Two related work products under one practice — instructional design that ships under audit, and live training that turns into adopted practice.
Credentials: MA Candidate in Learning & Technology, Royal Roads University · 22+ years instructional design across regulated industries · Training & Development Specialist at M.L. Campbell, a Sherwin-Williams operating company · national training programs built for federal, political, and industrial clients
Most teams come to me with one of two problems: a curriculum that has to defend itself under audit, or a team that needs to actually adopt a new way of working. The work products are different — instructional design ships a written, defensible course; live delivery lands a behaviour change in the room — but the discipline behind them is the same. One vendor, one method, one accountability surface.
Curriculum design
Curriculum design for edu and gov programs that hold up under audit. From competency mapping through SCORM and xAPI delivery, designed for programs where “good enough” gets a program suspended.
Designed to defend, not just to engage
- Competency-mapped — every module ties back to a named outcome a reviewer can read
- Standards-aligned — SCORM® 1.2 and 2004, xAPI™, AODA and WCAG 2.1 AA built in from the outline
- Audit-ready documentation — design rationale, assessment validity notes, and accessibility statements ship with the course
What I design
- Competency-based curriculum — competency maps, learning outcomes, assessment blueprints, scope-and-sequence documents your accreditor or regulator can read without translation
- SCORM and xAPI courseware — branching scenarios, scored assessments, completion and mastery tracking, packaged for any conformant LMS
- Instructor-led and blended programs — facilitator guides, participant materials, timing maps, and the handoff documents a contracted facilitator can actually teach from
- Assessment systems with defensible scoring — rubrics, item analysis, validity rationale; the documentation that holds up when a learner challenges a result
- Accessibility-first content — AODA and WCAG 2.1 AA designed in at the outline stage, not retrofitted in QA
How curriculum-design engagements run
- Intake. Paid scoping call. Who is the learner, what is the assessed outcome, who reviews the program, and what does “fail” look like for you.
- Competency map. A document your SMEs and reviewers sign off on before any course is built. Outcomes, performance criteria, assessment evidence. This is where most programs are won or lost.
- Outline and sign-off. Module-level scope, finished-hour estimate, assessment blueprint, accessibility plan. Written, dated, signed. The build does not start until this is locked.
- Build. Storyboards, then production. SMEs review at storyboard stage, where revisions are cheap, not at final SCORM, where they are expensive.
- Review and iterate. Pilot cohort, item analysis on assessments, accessibility audit, design-rationale document delivered with the package. Then a 90-day window for evidence-based revision.
Curriculum design — what it costs
Advisory and instructional-design strategy — $400 CAD/hour. Scoping, competency mapping, SME interviews, design reviews of work your team is producing. This is the rate when you need my judgement, not my production hours.
Production — $6,500 CAD per finished hour of e-learning (typical band $4,500–7,500). The anchor is mid-fidelity SCORM with branching and scored assessment. Higher fidelity, heavier branching, or simulation-style interactions move toward the top of the band. Lower-stakes linear content lands near the floor. I quote per finished hour because flat-rate per course is the margin trap that ends with a 40-hour course built for a 4-hour budget.
Live-cohort design workshops — $2,750 CAD/day. When your team needs me in the room running a curriculum-design intensive: competency mapping with SMEs, assessment blueprint workshops, outline sign-off sessions. Above the standard delivery rate because design work is harder than delivery work.
Live training delivery
Live, instructor-led team training that turns into adopted practice — not a slide deck nobody reopens. I run training for teams of six to twelve who need to change how they work, not just sit through a session. The day is built around your team’s actual responsibilities. Exercises map to work they’ll do next week. Q&A pulls from the room, not a script. The point is what your team can do on Monday morning that they couldn’t do on Friday.
Current courses available
The list below is pulled from the live published Training programs, so this page always reflects the current catalog.
Currently Available Courses
- Microsoft Excel Training 101
- Microsoft Excel Training 201
- Microsoft Excel Training 301
- Microsoft Excel Training 302
- Microsoft Excel Training 401
- Microsoft Word Training 101
- WordPress Training 101
- WordPress Training 201
- WordPress Training 301
- WordPress Training 401
Note: Level 4 is delivered as a 2-day course.
Note: Level 4 is delivered as a 2-day course. Custom curriculum work outside the standard catalogue bills at $275 an hour, or routes to the curriculum-design engagement above for anything multi-week or audit-bound.
