A school's operating system, built for any school

Global reach, outgrown infrastructure

Think Tank Training Centre, the #1 ranked game design school in North America, was founded in 2005 as a campus-only school. It began delivering online programs just ahead of COVID, a move that positioned it well to build a student community across the globe. But going online produced two disjointed operating systems rather than one, with no shared source of truth for student progress, no unified view of faculty across campus and online, and a learning experience that varied depending on which system a student happened to be routed through. That inconsistency wasn't just an operations problem, it was putting student outcomes at risk, right as the school was beginning to expand as a global community.

The challenge was twofold: fix this for Think Tank, and build it in a way robust enough that it could eventually be licensed to other colleges facing the same problem.

My dual mandate:

From vision to execution

I led the redesign of PORTL, Think Tank's legacy LMS built in-house, reporting directly to the CEO. With a small cross-functional team, I owned the parts of the work that needed a single point of continuity, strategy, data architecture, and delivery, so the platform stayed coherent as it moved from concept to build.

1. 01
   Mapped the friction, department by department

   Before designing anything, I built service blueprints and journey maps for students and faculty, tracing where campus and online operations diverged, and where workflows broke down between systems.

2. 02
   Defined scope through jobs to be done

   Rather than scoping by feature request, I grounded the requirements in what students, faculty, and administrators were actually trying to accomplish.

3. 03
   Researched what's out there to find what wasn't

   I researched current ed-tech practices and learning models to inform the platform's direction, shaping a learner journey built around active and experiential learning rather than passive content delivery.

4. 04
   Reconciled systems that held conflicting data

   Student and faculty data, as well as curriculum lived across three disconnected tools, each with its own version of the truth. I worked to restructure and centralize this while making sure that it met regulatory compliance requirements.

5. 05
   Gave it a design system to grow into

   I designed the UI myself, building a robust design system in Figma. PORTL wasn't a simple app, it spanned an SIS, an HRIS, and a curriculum engine, each with different UI needs, from data-dense admin views to learner-facing content to faculty tools, a range a generic component library or off-the-shelf UI kit wouldn't have covered well.

Explored AI with intention, not for its own sake.

As AI tools entered the mainstream, we evaluated several ideas for where it could genuinely help, personalizing the experience and easing manual work, for administrators, learners, and course creators. Some of those ideas turned out to be better solved with simpler, rules-based logic, and we were deliberate about not reaching for AI where it wasn't the right tool. The technology was evolving quickly, and we didn't want to over-invest in a build that could be outdated within months.

Innovation the school could run with

PORTL 2.0 was designed to give Think Tank a platform built around the people who'd actually use it: a more consistent, connected experience for students, a system administrators could run with confidence, and one shared source of truth for faculty across campus and online. It was a project I was proud of, ambitious in scope and built with real care. Handing it off when I went on parental leave, with the design and architecture in place and a clear set of directions for where AI could add real value next, wasn't easy. But I left proud of what we'd designed and the thinking behind it.