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
The ELearning Course Designer’s Blog
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
How AI Tools Are Reshaping the Work of Instructional Design
About a year ago, I was supporting a large faculty-led course redesign at the university where I was hired as a contract-based instructional designer. It was a general education course that enrolled several hundred students each semester and hadn't been significantly updated in years. The faculty member I was partnering with was extremely knowledgeable and genuinely invested in improving the student experience, but our collaboration time was limited to a few hours a week between her teaching load and committee obligations. Meanwhile, I was responsible for rebuilding the course from the ground up: rewriting learning objectives, creating effective activities, developing assessments, and preparing materials for review. All of that needed to be done on an academic calendar that doesn't pause for anyone. I was spending the majority of my time on production tasks. The higher-order work such as the learning architecture, the alignment between course outcomes and program goals, the … [Read more...] about How AI Tools Are Reshaping the Work of Instructional Design
Why Most Online Courses Fail (And How to Fix Them Without Rebuilding Everything)
Most online courses don’t fail in obvious ways. There are no floods of complaints, no dramatic drops in enrollment, no formal investigations that force action. Instead, they fail quietly. Students disengage slowly. Faculty sense frustration but struggle to understand the cause. Completion rates dip just enough to weaken learning, but not enough to trigger alarms. From the outside, everything looks fine, but on the inside, something clearly isn’t working. In my experience, this kind of quiet failure is far more common, and far more damaging, than outright breakdowns. The encouraging part is that most of these courses don’t need a full redesign. What they need are targeted fixes that address the real points of friction learners experience every week. Quiet Failure Rarely Comes from One Big Mistake When courses fail quietly, it is almost never because of a single design flaw. More often, it is the accumulation of small issues that compound over time. Students feel slightly … [Read more...] about Why Most Online Courses Fail (And How to Fix Them Without Rebuilding Everything)
Designing Learning Materials That Still Work When Learners Are Distracted, Tired, and Overloaded
Most learning materials are still designed for an imaginary learner: focused, well-rested, and able to give sustained attention. Unfortunately, in practice, that learner rarely exists anymore. Today’s learners are juggling work, family, constant notifications, and cognitive fatigue. They log into courses between meetings, late at night, or while multitasking. Even highly motivated students struggle to engage deeply. In many cases, that’s not because they lack interest, but because their mental bandwidth is already depleted. This reality presents a design problem that cannot be solved by adding more tools, more interactivity, or more content. In fact, those responses often make the problem worse. The courses that hold up best under these conditions are not the most elaborate ones, but the most intentional. Over the past several years, working on course redesigns and new online programs with limited time and budget, I’ve seen the … [Read more...] about Designing Learning Materials That Still Work When Learners Are Distracted, Tired, and Overloaded