Our Team

MARY ELLEN WHITAKER

SENIOR LEARNING CONTENT DESIGNER

Mary Ellen Whitaker has been designing instructional programs for learners of all ages for almost twenty years. She bases every course she designs on one key question: Who is our learner? Always with the learner’s needs at the forefront, she has designed everything from employee training courses for the financial services, health insurance, pharmaceutical, and healthcare industries, to interactive technology components for K-12 ESL students in Mexico.  At Illumina Interactive, Mary Ellen’s most recent projects were a six-module introduction to home buying for the Mass Housing Finance Company, and an eight-module e-learning course for psychotherapists, teaching them about cognitive behavior therapy for adolescent depression. She also designed two courses for The DentaQuest Institute. The first six-module course was designed to teach oral health professionals about risk assessment for dental disease. For the second series of seven modules for DentaQuest, Mary Ellen donned her television producer’s hat when she conducted video interviews with dental experts for the modules. As with all her other projects, she also designed interactivity and screen layouts and wrote all content and voiceover narration.

Before joining Illumina Interactive, Mary Ellen worked for Oakes Interactive (later Asymetrix and click2learn) as the company’s first Instructional Designer. Mary Ellen graduated from Kutztown University in Pennsylvania with a B.S. in television production with a concomitant major in speech and theater.