AI has made it remarkably easy to start an instructional design project in the wrong place. If you open almost any AI tool, you can immediately generate learning objectives, outlines, scenarios, quiz questions, scripts, graphics, summaries, feedback, and even complete courses. If you give the tool a topic and a target audience, within seconds it will give you have something that looks surprisingly close to instructional content. While that speed is useful. It can easily distract us from a much more important question. Before asking “What can AI do here?”, instructional designers should be asking: “What do people need to learn or be able to do, and what thinking do they need to practice to get there?” That one simple question is important because it changes how you use AI. Instead of looking for tasks you can automate, you start deciding which parts of the work AI can reasonably support and which parts people need to do themselves. Sometimes AI should generate the first … [Read more...] about Stop Asking “What Can AI Do?” Start With the Learning Goal
What Student Complaints About Online Courses Are Actually Telling You
The Data You Already Have Everyone knows that universities collect end-of-course surveys. Students fill them out at the end of every term, rating their experience, commenting on the course, and sharing what worked and what didn’t. Institutions gather this data consistently, analyze it regularly, and use it primarily to evaluate instructor performance. As an instructional designer and learning strategist, I see that as a missed opportunity. Student feedback contains some of the most honest and specific information available about the quality of your online programs. The problem is that most institutions are reading it through the wrong lens. When a student says the course was disorganized, the instinct is to look at the instructor. When students say they didn’t know what was expected, the conversation turns to communication skills. When complaints pile up about responsiveness, the focus lands on faculty workload or availability. In many cases, those aren’t instructor … [Read more...] about What Student Complaints About Online Courses Are Actually Telling You
Why Your Faculty Are Not Instructional Designers (And Why That Distinction Matters)
The Assumption That Costs Universities More Than They Realize When a university decides to build or convert an online program, the most common approach is to hand the work to faculty. After all, they know the subject well and have taught it for years, sometimes even decades. They have the credentials, the research background, and the classroom experience. On paper, they seem like the obvious choice. However, the problem is that knowing a subject deeply and knowing how to design learning around it are two completely different skills. And most institutions don’t make that distinction until something has already gone wrong. How Faculty Teach vs. How People Learn Faculty tend to teach the way they were taught, through lectures, readings, and assessments that test how well students absorbed the material. In a traditional classroom, an experienced professor can compensate for structural gaps in real time. They read the room, slow down when students look confused, spark a … [Read more...] about Why Your Faculty Are Not Instructional Designers (And Why That Distinction Matters)
Moving a Program Online Is Not the Same as Designing One
What Gets Lost in the Conversion When a university decides to take a face-to-face program online, the focus almost always lands on logistics. Which platform to use, how to record lectures, where to host the videos, how to replicate the existing course structure in a new environment. What rarely gets the same attention is the learning experience itself. Face-to-face programs work because of what happens in the room. A professor feels the vibe in class and adjusts in real time, students ask questions mid-lecture, discussions go somewhere unexpected and yet end up being the most valuable part of the session. None of that transfers automatically to an online environment. The hidden cost of most online conversions is taking the existing structure and uploading it as an online course. The content makes it across. The learning experience doesn’t. The Discussion Board Problem Asynchronous programs have become the default format for many online graduate and professional programs, … [Read more...] about Moving a Program Online Is Not the Same as Designing One
AI Can Build Your Course, But It Can’t Design Learning
Creating a Course Has Never Been This Fast In the era of AI, we all know that what used to take weeks now takes hours, as we are just a few clicks away from a script, interaction, or assessment. Inside iSpring Suite Max, that entire early production process can happen in a single afternoon. That’s a real shift. You no longer need advanced technical skills or a full development sprint just to get a professional-looking course off the ground. If you know your subject, you can start building the same day. Most of the friction that used to kill momentum early on, the blank slide deck, the hours spent writing learning objectives, the back-and-forth over quiz formats, is now gone because AI can easily handle the drafts for you. But as more of these courses appear, a pattern is getting harder to ignore. While they look logical, professional, and well-organized, when learners actually go through the experience, something feels missing. The Problem Isn’t the Tool. It’s How Designers … [Read more...] about AI Can Build Your Course, But It Can’t Design Learning
The Mistake Most Redesign Projects Make
When a course feels broken, we want to fix everything including rewriting the content, rebuilding the activities, redesigning the slides, and re-recording the videos. In my experience, however, recreating everything is almost always more expensive and less effective than a targeted approach. Here's why. In most underperforming courses, a small number of issues are responsible for the majority of problems learners experience. Weak learning objectives create misalignment that ripples outward. An unclear module structure makes otherwise manageable content feel overwhelming and missing navigational guidance leaves learners moving through material without really understanding what they're supposed to take from it. When you fix those specific things, the course transforms. If, however, you leave them unaddressed while rewriting everything else, you'll invest significant time and resources in a course that still doesn't work. The right question isn't how do we redesign this entire … [Read more...] about The Mistake Most Redesign Projects Make