LXD Spotlight: Kelly Roberts on Brand-Aligned Digital Learning Design

When I'm thinking about brand-aligned learning design, I'm thinking about more than the visual optics of branding like typography and color. Visual design is an important tool for communicating an organization's values and sensibility, but what interests me about branding really goes below the aesthetic surface. I want to know what makes an organization unique, what drives its mission, and what tools it wants to offer its learners, as well as how it sees itself in relation to our complex social world. I always find myself curious about the ways our approaches to education reveal so much about our values and aspirations—like what makes an institution tick and what drives it.

When I'm thinking about a digital learning experience, I'm bringing together multiple lines of thought:

Paying attention to the brand specificity shapes the tools we use, the content included, and the framework that informs the content we include. We're supporting institutions in communicating their values through their course design and ensuring that in the process they align with Universal Design for Learning, accessibility, and adult learning principles.

For instance, an organization that embraces AI literacy may wish to include AI-based assignments across courses, whereas an institution that highlights traditional liberal arts education may wish to design assignments that are more AI-resistant and emphasize critical thinking.

It's in part aesthetics, but it goes deeper than that. I'll say this very directly because I believe it strongly: an organization with integrity is an organization that can last. By integrity, I mean following those articulated organizational values even if they need to be transparently updated as contexts change.

Brand alignment is the way an organization expresses its commitment to staying aligned with its stated goals and values. Brand alignment communicates that an organization is trustworthy and rigorous.

For educational organizations in particular, not taking brand education and alignment seriously can come with steep risks—including reputation loss, loss of revenue, and perhaps even the loss of public trust in educational institutions. The last is so important because we need to be expanding access to education right now more than ever. I think we're also in a moment where younger people are rightfully feeling more skeptical of both longstanding institutions and new technologies. Being able to communicate and deliver on your brand value is important to staying relevant, resilient, and responsive to those changing contexts.

The emphasis on ROI—and educational institutions having to defend and demonstrate their ROI—is almost a uniquely American dilemma. You wouldn't necessarily have to defend that ROI if education were a public good and a right. I can see how many people are disillusioned with the fact that they'd be going into tens of thousands of dollars of debt for a degree that's not necessarily giving them a higher payout in the job market. It's a cyclical process of not valuing those positions and not valuing education. It's almost like these two things work together to limit degrees in the humanities and social sciences, because we don't value teachers and we don't value artists in our society. If those jobs paid more, we could demonstrate an ROI more.

The question about gender is an interesting one because in many ways over the past 50 or 75 years, the main beneficiaries of higher education have been women. So those who have seen the most gains in their earning potential have been women. We're also at a time when gender roles are being reimagined, and there's a lot of animosity toward those social shifts that have happened over the past 50 to 70 years. I really appreciate the question—there are so many complex factors that are informing this shift.

One of the things I really love about my work at SRM is that I get to work not only with specific institutions but with specific subject matter experts. I'm always interested in why they're so passionate about their subject area, and I try to find a way to tie this individuality in with the institutional branding in our digital design work. So when I'm designing a learning experience, I'm also trying to figure out what learners are gaining from learning this at this institution and from this subject matter expert.

While working on a film and philosophy course, I found a way to balance the knowledge checks of the core concepts that are essential for understanding the discipline with the values those SMEs shared: curiosity, attention to detail, and respect for nuance. The course balanced those knowledge checks with more experiential learning that created opportunities for learners to incorporate more film techniques or philosophical inquiries into their own lives—bridging the gap between theoretical and experiential learning in a way that both SMEs particularly valued.

I also really enjoyed doing this with a general education program where I was working with SMEs from the humanities and social sciences. I'm a very humanities-driven person—I have an English PhD to prove it—but I also understand some of the critiques or skepticism around humanities or social sciences about being too subjective or lackadaisical on the data. This course was interesting to me because it confronted the branding problem that the humanities and social sciences have. What I really wanted to focus on is what those critiques missed, which is that the humanities and social sciences don't deliver static facts but rather show learners how to defend lines of critique or pursue lines of inquiry based on data they gather.

I'm continually reading articles about higher ed, new tech, politics, and public sentiment. This whole slew of topics comes together when we think about branding and values alignment, because branding is ultimately about being able to communicate effectively in those different contexts or as contexts change.

A few foundational books worth exploring: Design for How People Learn by Julie Dirksen, Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design by Kat Holmes, and Interaction of Color by Josef Albers are helpful starting points for learning design, accessibility, aesthetics, and color theory. I also was very fortunate to study with some higher ed leaders at Rutgers, including Ralph A. Gigliotti, whose book A Guide for Leaders in Higher Education: Core Concepts, Competencies, and Tools is a helpful guide for connecting values and institutional tactics to brand messaging.

What I also love about this topic is there are so many interesting directions to look for inspiration. Successful advertising campaigns, winning political campaigns, social movements—even elaborate religious rituals are interesting case studies for analyzing the relationship between values, mission, aesthetics, and practices. Because higher ed doesn't deliver a product but rather a transformative experience, I really think it's important to look beyond traditional advertising and the hyper-marketing that dominates our screentime.

My ultimate advice comes from Henry James: try to be the kind of person on whom nothing is lost. Pay attention—notice the details, notice patterns, notice the different vehicles for conveying meaning, like colors, contrast, and punctuation.

Start reading, start noticing, start designing.