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
instructional design
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)
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
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)
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