By Larissa Martins, LSI Communications Intern

With more than 16 years of teaching experience and 11 years at the Learning Systems Institute (LSI), Robert Lengacher’s career has been focused on impacting students, educators, and learning. As his role at LSI continues to expand, his focus hasn’t shifted.

“Knowing that the work we do together at LSI has such a broad and deep impact is humbling and exciting at the same time,” said Lengacher.

As the instructional design lead at LSI, he develops guidelines and supervises instructional designers who collaborate with subject matter experts to develop e-learning resources for pre-kindergarteners to adult learners. He also creates e-learning lessons, videos, presentations, curriculum resources, and job aids.

Over the years, Lengacher has also contributed to the growth and success of CPALMS. The platform has over 250,000 Florida educators as registered users and was created to provide teachers with information, tools, and vetted resources. This role has allowed him to travel throughout Florida to teach thousands of teachers how to maximize all the resources CPALMS offers.

Lengacher is also constantly inspired by his colleagues and describes them as intelligent, hard-working, creative, and committed to the same mission. He mentions that one of his favorite aspects about working at LSI is seeing the positive effects they all have on people’s lives.

Before joining LSI, Lengacher was a Florida public school teacher. Most of his 16-plus year teaching career was spent at the FSU lab school, working with students in grades 3-12, collaborating with science education researchers, leading workshops, and mentoring colleagues. Eventually, he started pursuing his graduate degree in instructional systems at FSU while teaching full-time.

At LSI, Lengacher applied his formal instructional design knowledge to salvage a failing e-learning project, demonstrating his knack for analyzing what a system already has and identifying user needs to develop solutions that can serve those needs. The result was CPALMS Student Tutorials—a growing collection of over 1,200 computer-based lessons for school children—that have become the most popular resources on CPALMS, with millions of views in thousands of classrooms in Florida and beyond.

While at LSI, Lengacher has expanded his knowledge, skills, and involvement from teacher training and curriculum development to instructional design, multimedia production, and e-learning development to user experience (UX) design and agile software development. Likewise, the scope of his work has expanded from domestic projects in Florida to international projects.

Lengacher has worked on the Community College Administrator Program in the past and is currently helping LSI’s Uzbekistan Education for Excellence Program by developing academic standards, e-learning resources, and a digital education platform. In August 2022, he traveled overseas for the first time in his life to Uzbekistan, where he enjoyed meeting new people while working with project partners and experts from the Ministry of Public Education.

“Working with them was just as fun as doing a professional development workshop here in the States,” said Lengacher.

He notes that an important factor in international development is clear communication that can show people new possibilities while respecting their context and expertise. His approach is simple: “We all go into it with the attitude that we’re working with people who are experts, who might need to enhance their content knowledge or their skills in a particular area, but the capacity already exists, so we give them opportunities to stretch in the right way— to build that confidence [and] to enhance areas with knowledge and skills.”

Since his memorable experience in Uzbekistan, Lengacher looks forward to working on other projects abroad. He is encouraging his colleagues to accept opportunities to work on international projects as he continues to find new ways to help LSI achieve its goals.

“I’ve learned over time that I’ll get to work on a lot of things that are very different and really interesting that will force me to learn new skills and improve my knowledge in areas that I don’t know much about,” said Lengacher. “I believe in the mission of LSI and the mission of Florida State — serving people through education initiatives, and I know now that can take so many different forms.”