs or I'm having a baby or I'm doing this and it's like it's super chaotic.

But it seems like you found like the right area personally and then professionally and it's like all just coming together.

I love that feeling.

I love it, so warm.

Fuzzy, you got to create your own balance, right?

And it's funny, what we're doing here doesn't feel like a side hustle.

It's like integrated into everything that we do.

The community that forms around a vineyard is actually sort of interesting too.

So friends and neighbors offer all the time to help and to come out and and work out in the vineyard.

So it's just, it's amazing.

I think the the feeling that we have such close knit friends now that want to spend time with us out there digging in the dirt, right?

I have a neighbor, she says it's the best exercise ever.

And it's not like I have to have a gym membership.

Exactly, exactly.

I can, I can imagine kind of gracious, that's a lot of manual labor.

But one of the things I want to talk to you about is your journey with eye design and you know, your Co founder, CEO, all those different things like people who are transitioning teachers, they see themselves and I've talked to a lot of them.

I'm sure you have too.

And you have a very large following out on LinkedIn.

I want to mention that as well.

They feel like they have to jump back into the basics, like they have to go back into this entry level coming outside the classroom.

So I think one of the things I want to ask you is, as a former educator, how did you feel initially stepping out of the classroom?

And what are some of the things that you did to kind of elevate yourself or like deal with that imposter syndrome?

Because that's huge when you come out of the classroom.

Yeah, I think there's an interesting, like fear of failure that comes over a lot of us when we take that first plunge into a different pool, right?

And the, you know, the old saying fake it till you make it is helpful at times, right?

But stage fright is real.

I was actually on a podcast yesterday and I had the gal who was asking the questions get so nervous that she started sweating.

Just she was uncomfortable.

It was her first time hosting a podcast.

And all of us can be uncomfortable in certain situations.

And I think if you're willing to lean in to the chaos and the, and the challenging situations that we find ourselves in, sometimes those challenges come with great reward and opportunity.

So there's like this overcoming fear piece, right?

It's, I think we call it imposter syndrome a lot, but it's really our own physiological fear of success and I think we've all got to get past that a little bit and I know that's easier said than done.

And if.

You let the steps that magically appear in front of you.

If you let yourself take those steps forward, you'd be surprised where you'll end up.

Yeah, taking the risk for sure.

I think it, you know, one of the things I kind of preach to transitioning teachers is that they need to honor their teaching experiences because they go out into the world looking for a change in career.

And then, you know, they're working with resume reviewers or recruiters who have no idea about teaching, let alone learning and development and how that whole sector works.

And they're telling teachers don't put your teaching stuff on the resume, which really like breaks my heart because I'm like, if you've been in teaching for 15 to 20 years, you should really be looking for a senior level position out in the L&D world.

You should not be erasing that from your history.

So it really bothers me when I talk to people and they're like, Oh my gosh, the recruiter told me to take this off.

They're not going to like this.

Like, how can you not honor what a teacher does?

I.

Also think with AI, there's an opportunity to let chat TPT or Claude twink wink Claude who writes a little bit more academically by the way, right?

Claude is fantastic If you fed up your resume and asked it to highlight the relevant experiences that you've had as an educator related to that job posting.

I think the amount of leadership that you could unpack as a teacher is tremendous, right?

Being able to keep 30, sometimes 30 students on the same page, planning an entire lesson for them and and the cognitive science aspects of what a teacher does.

Like, I think we we're under singing.

Is that the right thing?

Yeah, we're kind of undersinging ourselves when we when we write what our capabilities are.

So maybe that would help somebody get unstuck if they're thinking about how to revamp their resume for a new position.

I agree AI, AI has totally changed the game when it comes to transitioning roles and kind of updating your professional materials.

So tell us a little bit about I Design for the audience that doesn't know or hasn't heard of I Design.

What do you do there and what what's I design all about?

Oh, Holly, thank you.

It is.

It is an incredibly wonderful organization.

We've been in business 12 years.

Congratulations, that's amazing.

But we've built so many programs at this point, I've, I've kind of lost track of how many.

It's been hundreds of universities all over the US and we have the largest domestic instructional design shop of, of humans, right?

Many of them were former teachers too, and needed an entry point into instructional design.

But I think, you know, we've partnered with universities to do programmatic design and to make sure that the program vision, the outcomes that the students are supposed to achieve, the what you want your students to be able to say about their student experience.

All of that gets captured at the program level before we build a single course so that we get a really cohesive student experience across the program.

