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
2026 Blogs
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
The Minimum Viable Course: A Practical Framework for Sustainable Online Course Design in Higher Education
For more than a decade, online course development in higher education has been shaped by a front-loaded design model. That means that courses are expected to be fully built before launch, often with polished multimedia, comprehensive assessments, and detailed LMS structures finalized in advance. While this model emerged from a desire to protect academic quality, it has become increasingly difficult to sustain. Instructional design teams are supporting more courses with fewer resources. Faculty are balancing teaching with research, service, and administrative responsibilities. Program timelines are accelerating, while expectations for flexibility and responsiveness continue to rise. In this environment, the assumption that a course must be “finished” before it can be taught is no longer realistic. In response, many institutions are quietly adopting a more pragmatic approach, one that preserves instructional integrity while allowing for phased development. This approach can be … [Read more...] about The Minimum Viable Course: A Practical Framework for Sustainable Online Course Design in Higher Education