WordPress training — what the sessions cover
Teams running WordPress face a gap generic training doesn’t close: your install, your theme, and your governance rules aren’t the defaults. Sessions for WordPress teams are scoped around your actual deployment. Typical coverage by role:
- Authors and contributors: the block editor as your theme uses it; media handling and alt text to your standards; taxonomy and metadata your site actually requires; the difference between draft, review, and publish in your workflow.
- Editors and senior contributors: reviewing and correcting contributor submissions; managing revisions; enforcing house style at the editorial layer; understanding what authors can and can’t do without escalation.
- Site administrators: user role governance — what each capability level allows and why it’s scoped that way; managing plugin conflicts in a live editorial environment; when to escalate to a developer versus handling in-admin.
- Developers and technical leads: writing and communicating governance rules to non-technical contributors; testing contributor workflows before they break on deadline; handoff between development and editorial contexts.
Every WordPress session runs on a staging or training environment that mirrors your actual site. Participants leave with written reference materials they can use the day they’re back at their desks.
Microsoft Office training — what the courses cover
- Excel 101–401: From basic formulas and formatting through PivotTables, financial modelling, and Power Query. Levels build on each other so teams enter at the right point rather than repeating material they already know.
- Word 101: Document structure, styles, templates, and collaboration — the things that make Word maintainable across a team rather than a formatting time bomb.
- Outlook 101: Email and calendar management for teams where inbox chaos has a measurable cost — rules, folders, delegation, and meeting hygiene.
- PowerPoint 101: Presentation structure and slide design for teams that need to communicate clearly, not just fill decks. Built around your templates and brand standards.
Live delivery — what it costs
Onsite training
$2,250 per day
In-person facilitation when the room itself is part of the value — discussion, exercises, and Q&A land harder when everyone is together. Up to three participants at the headline rate; $175 per additional participant (maximum 10), range $2,250–$3,475. Half-day: $1,400. Travel within 50 km of Fort Erie is included; beyond 50 km, travel and accommodation are billed at cost.
Remote training
$1,800 per day
Live instructor-led delivery for distributed teams or anywhere travel lead time would slow the rollout. Same active learning model, no travel costs, faster to schedule. Delivered across Canada and beyond.
Same instructor, same instructional discipline, same outcomes. The format choice is logistics, not quality. Hybrid delivery is on the table when it earns its keep — typically a kickoff day onsite to set the room, then a follow-up cadence remote so the team can apply the work between sessions without the travel overhead.
Who this is for
The two work products serve overlapping but not identical audiences.
Curriculum design buyers
- ✅ University, college, or school-board L&D leads whose program answers to an accreditor or ministry.
- ✅ Government training programs where the curriculum has to survive a public-sector audit.
- ✅ Regulated-industry training providers in health, safety, finance, or environmental sectors where a failed program has real compliance consequences.
- ✅ Internal L&D directors with strong SMEs and no instructional designer in-house.
- ✅ Programs replacing a marketplace instructional designer whose courses will not hold up when a learner challenges a result.
- ❌ Teams that need a course by Friday with the SME on vacation — rush instructional design produces courses that fail under audit.
- ❌ Sales-enablement microcontent — there are cheaper, faster shops for that work.
- ❌ Anyone shopping on price alone — per-finished-hour rates start at $4,500.
- ❌ Programs whose headline success metric is engagement rather than assessed competency — that is a different design brief.
Live training delivery buyers
- ✅ Teams of six to twelve with a real adoption goal — a measurable change in how the team works after the session, not a compliance checkbox.
- ✅ Leaders managing delivery quality who need consistent process behaviour from contributors at multiple sites, branches, or regions.
- ✅ Organisations onboarding or upskilling on WordPress, LMS platforms, or internal operational tooling where the gap between “trained” and “doing it well” is where money leaks.
- ✅ Teams that want active learning rather than passive webinar attendance — discussion, exercises, and applied work, with the instructor in the room.
- ❌ Solo operators or individuals who want self-paced video content — this engagement is live, team-only, minimum six participants.
- ❌ Teams whose real goal is a compliance checkbox rather than a measurable change in practice — training designed to be forgotten is not what this does.
