Building an Inclusive Design Community of Practice

The Challenge

When I joined the Blackboard Ally team, Ally was a new product trying to establish a new category in edtech: accessibility and inclusive-learning solutions. Until then, most accessibility work was done manually, by small teams, in a reactive way - there were few tech-driven solutions built for scale.

Ally offered a fundamentally new approach to accessibility and inclusive design, and it was my job to help institutions unlock its full value.

Interactive research visualizations I built for conference talks and sales-enablement tools.

The Approach

I led the development of a global community of practice grounded in Universal Design for Learning, where educators co-authored and shared best practices for adopting Ally and designing inclusive courses. I built a group of champions representing different institution types across geographies around the world.

The community was guided by four key actions:

• Grounded in shared research and storytelling
• Support product adoption among current users
• Inform the product roadmap
• Drive growth through new sales

Co-authored “Pathways to Inclusion” case studies turned community wins into shared, teachable craft.

The Build

The Ally Community was connected through a social sharing platform, gatherings at user-group conferences, and the Ally Tour - a full year I spent traveling to institutions around the world running workshops, producing podcast episodes, editing video interviews, building case studies, and supporting grassroots product adoption across campuses. I became the connective tissue between colleges and universities across the US, Canada, the UK, Norway, Australia, and Singapore.

I also started Fix Your Content Day - an annual friendly competition where universities and colleges race to see which campus can improve the accessibility of the most documents.

The Impact

The returns on the community, the Ally Tour, and Fix Your Content Day were massive - growing Blackboard Ally from a handful of early adopters into a category leader that set a new precedent for inclusive design and more usable, flexible digital course content for every student. Dozens of case studies armed sales teams with the proof points that drove new deals and secured renewals. These were published in a 130-page research compendium that included case studies, blog posts, and quantitative analysis.

Fix Your Content Day has continued every year, even after my departure. The content improved by faculty and staff on that single day typically exceeds what’s improved across the entire rest of the year - a key driver in proving Ally’s value and, more importantly, in making learning more inclusive for all students.