Terri Straut
Location: Littleton, CO
Motto: “To be compassionate is to experience divinity in our everyday life.” – Dada JP Vaswani
Hobby: Advocating for gifted and talented children through the Jefferson County Association for Gifted Children
Favorite Client Moment: Observing the power of engagement in learning through teams creating a Rube Goldberg machine. We gave them a toy truck, a marble, rubber bands, balloons, dominos, and wooden planks. Their mission: to move the marble as far from the starting point as possible. Competitive play makes learning stick, plus it’s fun.
Terri Taylor Straut specializes in online learning implementation, project management, instructional design, and the development of blended learning solutions. Having initiated and managed projects in higher education and corporate training, she offers a wealth of strategic and practical implementation experience.
Terri’s range of experience includes online learning, higher education, federal and state government, non-profit membership organizations, healthcare, software development and the telecommunications industry.
Recent implementations have included managing training logistics for the global roll out of systems training in eleven countries as well as program management for the creation and pilot of an accelerated boot camp for new hires. Terri collaborates with the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technology annually to produce their Distance Education Report, analyzing IPEDS data and reporting industry trends.
Terri has also created onboarding and job-role training for provisioners at a leading Internet company. She brought her significant instructional design experience to clients developing Six Sigma training programs, blended learning solutions and elearning products. Terri served as a Practice Manager for Oracle elearning and Strategic Services. She led the team responsible for developing performance consulting services to support elearning implementations. She was a liaison to the product team that developed Oracle iLearning, Oracle’s Learning Management System (LMS).
Terri has extensive experience developing and implementing web-based training initiatives as the founding member of three virtual university campuses. She served as the Director of Customer and Provider relations for the Western Governors University (WGU), a consortium of states dedicated to competency-based education delivered at a distance. She was responsible for developing and implementing all of WGU’s student services and comprehensive web site, as well as defining and implementing policies for education providers and students. Terri was also the founding Director of CU Online, the University of Colorado’s virtual campus initiative. CU Online was founded in 1996 and continues to be a leader in the development of curriculum and campus services provided on the Web.
Terri earned her MBA at Northeastern University, Certificate of International Business at Ecole Superieure de Commerce in Reims, France, a BA at the University of Delaware, and Certificates in Management of Lifelong Education (Harvard University) and Management of Distance Education (Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications). She has been a guest lecturer and featured speaker on issues related to online learning in corporate training and higher education environments.