Laila Ali
Educational Consultant, Team Leader & Founder
As Team Leader and founder of Key2Skills, Laila handles the day-to-day operations of the business. She has a Master’s degree in Educational Technology as well as over 19 years of experience in the education industry. She is skilled in creating performance-driven learning solutions and analytical assessments as well as building teams to be able to innovate and develop training solutions. Laila is a keen advocate of women rights, diversity, and personal empowerment.
Throughout her life and work experience, Laila always had the urge to raise global awareness about the benefits of diversity at the workplace, in one’s daily life and even within oneself. With time and experience teaching Diversity, Equality and Inclusion, the topic became one of Laila’s main teaching and personal goals. Laila is proud to have worked on multiple projects that have served this goal before. Key2Skills is a new chapter for her, which she hopes will give her the direct opportunity to not only train more women to be professionals, but to also train more professionals in general to include and accept others, as well as to understand the benefit of their differences.
When not working, Laila is a fitness buff who enjoys the summer. Give her a cold drink on a hot summer day and surround her with family, and you will have one happy mama!
Awards
Accomplishments
I proudly analyzed, designed, and evaluated the Sexual Violence Prevention Online Training, that was mandatory for all Concordia Faculty, Staff, and Students.
This course went on to be successfully implemented into Concordia University’s retraining program and became a mandatory training requirement as per Bill 151, the training has been completed by more than 40,000 individuals — students, faculty and staff in 2019.
To know more about this course, check IT TAKES ALL OF US
This Fall we implement in the eConcordia platform a quiz to spread awareness about online learning and academic integrity to students. It aims to limit the cheating specially for students who are registered in an online course.
We received great feedback recently that proves the impact and efficiency of the quiz on students’ behaviours.
“Thank you to Laila for taking this project with me and make it happen , Mylene who reviewed the content, Daniel and Ruhan who programmed it in eConcordia platform, Laura, Vanessa O., Kristina and Fatima who help implement, deployed and follow with students and profs….Thank you all for your support !
I’m very proud !
Thank you very much! ” Anik De St-Hilaire
Laila and her team (Boost) presented to the ISPI community members who acted as judges. Judges scored teams on their analysis, methodology, timeline, costs, metrics, prototype and their presentation. Team Boost was the overall point winner of the case study competition.
The ISPI Case Study Competition gives university students the opportunity to apply the theories and models they have learned during their graduate studies in Educational Technology to solve an authentic performance problem in an organization. The competition takes place over 10 weeks and culminates with presentations at the annual ISPI conference, which was held in Montreal from April 28 to May 2, 2017.
Lear more about Laila’s project in the ISPI conference.
How a Facebook post shaped my career vision
The moment Team Boost Won the competition
From the onset of working on this project, our group realized the lack of awareness and knowledge regarding non-binary language. From a societal context, gender norms affect everyone even before we are born. The pressures imposed by society for males and females is difficult enough, let alone if you are a person who does not identify as either being male or female.
It was important for our group to create this media project, as a means to reach out to adolescents’ school environment. Adolescence is a trying period when one tries to fit in. Our project aims to bring awareness to high school teachers regarding gender neutrality. We believe teachers have the ability to advocate and enable a more gender identity as well as gender expression inclusive environment. Providing them with the tools necessary to be more gender neutral can potentially be a benefit for all adolescents, especially those who identify themselves as being part of the LGBTQ group.
This project was part of my MA study at Concordia University. It was a very challenging experience from learning about the LGBTQ groups to designing a creative workshop to support them at a younger age. The harder those challenges were the more we learned . Finally we created a full campaign with an amazing product to spread awareness and support those who are in need.
This project aims to reduce bullying at schools and spread a safe healthy environment.
The goal of the project is to create a digital course that caters to school teachers. More specifically, this online game is designed to test and develop High school teachers’ benevolent and safety minded attitude towards children. This project was designed to encourage teachers to recognize their students consequently, reducing the stress and violence at schools.
In April 2016, the project has won the second prize in the second edition of ” SHARE: The Great Educational Technology Challenge ” contest supported by many organizations such as Commission Scolaire de Montréal, The Birks Family Foundation, and The Educational technology department of Concordia University.
Receiving a the second price for the second edition of ” SHARE: The Great Educational Technology Challenge ” contest by: Dr. Claude Martel