Blended course design for the WIPO Academy
A Spanish-language course on gender mainstreaming for intellectual property office staff across Latin America and the Caribbean.
A consultancy with the WIPO Academy from October 2025 to March 2026, where I worked as the sole external instructional design consultant. I transformed expert source content into accessible Articulate Rise modules, Zoom facilitator kits, learner guides, assessments, and a glossary.
Project overview
WIPO Academy commissioned a new course on gender mainstreaming for intellectual property offices across Latin America and the Caribbean. I designed and built it end-to-end.
Subject-matter content from gender-and-IP experts was routed to me through a coordinator at the WIPO Academy. From that, I produced the full set of deliverables: three Articulate Rise modules, three Zoom facilitator kits, three learner companion guides, a glossary, formative and summative assessments, and all associated source files.
The course was built to WCAG 2.1 AA from the first storyboard onward.
Key features & outcomes
- Designed and built three SCORM-compliant Articulate Rise modules in Spanish, totalling three hours of self-paced learning
- Created three Zoom facilitator kits for 3.5 hours of live applied learning, including lesson plans, tutor actions, slide guidance, and activity timing
- Transformed dense SME content into screen-by-screen storyboards with interaction design, knowledge checks, feedback text, infographic specifications, alt-text, and downloadable text equivalents
- Produced learner companion guides, a course glossary, formative and summative assessments, rubrics, infographics, videos, and AI-generated imagery
- Built to WCAG 2.1 AA from the storyboard stage, including a screen-reader-tested Rise template and customised Spanish interface labels
- Delivered all contractual milestones on schedule, with two rounds of WIPO and SME review per phase using Articulate Review 360
The WIPO Academy needed a course for a professionally senior but varied audience: intellectual property office staff across Latin America and the Caribbean, working in different institutional contexts and with different levels of prior exposure to gender mainstreaming.
The course also had to meet UN agency expectations for accuracy, cultural sensitivity, accessibility, and formal Spanish-language communication. Several stakeholders were involved in the review process, including the WIPO Academy, the Division for Latin America and the Caribbean, the Human Resources Management Division, and gender-and-IP subject-matter experts.
The source material arrived as dense expert content: strong in substance, but not yet structured for digital learning. My task was to turn that material into a blended course experience — self-paced Rise modules, live Zoom facilitator kits, learner guides, assessments, and a glossary — without a separate production team.
Set the design system before writing. Three frameworks did three different jobs. Understanding by Design anchored the work backward from learning outcomes. The Successive Approximation Model shaped how the work moved — rapid prototyping, two-round reviews per phase, iteration rather than waterfall. Universal Design for Learning and WCAG 2.1 AA defined the accessibility floor.
Convert subject-matter content into a teachable course. The subject-matter experts wrote content. What I produced from it was a course. For each module, I took the source document and built a screen-by-screen storyboard with welcome screens, learning objectives rewritten in second person, transitions between lessons, knowledge checks with feedback paragraphs, infographic specs with alt-text and filenames, text equivalents for screen-reader access, and downloadable PDF versions.
The work between the SME document and the storyboard is invisible in the final module. It's also where the course is actually designed.
Build accessible from the first storyboard. WCAG 2.1 AA was a build choice, not a QA step. The Rise template — heading hierarchy, alt-text protocol, colour contrast, Spanish-language interface labels — was set before I scripted Module 1. Every infographic shipped with three accessibility paths: alt-text for short summaries, a text-equivalent accordion for longer descriptions, and a downloadable PDF version. Every video had captions and a transcript.
Design for a Latin American adult learner. Spanish in formal register — usted rather than tú — chosen deliberately for a professionally senior audience and aligned with WIPO's institutional voice. Front-loaded paragraphs, sentence-case headings, and 20–35-word sentences per RAE and Fundéu conventions. Examples drawn from regional IP offices — Brazil's INPI, Mexico's IMPI, Peru's INDECOPI, Chile, Costa Rica — rather than European or North American defaults.
Design the blended modality deliberately. Rise carried the conceptual material — definitions, frameworks, examples. Zoom did the applied work: short recap, focused Q&A, breakout-room group work on a case typical of an IP office, collective synthesis, individual commitments. I designed each Zoom kit as a co-deliverable for a facilitator I wouldn't meet — two-column lesson plans (tutor actions on the left, slide content on the right), slide templates with suggested visuals, and timing for each segment.
The biggest design work happened before the build. The source content was strong, but it needed to be transformed into a course: sequenced screens, transitions, interactions, accessibility paths, recaps, and assessments. The finished Rise module looks polished, but the real instructional design happened between the SME document and the storyboard.
Accessibility worked best as a design constraint, not a final check. Building alt-text, text equivalents, captions, transcripts, and screen-reader-ready structures into the storyboard saved revision time and made accessibility part of the course architecture.
Solo consultancy requires invisible scaffolding. To deliver consistently across the project, I built internal style guides, an alt-text protocol, a Spanish Rise template, and an AI-assisted QA workflow. Most of that scaffolding never shipped to the client, but it made the final deliverables more consistent.