Karen LaPlant

Karen LaPlant has taught face-to-face, blended and online courses for 30 years. Her work in her institution’s Center for Teaching and Learning as a campus leader has impacted the quality of courses and learning for 1000s of students. She has presented at many national conferences and professional development workshops for faculty and administrators in course communication, Integrating Technology, Classroom of the Future and accessibility of course materials to increase student engagement. She worked on the Minnesota State Captioning Project to develop a toolkit of resources for institutions considering video captioning.   

Karen has evaluated faculty courses for years as a Quality Matters peer reviewer. She also served as a master reviewer for a team of peer reviewers, managing the course review process from beginning to end and coaching faculty in getting their courses certified. As the chair of her institutional professional development committee for years, Karen promoted course design review for over 200 faculty on two campuses and secured funding to get over 50 courses certified. She chaired the campus curriculum committee and developed a course approval system to help faculty streamline the process of getting courses approved. She developed a syllabus template providing all courses with the campus information required by the Quality Matters’ standards. She has seen first-hand what improvement can happen at an institution when faculty measure their courses for quality.

  • Business and Information Technology faculty at Hennepin Technical College
  • Web Design adjunct faculty at North Central University
  • Information Media adjunct faculty at St. Cloud State University
  • Course designer, faculty in online and blended courses
  • NOCTI Subject Matter Expert for Business Information Processing
  • Quality Matters Instructional Designers Association (IDA), QM Campus Coordinator, Course Peer Reviewer and Master Reviewer
  • Accreditation Council for Business Schools and Programs (ACBSP) Accreditation Site Evaluator Team Member
  • Minnesota Learning Commons Advisory Board Member
  • Co-leader at Hennepin Technical College Center for Teaching and Learning
  • Conference Planner and Presenter: D2L IGNITE/Connection Regional User Conference, D2L International Fusion User Conference and MN eLearning Summit.
  • Conference Presenter: Quality Matters National Conference, and Minnesota State IT, Leadership, Front Line, iTeach and Realizing Student Potential Conferences.
  • Planner and Presenter: Hennepin Technical College Professional Development Workshops