And so that's been really powerful from a creating student centered learning experiences perspective while working with faculty that are using a technology that might be new to them or teaching where, you know, maybe all they did was during the pandemic remote instruction.

Right emergency remote teaching.

Emergency remote teaching.

There you go.

Maybe they didn't embrace all the technology that they could have leveraged in order to create synchronous and asynchronous experiences for their students.

So we help with all of that, but that's just one pillar of the business.

Now when I look back 12 years ago, I'm like, oh wow, that's where we started was instructional design, but then we started with our nursing and healthcare related programs solving a lot of challenges throughout the years.

So you may remember during the pandemic finding clinical placement sites got really tough.

And so we have some institutions where they, we were supporting their nursing programs all the way from, you know, marketing and enrollment services through to retention and coaching students and navigating higher Ed.

A lot of first Gen.

folks, right, going through programs.

Well, we actually solved the clinical placement problem too for our partner institutions.

And so that's been huge for them to be able to ensure that, you know, when they've got 1000 nurses going through their nursing programs, but there's a place for every single one of those nurses to do their clinical activities.

So, yeah, so that's been really cool.

And then in the last four years or so, we built software.

So we have a curriculum mapping software tool that does accreditation reporting with the push of a button and are now using AI in instructional design in really thoughtful ways.

Still, from a programmatic view, it's not like an AI course builder.

It, you know, there's one of those born every minute on the Internet now.

Yes, that's so true.

Programmatic design that leverages the power of AI and our own reusable design objects and reusable build objects that make the process so much easier and faster.

But better, right?

Richer student experiences because of those reusable design objects that we've created.

So again, another fun journey to be on is the evolution of iOS, which has been tremendous.

I love to hear it and I love to hear the fact that, and I already knew this, that you're focused on the student experience and you take it from the program level.

You're not just saying, OK, let's just start designing these courses.

You really take a look and evaluate what's happening and what needs to change.

You know, that's all that just helps the students so much.

And in a sense of building community and the authenticness and realness.

You can have all the AI you want, you know, but there's something to be said about the human emotion and the human experience in these programs.

And like you said, there was a huge challenge during COVID, so we had to figure out our way around that.

Like with the clinical stuff or just, you know, at the end, I remember at the end of COVID, there's like an article that came out like in the New York Times or something that said online teaching failed or something like that.

And I'm like, you all don't even know what you're talking about.

I got so upset when I read that article.

I'm going to have to find it.

But it was just like, this is not what we're talking about when we're, we're considering instructional design in the frameworks and the things that we do on the back end of things.

This is, you know, we literally just said move this online, put this in the Google, you know, the Google Classroom or whatever LMS you're using.

And that there wasn't thought or consideration behind how to do that.

It's kind of just when we call it an emergency, that means it moved really fast.

It was triage to go online, which has its benefits but also has some huge disadvantages too.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And you, you miss out as a student, right?

I mean, how many of us had children at home during the pandemic, right?

So I would I had AI had a daughter that was in high school and while I'm working she's on her computer having school right on Webex and so she's laying in bed with her camera off and I don't know did she learn anything.

I feel terrible for those younger students too.

Trying to or teachers for goodness sakes.

Right?

Trying to hold the attention of a bunch of 6 year olds to go back to my first grade days on Webex or Zoom for 45 minutes, much less a whole day.

I I really I can't imagine what that felt like to be a teacher in that moment.

And I'm so grateful for all those educators that stuck it out and still are in classrooms every day helping students be better then they could be if they were sitting at home on Webex or Zoom.

Yeah, it was it was definitely some tough times.

And I know we learned a lot of different lessons out of COVID and what to do and what not to do.

And I just think that people really need to understand and like you're saying, give the teachers grace, give the students grace 100%.

Like that was not what they were expecting.

Their expectations had to shift and shift very quickly.

And who knows, like when that hopefully doesn't happen again with a Covic type situation.

But what if something else happens, especially if we think about local communities.

You're in Texas, tornadoes.

I'm in Wilmington, there's hurricanes.

So when devastation or something like that happens, like what do you do to make sure that people still have access and that they're still able to learn and be social?

Like I think that's the one thing I missed.

It was so difficult to be stuck inside the house and not I had to have a fever really bad.

Like I wasn't getting out there and talking to people.

It was, it was crazy.

Yeah, yeah.

Aren't we glad those days are behind us now, though?

Yes, we're so glad.

We're so glad I'm traumatized, but we're so glad.

