Randy Rodriguez is an instructional designer and project manager who brings nearly a decade of experience at the nexus of research and evaluation, project management, and learning experience design.
Randy earned his Ed.M. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he specialized in Learning Design, Innovation, and Technology and a B.A in Geography and Education Studies from UC Berkeley. His interdisciplinary practice spans higher education, EdTech, and health-focused learning environments, with a focus on designing accessible, research-based learning experiences.
His affiliation with The Blood Project as Project Manager began after conducting a comprehensive user research study aimed at evaluating the platform’s usability, accessibility, and educational impact, work that has since informed ongoing efforts to scale and refine TBP’s learning ecosystem. Prior to TBP, he worked at Conectado Inc as Lead Instructional Designer., where he co-developed culturally responsive, career-readiness programs and supported students in developing domain expertise at the intersection of healthcare, technology, and bioinformatics through strategic partnerships with Stanford’s School of Medicine and UC Berkeley’s School of Education.
In this podcast, Randy Rodriguez talks with Adam Weiss about:
- His path to joining The Blood Project and stepping into the role of Project Manager.
- Bringing human-centered learning design to hematology education, from managing cognitive load to creating multimodal resources that reach global audiences.
- The role of interdisciplinary teamwork and emerging tools like AI in shaping The Blood Project’s approach to teaching and communicating about blood.
Producer and audio editor: Adam Weiss, Relativistic Media
Randy’s Resources for Communicating Science and Designing Effective Learning Experiences:
The Learning Scientists, Alan Alda Method, EDUCAUSE, Universal Design for Learning
Transcript:
ADAM: Welcome to Talking About Blood, a podcast that explores the wonders of blood, brought to you by The Blood Project. I’m Adam Weiss, and I’m sitting in for Helen Osborne, who’s taking a month off to recover from back surgery. Today, I’ll be talking to Randy Rodriguez, an instructional designer and project manager with nearly a decade of experience creating accessible, research-driven learning experiences in higher education. He’s also worked in ed tech and health-focused environments. And Randy’s the new project manager for The Blood Project. He’s here today to talk about how we learn, how that’s changing, and how that all relates to communicating about blood. Welcome, Randy.
RANDY: Hey, Adam. Good to be here. Thanks for having me on.
ADAM: So, there’s a lot more to your story and background to what I just said in the intro. Can you just tell us how you found the blood project and what made you come to work here?
RANDY: Yeah, sure thing. So, I came across the blood project as a graduate student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I was taking a course called, “Formative Evaluation of Education Technology Products”. I know that’s a big mouthful, but… The Blood Project was one of multiple sponsors for this class where students were able to partner up and work together for about 15, 16 weeks together. And so in that class, we got to choose from a list of project partners. And at the time, the Blood Project was in its second year of being affiliated with this class. I saw it as this kind of unique space where medicine, STEM education and storytelling intersected. And so I was really drawn to that mission of, you know, making hematology engaging for a broad audience.
ADAM: It seems like you have a background in health communication, not just from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, but from before that. How did you get into education and learning design and what led you to that class where you found the blood project?
RANDY: Yeah, so prior to coming to Harvard, while I was an undergrad, I had been studying education formally at the University of California, Berkeley in the San Francisco Bay Area. And really, it was there where I kind of became exposed to this practice of learning design and really thinking about how we learn and how people learn effectively throughout their lifespan. So I got connected with an edtech organization called ‘Conectado’, which means “Connected” in Spanish. And so here is really where I’m kind of thrown into the field and start to learning about what it means to translate research into, you know, multimodal learning experiences. And, I was really working central to my work was bioinformatics and thinking of this relationship between healthcare and technology through this partnership at the Stanford University School of Medicine. So it’s really kind of that time where I’m kind of being exposed to this intersection between, you know, how we communicate effectively within healthcare, how we develop the skills that are required for careers in healthcare technology. And that’s kind of the foundation that I brought to Harvard and what I get to do now at the Blood Project.
ADAM: So what really drew you to the hematology and blood aspect of this? There’s a lot of health, medicine, science education out there. What made you particularly interested in actually talking about blood?
RANDY: I would say my connection to the blood project is deeply personal. A few years ago, my father was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia or otherwise known as CLL. You know it was his second cancer diagnosis and my sister and I have always been involved as much as possible in his healthcare, helping to translate, attending appointments, making sure that he understood all his options when it came to his care. And so The Blood Project, when I came upon it, I identified the way in which it has resources that I would have never encountered otherwise, right. Like guides on how to interpret CBC changes in CLL or images of what CLL actually looks like on a blood smear. And so it’s really kind of that content that bridges the gap between these very abstract lab results that we were so used to seeing and something that you can really visualize and make sense of. So for me, really, you know, doing this work with The Blood Project, it’s a reminder that hematology isn’t just about lab numbers, right, it’s about people and families and the knowledge that helps them to navigate something complex, like the decisions involved with our own health care. Luckily for us, you know, and for my dad, CLL has a really good prognosis and so he’s in great condition and thriving in his life at nearly 80 years of age.