The needs analysis included at this engagement
Every training-and-enablement engagement includes a pre-engagement needs analysis at $500 pre-check level — credited back against the engagement fee. The needs analysis shapes the session content around how the team actually works rather than around a generic curriculum.
- A team and context review. Who is in the room, what they already know, what they are working around today, and what the session needs to change.
- A goal-and-success-criteria check. What measurable change the engagement is meant to produce, and how the team will know it landed.
- A pre-session assessment — usually a short asynchronous questionnaire to the participants — so the session opens at the right level rather than spending an hour calibrating.
- A written session plan covering structure, pacing, hands-on work, assessment, and follow-up — reviewed with you before the session runs.
- A facilitation memo — the equivalent of a $500 pre-check audit report — that survives being passed to a senior stakeholder before the engagement runs.
If the needs analysis surfaces work past a single training engagement — a full curriculum design, a multi-cohort programme, or a curriculum that has to pass accreditation review — the memo routes the engagement to Pilot, Program, or Enterprise Curriculum. Needs-analysis hours credit forward against the larger engagement.
What comes alongside the delivery
The training session is the centrepiece, but the surface around it is built so the work actually lands. Each engagement includes the materials and follow-up that make a session change how the team works rather than just sit through an afternoon.
- Session recording kept available for the team for the long run, not 30 or 90 days.
- Session materials — the slides, the worksheets, the reference documents — delivered as files the team owns and can re-use internally.
- A facilitation memo for whoever runs the next round of the same conversation internally.
- 30 days of email Q&A access after the session for the participants, on anything that came out of the work, no per-ticket limit.
- An optional follow-up session available at a reduced rate within 90 days — usually a 60-minute working session covering what the team has tried, what worked, and what needs adjusting.
Training-and-enablement is delivered live, in person or online. In-person delivery within driving distance of the Niagara region carries no additional travel cost; further than that in North America, travel is quoted separately. Multi-day engagements at a single location frequently absorb travel costs into the engagement fee.
Cancellation, deliverable ownership, and credit policy
If you also need the platform
Curriculum design ships the course. Live delivery lands the behaviour. Neither one builds the platform that hosts the courses or tracks the learners. If the LMS itself is the bottleneck, the right engagement is LMS development — or the fixed-price WordPress LMS Strategy & Architecture Review if you are still deciding what to build.
Frequently asked
Why per-finished-hour pricing for curriculum?
Because “build us a course” is not a unit of work. A 20-minute compliance refresher and a 12-hour certification program are both “a course.” Per finished hour is how serious instructional-design shops have priced production for thirty years. It protects your budget from runaway scope and protects mine from a course that doubles in size mid-build.
What is a “finished hour”?
One hour of seat time for the learner. A SCORM module that takes the average learner 45 minutes to complete is 0.75 finished hours. Estimated at outline stage, confirmed against pilot-cohort data, reconciled at delivery.
Can you work with our SMEs?
That is the design assumption. You bring the subject-matter expertise — clinical, regulatory, technical, operational. I bring instructional design, assessment design, and production. Most of my engagements are SME-led on content and ID-led on structure.
Do you handle SCORM packaging?
Yes. SCORM 1.2, SCORM 2004, and xAPI. Packaged, tested against your LMS, and delivered with the manifest documentation your platform admin needs. If you do not have an LMS yet, that is a separate conversation — see LMS development.
What about AODA and WCAG accessibility?
Designed in from the outline, not bolted on at QA. WCAG 2.1 AA is the default target; AODA-specific documentation is included for Ontario clients. If your program needs an accessibility statement to ship with the course package, that is standard.
Onsite or remote — which fits the live delivery work?
Same instructor, same instructional discipline, same outcomes. The format choice is logistics, not quality. I’m based in Fort Erie, Ontario. Onsite training inside the Niagara region comes with travel rolled in; anywhere else I bill travel and accommodation at cost, with a written estimate before anything is booked.
Not ready to commit — can we talk first?
Yes. The 20-minute discovery call is free, no scoping document required. Bring the program problem you are actually trying to solve and we will figure out together whether this is the right fit.
Ready to scope?
Twenty minutes, no slide deck. Tell me about the program or the team, who reviews the work, and what “fail” looks like — I’ll tell you which engagement fits and whether I’m the right designer for it.
Book a 20-minute scoping call Book the 60-minute scoping
