Jason K. McDonald
Dr. Jason K. McDonald is an Associate Professor of Instructional Psychology & Technology at Brigham Young University and the program coordinator of the university’s Design Thinking minor. He brings twenty years of experience in industry and academia, with a career spanning a wide-variety of roles connected to instructional design: face-to-face training; faculty development; corporate eLearning; story development for instructional films; and museum/exhibit design. He gained this experience as a university instructional designer; an executive for a large, international non-profit; a digital product director for a publishing company; and as an independent consultant.
Dr. McDonald's research focuses around advancing design practice and design education. He studies design as an expression of certain types of relationships with others and with the world, how designers experience rich and authentic ways of being human, the contingent and changeable nature of design, and design as a human accomplishment (meaning how design is not a natural process but is created by designers and so is open to continually being recreated by designers).
At BYU, Dr. McDonald has taught courses in instructional design, media and culture change, project management, learning psychology, and design theory. His work can be found at his website: http://jkmcdonald.com/
Richard E. West
Dr. Richard E. West is an associate professor of Instructional Psychology and Technology at Brigham Young University. He teaches courses in instructional design, academic writing, qualitative research methods, program/product evaluation, psychology, creativity and innovation, technology integration skills for preservice teachers, and the foundations of the field of learning and instructional design technology.
Dr. West’s research focuses on developing educational institutions that support 21st century learning. This includes teaching interdisciplinary and collaborative creativity and design thinking skills, personalizing learning through open badges, increasing access through open education, and developing social learning communities in online and blended environments. He has published over 90 articles, co-authoring with over 80 different graduate and undergraduate students, and received scholarship awards from the American Educational Research Association, Association for Educational Communications and Technology, and Brigham Young University.
He tweets @richardewest, and his research can be found on richardewest.com.
