Design
Systems-level curriculum architecture — reusable cores mapped to performance objectives and to the regulatory floor (OSHA / ANSI / ISO 9001).
Senior Instructional Designer / L&D Engineer
Derek Dorsett
I design, build, measure, and govern compliance learning end-to-end.
Hand-coded, regulation-anchored, and proven with data. I design the learning, write the code, instrument the results, and own the governance.
I write my own code
Curator’s note — the type pairing is deliberate: an expressive serif (Fraunces) over a plain-spoken sans (Public Sans). Warmth for the voice, clarity for the reading. The terracotta underline on “govern” is hand-drawn SVG — the one word most designers can’t claim.
- 12+years in instructional design & L&D
- 4.8 / 5average learner rating
- 100%of measured courses improved
- WCAG 2.1 AAaccessible by default
Curator’s note — these are pre/post-instrument numbers from real deployments, not vanity stats. If a claim can’t survive an audit, it doesn’t go on the wall. And the site takes its own medicine: the Measure card below the fold reports this site’s own live analytics.
Derek DorsettAustin, Texas
The practice
Design. Build. Measure. Govern.
Most instructional designers do one or two of these. Doing all four — inside regulated, audit-defensible environments — is the rare combination that lets one person carry a high-stakes program from mandate to measured outcome.
Build
I hand-code my own accessible HTML/CSS/JS interactions and Articulate Rise web objects — no design-to-dev handoff, no separate dev team.
Measure
Identical pre/post instruments and SCORM/xAPI analytics, packaged into leadership-ready effectiveness reporting.
Practiced here, too: this site measured — pageviews in the last 30 days — server-side, no tracking scripts.
Govern
Audit-defensible certification records, SME-review playbooks, RACI, go/no-go gates, and accessibility held to WCAG 2.1 AA.
Selected work
A representative slice across compliance e-learning, hand-coded interactions, custom tooling, product design, and client web design. Some of my best work is for clients I can’t name — discretion is part of the job, and full case studies are available on request.
Curator’s note — every exhibit is hung, not listed: real screenshots, framed, with a wall label. The one exception is deliberately empty — under NDA, and that emptiness is the exhibit.
This one’s under NDAFull walkthrough available in person
Enterprise safety certification program
A confidential defense / advanced-manufacturing client
Architecting the complete redesign of an enterprise safety-certification program as sole designer and de facto program manager — a reusable shared-core spine feeding role-specific courses, each paired with a facilitator guide and an OSHA-defensible in-person practicum. (In active build.)
Read the case study →
ISO 9001 QMS curriculum
A confidential defense / advanced-manufacturing client
A 10-course Quality Management System curriculum (document control, corrective action, calibration, nonconformance, internal audit, and related processes), deployed company-wide via enterprise LMS — sole author, developer, and media producer.
Learner personas
A representative six-persona audience analysis for an enterprise compliance program — role, daily context, technology comfort, and learning preferences turned into concrete design decisions (modality, scaffolding, tone).
See the personas →
Hand-coded learning interactions
Self-contained, accessible HTML/CSS/JS interactions — drag-and-drop card sorts, audit simulators, decision flows — built as Articulate Rise web objects with full ARIA and keyboard support, on a versioned design system.
See the live demos →
L&D project-intake pipeline
A custom web tool I designed and coded that operationalizes instructional-design judgment: a Mager-based triage filter feeding a five-pillar scoping intake, with structured JSON hand-off between stages.
Open the live tool →
AI authoring console
A custom prompt-authoring console that standardizes AI-assisted content production across an entire course program — part of a suite of tools I built to accelerate multi-course development under a human QA gate.
Open the live tool →
Reference King — concept to clickable product
Personal venture concept, 2020 · rebuilt 2026
A video-reference platform where job seekers ask once and reuse forever: scripted asks, code-gated employer access, view analytics. Taken through the full product process — discovery, brand system, a six-lens UX review, and a fully interactive prototype.
Click through the live prototype →
The designer
About
An art-trained designer who builds and measures.
My career has one thread: I don’t just teach — I build the system that makes people competent, then prove it worked.
That instinct took me from teaching and building an education micro-business, into instructional design in higher education and corporate L&D, into senior safety and compliance learning, and now into architecting certification programs for regulated and defense-sector environments. The stakes rose at every step; the craft is the same — design the learning, write the code, instrument the data, and own the governance.
I hold an M.S. in Instructional Design & Educational Technology, am an ATD Master Trainer, and bring a B.A. in Art & Performance to the visual and media side of the work.
Some of my best work is for clients I can’t name. Discretion is part of the job.
Contact
Let’s talk
Open to senior instructional design / L&D roles. The fastest way to reach me: