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
AI and learning design
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