The Problem Isn't Finding AI Tools Anymore There's no shortage of AI tools promising to make instructional design faster. Some generate entire courses. Others build videos, presentations, diagrams, assessments, or transcripts. Established authoring platforms keep bolting on AI features of their own, and new products seem to show up weekly. For instructional designers, the hard part isn't finding AI tools anymore. It's figuring out which ones are actually worth your time. Over 12 weeks, I worked through AI from a different angle each week, looking at tools through the lens of instructional design rather than just testing how impressive their outputs looked. My list included Mindsmith, Claude, Manus, Miro AI, Napkin AI, Otter.ai, Vyond, Articulate Rise 360, iSpring, HeyGen, and Glean, plus the general-purpose AI tools that have quietly become part of my regular workflow. I kept coming back to one practical question: would I actually use this as an instructional designer? That … [Read more...] about I Tested 12 AI Tools for Instructional Design. Here Are the Ones I’d Actually Use
Instructional Design and ELearning
AI Can Save Your Learners Time. It Can Also Quietly Take Their Learning With It.
The Argument Nobody Questions Ask anyone why they want AI in their training and you'll hear some version of the same answer: it saves time. And it's true. AI can summarize a 20-page report in seconds, turn messy notes into a clean response, generate examples, compare options, build quiz questions, and explain a hard concept in plain language. For instructional designers, trainers, and learners, that's real value. Here's the catch. Sometimes the work AI removes is the exact work that was supposed to produce the learning. If a learner is supposed to practice analyzing information and AI does the analysis instead, the task gets easier, and it may also stop teaching anything. If the goal is to build judgment and AI hands over the recommended option, the learner lands on the right answer without ever building the skill the activity was designed to develop. That's cognitive offloading, and instructional design hasn't caught up to it yet. The question isn't whether people … [Read more...] about AI Can Save Your Learners Time. It Can Also Quietly Take Their Learning With It.
Stop Asking “What Can AI Do?” Start With the Learning Goal
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
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
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