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My first professional design role. A summer co-op with the multimedia team at OpenED, University of Guelph, where I spent three months translating complex offline educational content into engaging online experiences for university students.
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My Role
Lead UX Designer and Brand Designer
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Timeline
Summer 2020
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Team/Organization
OpenED, University of Guelph.
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Tools
Vyond, Adobe Premiere, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Audition, Adobe Illustrator
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Deliverables
Animations, infographics, closed captioning, educational multimedia content
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Environment
Agile team with weekly meetings, daily task logs, and ongoing collaboration
Taking the classroom online
In the summer of 2020, I joined the multimedia team at OpenED, the online education division of the University of Guelph, as a Multimedia Design Assistant. The role came during my time studying software engineering at Guelph, and it was one of the first signals that my real interests were pulling me toward design.
The core challenge of the role was translation. University courses had been built around in-person delivery — lectures, physical handouts, face-to-face explanation. With the shift to online learning accelerating, the team needed to take that content and reimagine it in formats that would work for students learning remotely. That meant understanding not just what the content was, but how people actually learn from a screen.
My work spanned animations, infographics, and closed captioning, produced for real university courses that students were going to use in the coming semester. That accountability made it feel like genuine professional work, not just a practice exercise.
"The question was never just how to put content online. It was how to make it work for someone learning from a screen, often alone, without a teacher in the room to fill in the gaps."