But.

You're spot on when you start thinking about disaster preparedness, right?

Yeah, yeah, there's a lot to that.

When I was out at the College of Southern Nevada, we were working on those plans.

What were we going to do in the event of an emergency, right?

So I think there are a lot of institutions that actually think about online learning from that perspective.

And that's actually the wrong perspective to be thinking of it from, right it.

It shouldn't be an emergency situation where you would consider online.

It should be to benefit your students for the greater good of them, society, the institution.

There's a lot of benefits to making your educational experiences available in a variety of formats.

So but yeah, let's be forward thinking and student centered.

Yes, that's all.

That's what the future is now, you know, with all this, this AI stuff, I'm, I'm excited about to see how this all integrates.

One of the things I want to ask you, since you have such a wonderful career journey and like you've been in the classroom, you've been in higher Ed, you, you own a business, you're an entrepreneur inside, inside higher education and outside higher education, you have your vineyard.

We have a lot of transitioning teachers or people who are just looking to make a change that listen to the show.

So if you could give them like 3 pieces of advice about how to transition out and, and what to do.

Like what are the ways that they can just just do it, Like make the step, you know, overcome the, the fear that that kind of thing.

I want to hear your what your three pieces of advice are.

Yeah, I think let's see three things.

One, continue your education like this journey in education begins and ends with learning.

Like you need to be a lifelong learner and you need to be embracing the latest technologies and and advancing your educational experiences.

So I'd say keep learning.

It doesn't have to be for credit, it doesn't have to be another degree, but some sort of learning experience should be a part of your daily routine.

Network.

LinkedIn is a great place to network with other people.

You think, Holly, I don't remember where I saw that you were prepared or like you were presenting at a conference overseas somewhere.

And I was fascinated by your post.

I remember this very vividly.

And I wrote you and said, Oh my gosh, you're the kind of person I really like to be around.

Can we connect sometime and have a coffee?

And I think networking is where some of the best connection points for all of us or is found, whether it's virtual on LinkedIn or it's in real in the real world.

And then the other career advice I would share is if you don't feel like the opportunity is there for you to move up, then move over.

So and all, I mean career letter wise, if you're not where you want to be yet, you may have to move to another organization or entity, whether that's inside education or external in order to continue your journey upward.

So never feel like there's a ceiling.

Just feel like, you know, what was that?

Chutes and ladders, right?

But think mostly ladders.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Those are.

That's great advice.

Very, very simple and actionable tips of things that you can do right now if you're thinking about transitioning into a different role or into the learning and development space, Whitney is a great role model for that and how to do it.

So tell everyone in the audience where they can find you, where they can connect with you, where they can see eye design stuff, if they're interested in working with you.

Give us all.

Yeah, so the I Design website is I designedu.org.

Check it out.

Lots of great stuff happening there.

If you're interested in learning more about our aligned software, feel free to reach out to me.

My e-mail is whitney.kilgore@idesignedu.org.

I'm happy to answer questions about anything that we do.

And if you're wanting to network, you can catch me there or find me on LinkedIn.

I think my LinkedIn is Whitney Kilgore.

Yeah, on LinkedIn.

So try to be as easy to find as possible.

And I love connecting people with other people.

So if you've got something you're thinking about or excited about, you know, let me know how how can I help you connect with others that might be able to help you bring your dream to reality, your vision to reality.

Well, it's so great to to have had you on the show now and reconnect with you.

And I can say that you're definitely one of the people I look up to when it comes to like the journey in L&D.

And so I appreciate all that you share, all that you do.

And the fact that you are first grade teacher turned the CEO and the Co founder is an amazing feat.

You should be very proud of that and I just love, I just love chatting with you.

It's just so easy and you really break it down into simple stuff So what people can do.

So thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your experience with our audience.

Thanks for having me on Holly, it was quite the adventure.

Yeah.

Hi, we're Ice Spring, an international team of e-learning enthusiasts who helped more than 60,000 clients across the globe succeed with better online learning.

Our two flagship solutions are ispring Suite and ispringlearn LMS ispring Suite is an intuitive all in one authoring tool for creating engaging e-learning content, while ispringlearn is an innovative online training platform for onboarding, upskilling, and certifying your teams.

We'd be happy to get to know you and pick a solution that fits your needs best.

Go to www.ispringsolutions.com to learn more about us and connect.

Thanks for spending a few minutes with Holly.

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Until next time, keep learning, keep leading, and keep believing in your own story.

Talk soon.