ADAM: That’s very good to hear. It’s very interesting that you really kind of brought this family experience and then your personal educational experience together in this project. In your involvement in The Blood Project, do others have that same connection? Are they mostly hematologists? I’m not someone who’s working with the team very regularly. I just produce and edit the podcast. So can you give a little bit of a window into the workings of The Blood Project and talk about what it’s like to work there and who’s involved and what their motivations are?
RANDY: So I would say, you know, working at The Blood Project and really overall, I’m thinking the way that we work is deeply interdisciplinary. Right. We have our hub and spoke model. Right. Which means that we start with a central concept. Right. Say like TTP, for example, and we’re exploring it from multiple angles. So everything from history, to patient experience, lab science and clinical practice. And so I would say, you know, within the team, you know, working closely with Bill, with Dr. Carney, with Dr. Lafollette, we’re building systems to streamline, right, how medical education content is both created but also maintained. Right. And I would say that, you know, Bill and I really share this vision for balancing high level strategy, but with the sort of small details of project management and of learning design. What I learned only through having done the work that I did with Bill and with Alia and a couple of other folks that are on the team, was really understanding how human centered a lot of the design and the learning content that exists on the website is. Right really thinking about the different steps and levels of analysis that Bill has brought to really think about how are we translating this highly technical, highly scientific, evidence-based information into content that is easily understandable, that is digestible for learners, and thinking about the context of who those people are, right? Who are the users of The Blood Project? And so that’s one thing that I really appreciated is seeing that commitment to, right, the folks that are navigating the website and thinking about how they’re using the content on The Blood Project and say their everyday practice as clinicians, as medical students, and so forth.
ADAM: And I suppose that blood, as a topic, is actually inherently a bit more difficult to communicate about for some people because so many people have a visceral reaction to the thought of or the sight of blood. It’s kind of like trying to engage people on a project about spiders. So, what are the particular issues that come about when it comes to talking to people about blood versus other health topics?
RANDY: Absolutely, yeah. You know, I would say even that blood can be a bit of an emotionally charged topic for some learners, right? Whether that’s due to personal experiences or cultural perceptions. There’s also this physical reaction, right, as we name that many people have when thinking about or even seeing blood. And so combine that with the complex terminology and processes in the field of hematology, and it can get overwhelming pretty quickly. So, I think an important instructional design principle that we can anchor this is with cognitive load theory, wtells us that when learners are overwhelmed by extraneous load, things like distractions or non-essential information, it can really reduce their ability to focus on the core material. There’s this 2024 study by Bronfield and colleagues where researchers looked at cognitive load in this clinical training context and what they found was that after four new inpatient consultations in a shift, trainees were reporting that there was a significant distraction from interruptions, emotions, right, extraneous info, to the point that it even risked their focus and potentially patient safety. That’s important because while our learners in hematology aren’t doing inpatient consults just yet, right, the takeaway is similar. There’s a threshold where too much information or too many demands kind of overwork our working memory. So that’s why I think we designed these modules on TBP to chunk content, layer visuals with text, and kind of provide multiple entry points, depending on what users need and what they find to be most important for them.
ADAM: That kind of brings me back to something you said about your background as well, because you were working in multicultural and multilingual communities in your past. Have you looked at any of those aspects when it comes to communicating about blood and in The Blood Project and how cognitive load or something else might affect people who have English as a second or third or fourth language when they’re talking about these kind of topics?
RANDY: Yeah, I think that’s definitely an area of interest, you know, for the team and I, right, we really want to think about how this might be nuanced across different categories. You know, in a user experience research evaluation we conducted we did get some representation in our sample data across practicing clinicians in different countries. But I think that’s an area that we’re going to focus a little bit more attention towards is kind of understanding what those differences are, if any, right? And how do we design the content that we have to make sure that it’s addressing a diverse population of learners.
ADAM: And I know a lot of people across the entire communication spectrum are now leaning on AI for things like that. Have you looked at how AI impacts communication about hematology and blood, whether it is from that communication and translation, whether it’s from science speak to normal speak, or whether it’s from one language to another, or how AI’s interpretation of blood topics might influence people?
