LMS development for universities, school boards, and regulated training programs
You have a curriculum. You have learners. Somewhere between the two sits a platform, and the platform is either helping the curriculum land or quietly fighting it. I help training teams figure out which one is happening, and what to do about it.
Credentials: MA in Learning & Technologies, Royal Roads University · 22+ years instructional design across public, private, and regulated sectors · national training programs built and shipped for federal and industrial clients
I work across LearnDash, Sensei, LifterLMS, and Moodle. The platform is rarely the interesting question. The interesting question is whether the thing you bought is actually shaped like the program you teach.
Book a 20-minute LMS scoping call
Who this is for
- ✅ Training directors at universities and school boards whose program answers to an accreditor, ministry, or board.
- ✅ Program leads inside government where the training has to survive a public-sector audit.
- ✅ L&D managers in regulated industries — health, safety, finance, environmental — where a non-compliant program carries real consequences.
- ✅ Teams taking over an in-flight LMS build that has stalled and need a review before the next sprint locks in decisions.
- ❌ Small businesses looking for a course site to sell into their customer list — different engagement, different budget.
- ❌ Teams that have not yet built or validated a curriculum — see curriculum design first.
How most engagements start
With a paid readiness review before any platform decision gets made or remade. Two reasons for that. First, the platform conversation is almost never the real conversation; the real one is about reporting structure, learner journey, and who needs to see what. Second, paying for the review keeps both of us honest. It is not a sales call dressed up as a deliverable.
From there, scope follows the finding. Sometimes it is a configuration project on what you already own. Sometimes it is a migration. Sometimes the recommendation is to leave the platform alone and rebuild three pieces of curriculum.
How I work with your platform
LearnDash
The conversations I have most often on LearnDash are about Groups, ProPanel reporting, and what group leaders can actually see and do. The product gives you a lot of structure; whether that structure matches your reporting hierarchy is the question worth answering before you build out 80 courses on top of it. I shipped LearnDash at the M.L. Campbell Training Centre, where attendance grew tenfold over the program’s first phase.
Sensei
Sensei is the right answer when WooCommerce is already part of your stack and selling courses is genuinely the model. The places it tends to surprise teams are around progress tracking, which still leans on comment infrastructure in ways that do not always match how regulated training wants to be audited. Worth knowing before you commit a curriculum to it.
LifterLMS
Strong on cohort and membership modeling. The Engagement engine is genuinely useful when you are trying to operationalize “what happens when a learner falls behind.” The work I do on LifterLMS is usually about wiring those engagements to something other than email, and making sure the membership model matches how your organization actually grants access.
Moodle
Moodle work tends to live or die on three things: SSO that holds up under real load, SCORM packages that behave the way the vendor promised, and a gradebook export your registrar’s office will actually accept. I have worked on national-scale government training where all three had to be right on day one.
Recent work
M.L. Campbell Training Centre. Custom WordPress training platform on LearnDash, built for an international wood-finishing brand inside Sherwin-Williams. Attendance grew tenfold over the first phase of the program. I am the Training & Development Specialist on this one in my day job, which is part of why the platform decisions stuck; I had to live with them.
Sayerlack training portal. Sister brand to M.L. Campbell, same lineage. Different audience, different language, same discipline about matching the platform to the curriculum.
National-scale government training program. Earlier-career work on a federal training platform serving a national civil-service audience. I can name the department on a call once I confirm with them; I will not drop it in public copy without checking back first.
Curriculum and platform are different engagements
Sometimes the work that needs doing is not on the LMS at all; it is in the course design. When that is the case I will say so, and the right page for that conversation is curriculum design. I keep them separate because they are priced differently, sequenced differently, and rarely belong inside the same statement of work.
What it costs
Senior development is $275/hr CAD. LMS advisory work is $400/hr CAD. The fixed-price WordPress LMS architecture review is $4,950. Anything outside those is quoted on the call rather than as a number that hides the work.
Frequently asked
What if we have already chosen a platform?
Good. That is usually a sign someone has done real thinking. The platform choice is rarely what I would unwind; the work is making the platform actually serve the curriculum you have. I would rather help you get more out of the LMS you have committed to than relitigate a decision your team already lived through.
Do you take over from another vendor mid-build?
Yes, with a readiness review first. Picking up an in-flight build without a review is how scope blows up; the review keeps both of us out of that.
Are you a reseller or affiliate of any of these platforms?
No. The recommendation you get is the one I would make if you were paying me by the hour to be wrong as rarely as possible.
Book a 20-minute LMS scoping call
Twenty minutes, free, no slide deck. Bring the platform, the curriculum, and the part that is not working. We will figure out together whether there is an engagement here or whether you have got it handled.
