Missy Gordon — Learning × AI

About

Educator first. Innovator always.

For more than 20 years at Western Governors University, I've coached 140+ students at a time through personalized degree plans, designed learning experiences for virtual environments, and trained staff on the systems and skills that keep a fully online university running.

Today I'm channeling that depth into AI: completing WGU's AI certification, serving as my team's go-to AI resource, contributing to the WGU AI Explorers Group, and leading a data-driven student re-engagement initiative built on Salesforce and Microsoft Copilot.

Off the clock you'll find me in rural Utah — hiking, practicing yoga, riding four-wheelers, and hanging out with my fluffy sidekick. City smarts, rural flair.

Featured Work

At-Risk Student Outreach Project

Using behavioral data + AI to bring at-risk students back.

Students who go quiet rarely announce it — the signal lives in the data. I designed and lead an initiative that identifies disengaging students early using Salesforce activity data, then pairs AI-assisted workflows (Microsoft Copilot) with human-centered outreach to re-engage them before they fall behind. It's behavioral data science, ethical AI use, and learning design working as one system.

Salesforce + Copilot

Tech stack

Early-signal detection

Behavioral data approach

Human-in-the-loop

Ethical AI design

Corporate Training & Research

Training that changes behavior — with a passion for health.

My favorite training work lives at the intersection of wellness and behavior change. I've designed programs promoting community and workplace wellness — nutrition, exercise, mental health — built around virtual challenges, personalized plans, and the engagement mechanics that actually get people to participate.

That passion is personal, too: I'm an avid student of cardiovascular health and evidence-based nutrition, and it shapes how I approach every wellness program — grounded in research, not fads.

It's also grounded in research roots: before WGU, I served as Data Manager & Research Assistant at Utah State University's Early Intervention Research Institute, supporting studies on early childhood health and developmental intervention. Managing research data taught me to treat every training outcome as a measurable hypothesis.

Needs assessment → pilot → refine → rollout → evaluate. Every program I build follows that evidence loop.

Community & Workplace Wellness

Digital wellness platforms, virtual wellness challenges, and personalized plans covering nutrition, exercise, and mental health.

Virtual Emotional Intelligence

Helping teams — including healthcare teams — maintain empathy and connection in remote and hybrid environments.

Virtual Leadership

Equipping leaders to manage, motivate, and develop remote teams with practical toolkits and live workshops.

Hybrid Meeting Effectiveness

Best practices, templates, and e-learning that cut meeting time while raising engagement.

Multi-generational Collaboration

Bridging generational gaps to turn workforce diversity into a collaboration advantage.

ITIL & IT Service Training

Process training and documentation for incident, problem, and change management.

Focus Areas

Five roles, one throughline: helping people and intelligent systems work better together.

Learning & Development

Training programs, instructional design, LMS & virtual training, blended learning, onboarding, and leadership development — built and delivered at scale for 20+ years.

AI Ethics & Responsible Adoption

Ethics-grounded implementation frameworks, human-in-the-loop design, and policies that build trust — developed through WGU AI certification coursework and applied on a real team.

Human-Computer Interaction

Two decades watching real people interact with educational technology. I design AI touchpoints around how humans actually behave, not how we wish they would.

Behavioral Data

From research data management at Utah State's Early Intervention Research Institute to Salesforce engagement analytics today — turning behavioral signals into action.

AI Product & Change Enablement

Prompt engineering, capstone implementation frameworks, Copilot workflows, and the change-management muscle to get tools genuinely adopted — not just installed.

Strategic Program Design

Needs assessment, program design, evaluation, and continuous improvement — the operating system underneath everything above.

Where human learning meets machine intelligence.