RANDY: When it comes to AI, I’m personally of the mind that AI can help with things like efficiency. When we’re thinking of drafting outlines, maybe summarizing research, creating adaptive quizzes. But as you mentioned, there are risks. There’s the risk of inaccurate information, of bias, and even over-reliance without expert oversight. So, I really think of AI as a support tool or what we can call ‘IA’, an ‘intelligence augmentation’, but really not a replacement for human expertise. And so, you know I’m very fortunate to work in a space where, you know, at The Blood Project, we prioritize transparency, verification, right, things like peer review, and that really like human in the loop approach to what we’re doing. And so really, just again, thinking of AI, not as replacing educators or fully creating educational content on its own, but as kind of accelerating the workflows that a lot of the clinicians that are involved form part of, so that more time and focus can be given to things like interpretation, personalization, and contextualization of hematology content.
ADAM: So do you have a tip or a warning or some kind of statement that you would give for people who are listening to this who are thinking about potentially using or interacting with AI when it comes to communicating about blood?
RANDY: Yeah, you know, I would say things like LLMs, right, just such as GPT-based systems, they’re evolving at a super rapid pace, right? So OpenAI’s GPT-4, for example, right, is reportedly trained on hundreds of billions of parameters and can generate high-quality context in a matter of seconds. But one of, as we might know already, one of the key shortcomings of current LLMs is this idea of hallucination, the confident generation of false or fabricated information. And so I think in science learning, where accuracy is imperative, this can mislead learners if not carefully checked. And so I think it’s always important to reevaluate and consider the outputs of these models, especially when you’re going to use the content to educate others on something like blood and medical education.
ADAM: So with that in mind, do you have any favorite resources that you would share with the listeners that they should look to as a reliable and understandable source of ways to communicate about science, to communicate about blood, education, or learning design?
RANDY: Yeah, there’s so many great resources out there. It’s really hard to pick a few. But since I’m on the project team, I’m happy to compile a list together of some really great resources on these different topics and share it along with the podcast.
ADAM: Okay, we’ll make sure that that actually ends up on the web page along with this podcast. So if you’re listening to this not on The Blood Project website, then go to The Blood Project website and find Randy’s list of favorite resources. One of the things that I know The Blood Project is trying to do is approach learning from a bunch of different directions. That’s one of the reasons that this podcast exists. You’re doing things that are accessible in a variety of different ways to different audiences. Can you talk about the multimodal approach that you have to getting content available to people from different avenues so that they can learn in the way that works for them?
RANDY: Absolutely. Yeah. Just as you mentioned, I would say another big priority of the work that we’re doing, right, is that accessibility access. And not just in the sense of like plain language, but really thinking about what are multiple learning formats and how we might use those to continue to reach a global audience. We just recently hit 800,000 users on our platform, right, which is representative of different places in different countries. And so I think that insight, right, really thinking about how folks are learning most effectively within these different diverse geographies is only going to help us to continue to improve our content and really think about what are the areas on the platforms where learners are already spending a lot of their time learning. I also want to help to deepen that interdisciplinary approach, right, that Bill and the leadership team have already established so well. And so really thinking about how we’re bringing perspectives from medicine, from education, history, and really those patient experiences so that we’re giving our learners, right, really this fuller understanding of blood and blood disorders.
ADAM: So looking at the next few years, what do you want to accomplish and what do you and The Blood Project want to accomplish to further those goals as you start working with the organization?
RANDY: You know, I’d really love to help support The Blood Project continue to grow its topic modules. And we’re well on our way to having this really robust, sustainable library of hematology learning experiences. I think one thing, too, is, you know, I want The Blood Project to continue to remain responsive to change. Right. And I feel like that’s a core, core foundation to how we work. So that’s whether integrating new research findings, right, or adapting to evolving technologies like AI, like we were talking about, or even designing new learning modalities based on that user feedback that we’re getting from folks across the globe. I think that’s one of the areas that I really want to hone in on, right, is for The Blood Project to be recognized, not just as a trusted source of hematology, right, it very much is, but also as a model for how science education can be rigorous, but still deeply human centered and forward thinking. Maybe creating shorter videos where we’re really honing in on that visual component and ways of bringing together a learning experience of some kind. So that way we’re really adapting to how us as a society are changing in the ways that we learn through, right, this rise of technology, this rise of AI so that we’re, again, meeting the needs of the way in which even us as learners are evolving.
ADAM: Definitely. When I have younger relatives sending me things, they’re almost exclusively these short, you know, one-minute videos from TikTok or YouTube shorts or other places. So I certainly think that those kinds of approaches are going to be really important and really valuable in the future. Randy, thank you very much for being on. I think you’re a great addition to The Blood Project team, and I really look forward to seeing what you and the rest of the team do over the next few years.
RANDY: Absolutely, Adam. Thanks so much. Good to be here and thanks for having me.
ADAM: And thanks to all of you for listening. To learn more about The Blood Project and explore resources for professionals, trainees, and patients, visit thebloodproject.com. Please help spread the word about this podcast series and The Blood Project. Share this interview with your colleagues and friends. I’m Adam Weiss. It was nice sitting in front of the mic for this one, but Helen should be back next month.