Welcome to My Learning Design Portfolio

Welcome! I am Colton Clark, an instructional designer, researcher, and doctoral student in Instructional Design at National University’s Sanford College of Education. Positioned between an analog childhood and a digital adulthood, I combine empathetic pedagogical methods with interactive media to build human-centered, engaging learning environments. My design practice operationalizes John Dewey’s (1899) conceptualization of education as a “linking science,” dedicated to bridging theoretical learning principles with authentic, real-world application (Dewey, 1899; Stefaniak et al., 2025).

Guided by the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), I view digital accessibility not as a compliance checklist, but as a foundational standard that proactively reduces extraneous cognitive load and affirms diverse learner identities (CAST, 2024; Martinez et al., 2025; World Wide Web Consortium [W3C], 2025). To ensure technology choices directly advance pedagogical goals, I evaluate media through a dual-axis model synthesizing the SAMR framework (Puentedura, 2013) with Bloom’s (1956) taxonomy. This approach pairs purposeful structural support at the lower tiers with transformative student agency at the higher tiers, enabling learners to actively critique concepts, navigate simulations, and solve complex problems (Puentedura, 2013; Stefaniak et al., 2025).

This ePortfolio highlights my doctoral research and multimodal design artifacts, including published scholarship in The Teacher Advocate and applied projects such as Mobile-First eLearning for Food Safety and From “Time-Crunched” to Tech-Savvy. Supported by ongoing professional development through the Online Learning Consortium (OLC, 2026), my work is dedicated to exercising sound design judgment to translate educational theory into accessible, high-impact learning experiences (Dewey, 1899; Stefaniak et al., 2025).

References

Bloom, B. S. (Ed.). (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educational goals, Handbook I: Cognitive domain. David McKay Company.

CAST. (2024). Universal Design for Learning (UDL) Guidelines version 3.0. https://udlguidelines.cast.org

Dewey, J. (1899). The school and society: Being three lectures. University of Chicago Press.

Martinez, G. M. B., Narváez, S. C., Quinteros, G. D. L. C., & Peñafiel, L. A. V. (2025). The impact of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) on inclusive education: An analysis of participation and academic performance. Architecture Image Studies, 6(3), 1160–1167. https://doi.org/10.62754/ais.v6i3.419

Online Learning Consortium. (2026). Professional learning. https://onlinelearningconsortium.org/professional-learning/

Puentedura, R. R. (2013). SAMR: Getting to transformation. http://www.hippasus.com/rrpweblog/archives/2013/04/16/SAMRGettingToTransformation.pdf

Stefaniak, J. E., Cha, E. E., Yang, F., Gilstrap, S., & Yang, L. (2025). A comprehensive review of instructional designer research and approaches in learning design. Educational Technology Research and Development, 73(4), 2057–2079. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-025-10501-1

World Wide Web Consortium. (2025). Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1. https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/