Ever wondered how we can seamlessly transition educational content across platforms while maintaining high quality? Discover how we are imagineering the migration of various courses to YouTube by leveraging AI and a student workforce, ensuring public access to engaging, well-curated educational videos.

Often, instructional design teams are assigned unique, complex projects that go beyond the scope of their normal job duties, using their project management, technical expertise, and proximity to online education. As Nicole Weber recently reminded us in “Protecting and Empowering our Swiss Army Knives,” instructional designers can be asked to do this “because of their wide-ranging knowledge, skills, and abilities” (Weber, 2024). Our team recently faced the challenge of promoting our online programs and showcasing our world-renowned faculty on a public platform using existing course content. In our presentation, we will use Disney's Imagineering process as a framework to walk attendees through our journey. By exploring the phases of Blue Sky, Concept, Feasibility, Design, Production, Installation, and Opening Day, we will demonstrate how we tackled this project so that attendees can apply lessons to their work. The Blue Sky phase is about dreaming up possibilities. The audience is invited to think about times when they've had ambitious ideas or inherited someone else's blue sky. We were asked how we could make our online program and instructors accessible to the public in a way that would highlight their expertise. You'll be asked to shape the big idea as we guide the audience through the Concept phase. Afterward, we will describe how we built a diverse team, mapped out where source content could be found, and imagined how this content could be presented on public platforms to increase the organization's online presence. In the Feasibility phase, we encourage you to think about a time when you faced the practical realities of bringing a concept to life. We'll discuss how this played out in our project. This includes curating content and navigating approval processes to developing project management strategies that keep stakeholders, tasks, and resources organized. During the Design phase, we invite you to consider how you would elevate your own project. For us, this meant thoughtfully incorporating branding elements and finding the language and tone to promote our exceptional courses and faculty. Production is all about getting your hands dirty. Imagine yourself in the middle of the project. What challenges might you face when trying to bring all the pieces together? We were immersed in asset management, exploring how AI might improve our workflow, and deciding how to include student workers or other members of our team. In the Installation phase of the project, we ask what are the final details to bring this complex process to completion. For us, in addition to diligently editing and uploading content, we optimized video metadata to ensure it was easily discoverable once launched. All the pieces need to be brought together seamlessly with attention to detail, collaboration, and communication. In the end, we would like you to think about how you might envision your own "Opening Day" for such a project. Ours is still underway, so we're eager to share what we've learned along the way as well as our successes, challenges, and insights. The lessons here can be applied across a wide range of projects and teams, from managing complex projects and fostering collaboration to allocating resources, using artificial intelligence, and communicating effectively. Throughout each phase, we'll draw parallels between our experiences and those of the audience. We'll invite you to imagine how you might apply the Disney Imagineering framework to your unique challenges. By grounding the discussion in our real-world project, we aim to provide a relatable model for creative problem-solving and collaboration that you can adapt and implement when tackling new and challenging tasks. Attendees will gain strategies and insights to apply, including: The importance of documentation, training, and processes for complex projects with changing team members The role of collaboration and psychological safety in effective teamwork Approaches to determining appropriate resource allocation for novel projects Ways to identify opportunities for AI to create efficiencies Techniques for estimating and communicating timelines for new types of tasks Models for integrating student workers in ways that provide real-world experience Ideas for managing stakeholder expectations when instructional design teams are called upon to wear many hats Instructional designers and their teams possess a versatile skillset that equips them to take on challenges beyond their standard roles. By applying an imaginative, structured approach like the Disney Imagineering framework to a real-world project, our session will showcase how teams can devise innovative solutions. Join us to explore how transforming unique challenges into opportunities for creativity, collaboration, and growth is all in a day's work for instructional design Swiss-army knives.