Instructional Design on Coach Alan

Essay 36: What If I Didn't Standardize the Loop?

Wed, 23 Sep 2026 08:45:00 -0700

In the architectural evolution of Curriculum-as-Code (CaC) across our higher education courses and clinical exercise science programs, few frameworks have proven as foundational as the Mission Loop (Pattern / Rule / Solve).

By demanding that every learning challenge follow an explicit three-phase pipeline—observing empirical telemetry, confronting it with non-negotiable Single Source of Truth (SSoT) constraints, and deriving a human-verified solution—we insulated our classrooms from generative AI hallucination and restored the cognitive friction of authentic deduction.

The Logic Grid: Why Good Assessment Looks Like Sudoku (and How the Mission Loop Solves the AI Crisis)

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 10:00:00 -0700

The conversation surrounding generative artificial intelligence in higher education has fixated on the wrong villain.

We wring our hands over language models because they can instantly generate a cohesive, grammatically pristine 500-word essay on physical inactivity or socioeconomic barriers to healthcare. In response, institutions have spent millions on probabilistic detection software that flags innocent non-native English speakers while failing to detect basic prompt injections.

The crisis is not that the machine can write. The crisis is that our assignments were built to reward surface-level fluency rather than analytical deduction.

Essay 31: Beyond the Slide Deck — Architecture as Professional Development

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I have sat through enough institutional professional development sessions to know the script by heart: sixty generic slides, high-altitude platitudes about the changing nature of work, a five-minute demonstration of a commercial chatbot, and a polite Q&A. The moment faculty step out of the seminar room and back to their department desks, that ephemeral deck evaporates in the face of a forty-hour grading backlog, committee notes, and syllabus revisions.

Worse, most of these training decks and post-session web portals actively violate basic digital accessibility standards. At a time when the Department of Justice’s final rule on ADA Title II digital accessibility demands strict, verifiable conformance, institutions routinely disseminate training materials that rely on uncaptioned visuals, illegible color contrast, and fragmented PDF exports.

Curriculum-as-Code, ADA Title II Compliance, and Fleet-Wide Accessibility Refactoring

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 16:53:00 -0700

When the Department of Justice codified WCAG 2.1 AA standards under ADA Title II for public higher education institutions, it ended the era of reactive, page-by-page accessibility audits. Traditional post-publication fixes inside LMS rich text editors fail to scale across multi-section course fleets.

Achieving sustainable compliance requires moving accessibility upstream into a version-controlled engineering workflow: Curriculum-as-Code.

The Upstream Accessibility Pipeline

By authoring instructional materials in standardized Markdown and validating them through automated linting pipelines before deployment, entire categories of accessibility errors are eliminated at the source.