Channell Walker

A Complete Professional Development Record

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Leadership had a goal: demonstrate that the institution met a defined standard for faculty professional development. The certificate was how they planned to do it. Participants would need to accrue ten hours across a combination of live workshops, asynchronous learning pathways, and one-on-one consultations with an instructional designer. Any combination counted, as long as the hours added up and someone could prove it.

That last part was the problem.

The team spent three years trying to solve it. They looked at video analytics. They looked at LMS quizzes. They tried spreadsheets. Every approach covered something and left something else out. The consultation requirement was the wall nobody could get past. With 227 instructors teaching online and only two instructional designers on the team, mandatory consultations alone could mean more than 400 hours of meeting time in a single year. Someone raised the question of how to track all of it. The room didn’t have an answer. The meetings lost momentum. The project stayed stuck. They didn’t know what they didn’t know.

That’s where outside help came in.

Left alone, the room was already leaning toward the familiar move: bring in a new platform built to do what the current ones couldn’t. It was the same instinct that had first pushed the team toward Asana, reaching for another tool because the ones already in place seemed to have hit a ceiling.

Channell had already built the workshop workflow system for the same team. That system answered a question they hadn’t thought to ask: could the tools they were already using do more than they realized? Once the workshop piece was running, she looked at what the certificate actually needed and found three places where the architecture had to go further.

Workshops, learning pathways, and consultations all lived in separate places with no connection between them. A participant could spend a full semester doing all three and there was still no single record showing how close they were to ten hours. Three types of professional development. Three separate places. No unified picture.

Consultation time left no trace anywhere. An instructor could spend two hours with an instructional designer, leave with something genuinely useful, and that time would vanish. No record. Nothing visible to a supervisor. Nothing that counted toward anything.

Reporting to leadership meant starting from scratch every time. No dashboard. No running totals. Someone had to find every piece, reconcile it by hand, and build something presentable on demand.

Channell connected all three into one hub. Two SharePoint lists carry the load: one logs every individual action across all three entry points, one holds each participant’s running total. A workshop attended, a consultation completed, a pathway finished: all three route into the same record automatically. The tools the team was already using for consultations just needed to feed into SharePoint. It didn’t require them to change how they worked. It required someone who knew what the tools could do.

63 people now have a professional development record that didn’t exist for any of them before this system ran. The year-end summary generates itself and goes directly to the participant to share with their supervisor. The dashboard gives the team real numbers to bring to leadership. And the certificate program that had been stuck for three years finally had a structure to move on.

Channell also noticed where the architecture points next. A hub built to track professional development hours doesn’t have to stop there. Course design work, outreach events, production hours: the same structure holds all of it. The team already has everything they need to expand it. It’s only a question of what they want to be able to see.
Which projects could you get off the ground with a more supportive structure?