The K. Patricia Cross Academy

Empowering College Educators Everywhere

The K. Patricia Cross Academy is a nonprofit that fills an enormous gap in higher education, offering college educators a wealth of completely free content including a la carte teaching methods, class activities, and long-form articles. From 2018 to 2024, I worked with the 20|20 team to support the Cross Academy, scaling the brand crafted by fellow designer Meg Stinnett across various print and digital media.

As of 2024, the K. Patricia Cross Academy has been acquired by The University of Alabama, to preserve Pat Cross's legacy and carry out her mission of empowering college educators everywhere.

What I Did

Web/UX

Content Design & Editing

Video Editing

Website Design & Dev

My greatest undertaking with the Cross Academy was designing and building a website that would host a library of instructional videos and a blog, while creating an immersive experience centered around the brand.

Up to the University of Alabama acquisition, the site continually grew, and I was responsible for scaling it to accommodate a much more expansive library of videos, articles, and eventually an interactive, 15-part multimedia course. To do this, I transitioned the site from mostly static pages to a more flexible dynamic system, leveraging templated design systems in Themeco Pro, powered by ACF and custom post types.

Content Design

I was also responsible for translating long-form, text-only articles to a more engaging digital experience. Often communicating directly with the client, I handled mechanical copy editing, then worked to format articles, adding visual aids and curated stock photography, both to break up extensive sections and illustrate key points.

Educational Video Editing

Working from styles established in KPCA's a la carte instructional videos, I edited a series of introductory videos for its Engaged Teaching Skills Series course.

My responsibilities included cutting and color-grading raw footage; editing while following scripts and storyboards; curating B-roll relevant to the subjects and with diverse representation; designing additional title cards; and making editing decisions wherever storyboards left anything open to interpretation.

A Comprehensive Course

The Engaged Teaching Skills Series demanded a robust ecosystem of web, video, and print pieces. I designed, built, and documented a section of the website with custom interfaces for the folks at the University of Alabama who would carry out the rest of the project, and also produced all supplemental PDFs for the course.