3 min
Between the platform and the room
I am not a teacher. I help academic staff get technology into their teaching, and the work of moving things from the institution's side to theirs keeps turning into small software.
I am not a teacher. I am a digital learning designer and consultant at a university, which means the courses I work on belong to somebody else. My job is to help the people who own them get technology into their teaching in a way that is worth what it costs them, which is a caveat I would want on the sentence even if it made it longer.
That covers more ground than the title suggests.
The list looks like five jobs. In practice it is one, approached from five directions, and the thing they have in common is that none of it is mine. I do not own the course, the room, or the hour. I am there to make somebody else's version of those work better.
Why it turns into software
Two things sit on either side of that position. On one side is the platform, which has to run every course in the institution and keep working when nobody is watching it. On the other are the rooms and the people in them, where what matters is this course, this cohort, this term. A good deal of the work is carrying something from one side to the other.
Work like that repeats, and the repetition is never exact. If it were exact it would be a template and somebody would have built one already. It repeats with a difference every time, which is the shape of problem you end up writing a small program for.
What that has produced
A builder for Moodle pages. Assembling a course page click by click inside the editor is fine once. It is less fine as the thing you do on a Tuesday, repeatedly, on behalf of people who are waiting for the result.
A list of activities I can filter by what I want to happen in the room, instead of by the name of the method. When I sit down with someone to plan a session, they almost never open with the name of a method. They describe what they want the students to be doing. Most collections are indexed the other way round, which means the first thing I do is translate, and translation is exactly the sort of thing a list can do for you.
stepped-presentations is the one that is public, and the only one other people have a reason to install. It is a Claude Code skill for building interactive HTML presentations.
Two different bars
Some of these are for me and some are for the people I support, and the second kind is much harder to get right.
A tool I use myself can be held together with assumptions. I know what it wants, I know how it behaves on a bad input, and when it breaks I am standing right there. None of that survives being handed over. A tool an educator uses has to make sense to somebody who has never read a line of it, on a day when they have five other things to do, and if it fails it fails the evening before a class or in front of one.
That bar is high enough that most of what I build never clears it. I do not think that is a problem to solve. Building for one person and one situation is cheap enough that I can afford to be wrong, and the alternative is being careful in advance about things that are easier to find out by trying. What ends up on cdul.app is whatever cleared the bar.
AI on both sides
Helping staff work out where AI belongs in their practice, and where it does not, is part of the job on that list. I build these tools with Claude Code, which puts me on both sides of the same conversation. I would rather be there than give advice about a way of working I do not use myself.
It has failure modes, and I have written about those separately in the note about this site. The short version is that it needs checking, and that the checking is the part nobody can do for you.
The index on the front page is the current state of all of it. cdul.app is the live one.