Designing for Transformation: Corrie Melanson on Facilitation and Peer Feedback

Corrie is a facilitator and instructional designer who saw an opportunity when the world shifted online in 2020. Her first course, Beyond Talking Text (later renamed Online by Design), taught people how to create collaborative, inclusive virtual experiences that went beyond talking and typing in chat. She built it as a six-week flipped classroom: participants work through content at their own pace, then come together for live synchronous sessions. The demand was staggering. "I launched that course in September 2020, and I just started getting calls from companies across Canada," she says. "I delivered the course 15 times in the next six months." She built it on Ruzuku as her learning management system. Her second course, All In: Allyship and Inclusion Leadership, co-developed with an indigenous leader from PEI, uses the same blended model with holistic reflection practices based on the four elements of the medicine wheel.

Corrie builds extensive peer feedback into every course, and she has developed specific structures to make it productive rather than superficial. Students submit weekly reflections and assignments, and their peers offer feedback using a simple framework: "I like, I wish, I wonder." "What's one thing you like about what this person shared? What do you wish? And then what do you wonder?" she explains. This structure encourages appreciation, constructive suggestions, and curiosity without overwhelming participants or producing vague feedback. She groups students into "wisdom groups" of five to eight people, often organized by time zone, who begin each live session with small-group reflections on their key takeaways. Corrie reads all peer feedback and comments on it herself, providing a guardrail that prevents the "blind leading the blind" concern. The combination of peer accountability and instructor oversight creates a learning community that is far richer than either element alone.

Because Corrie's courses deal with topics like inclusion and allyship, creating psychological safety is essential. She starts every training with a pre-course survey that asks both where participants are on the learning objectives and "what would make this a safer and more inclusive learning space for you." Those responses become group agreements in the first session. One of her most impactful tools is providing an anonymous whiteboard, using platforms like Padlet, where participants can ask questions without attribution. "There are a lot of questions that people have, or they feel like they don't know where to start," she says. "By using an anonymous tool, it has really helped create a space where people feel like they're not asking dumb questions." The business model is straightforward: her latest cohort of 37 people at $997 each generated roughly $37,000 in six weeks, with most of the content already built and only a few hours of customization needed per week.