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 course? It’s what are the few changes that will create the most meaningful improvement?
What the 80/20 approach looks like in practice
Over many redesign projects, I’ve identified a consistent set of high-leverage interventions that are relatively contained in scope but disproportionate in their impact on the learner experience.
1. Clarify priorities without removing content
Many courses feel overwhelming not because they contain too much material, but because learners receive no guidance about what to focus on. When every reading, every lecture segment, every concept is presented with equal weight, the implicit message is that all of this matters equally. For someone already managing a heavy course load, that’s paralyzing.
However, the fix is often simpler than it sounds. Consider what changes when you add a little explicit guidance to a module that currently offers none:
Before
Three readings of 20–30 pages each, a recorded lecture, and a discussion post presented without any orientation.
After
The same content, with added guidance:
“Start with Reading 1. It’s directly tied to your assignment.” “Reading 2 is recommended if you want a deeper understanding of the theory.” “In the lecture, pay particular attention to the second and third concepts.”
As you notice, nothing has been removed or rewritten. However, the learner’s experience of the module is fundamentally different. They feel guided rather than overwhelmed, and they can allocate their attention strategically instead of trying to absorb everything at once.
2. Restructure before you rewrite
When a course feels confusing, the instinct is to assume the content is the problem. In my experience, however, the culprit is usually the sequence.
A module that opens with dense theory, moves to a case study, returns to more theory, then closes with a quiz asking learners to build understanding from abstract principles before they have any concrete frame of reference for them. Simply reordering the same material (concept introduction, illustrative example, application activity, reinforcing assessment) can make a significant difference in how learnable the module feels. The ideas are identical, but the path through them is just clearer.
3. Replace several weak activities with one strong one
One of the most common structural problems I see is this: a single module includes four or five small, disconnected tasks, such as a discussion post, a short reflection, a knowledge check, and a worksheet. From the learner’s perspective, each one feels like just another item to complete. On their own, none require deep engagement. Together, they create unnecessary cognitive load without leading to meaningful learning.
A single well-designed activity can do more than all of them combined. A scenario-based problem that places learners in a realistic situation, asks them to make a decision, provides substantive feedback, and prompts reflection on their reasoning generates exactly the kind of active processing that produces durable learning in less time than completing four disconnected tasks.
4. Rewrite the learning objectives
Vague, unmeasurable objectives like “understand leadership principles” or “learn about communication strategies” are a small problem with large consequences. Learners don’t know what they’re working toward. Assessments don’t align clearly to expectation and design decisions become harder to make because the target keeps shifting.
Replacing “understand leadership principles” with “apply leadership strategies to diagnose and respond to team performance challenges” clarifies expectations, creates a measurable target for assessment, and gives the entire module a specific purpose.
5. Add signals that reduce cognitive load
Sometimes the highest-leverage intervention is also the smallest. A single sentence, “this is the concept you’ll apply in your final project” or “if you take one idea from this module, it’s this one”, can reorient how a learner engages with everything that follows. These navigational signals don’t change the content, but they change the learner’s relationship to it.
What this looks like on an actual project
I want to illustrate this with a project that reflects a pattern I’ve seen more than once. The initial feedback from stakeholders was that the course needed a full rebuild. They thought there was too much content, unclear flow, and weak learning objectives. Any one of those issues in isolation could have been addressed through targeted revision. Together, however, they made the course feel fundamentally broken.
Rather than recommending a ground-up redesign, we focused on four specific interventions: adding explicit priority guidance within each module, restructuring the content flow, strengthening two or three key activities, and rewriting a handful of learning objectives. We didn’t remove major content areas, redesign the visual presentation, or rebuild the assessment structure.
As a result, the course felt significantly different. It was more navigable, more focused, more purposeful, at a fraction of the time and cost a full redesign would have required. The content that had always been there was finally working because the structure surrounding it was doing its job.
Where to start
If you’re approaching a course that feels like it needs more help than you have time to give it, I’d suggest starting with four diagnostic questions:
- Where are learners most likely to feel lost or disoriented?
- What is the one thing a learner must understand in each module and is that made explicit?
- Which activity is actually driving meaningful learning, and which ones are just adding to the load?
- What content can stay exactly as it is, but be repositioned or reframed to serve the learner better?
The answers will almost always point you toward a small set of high-leverage changes. When you fix those, you may find the course doesn’t need nearly as much work as it first appeared to.
A final thought
The most important reframe I can offer on course redesign is this: a course that needs improvement isn’t necessarily a course that needs to be rebuilt. More often, it’s a course with strong content and genuine expertise behind it that has never been given the structure it needs to deliver on its potential.
The 80/20 approach is, at its core, a discipline of prioritization. It asks you to resist the instinct to fix everything and develop the judgment to identify what actually matters. Knowing which changes will move the needle, and which ones won’t, is one of the things that distinguishes experienced instructional designers from those earlier in their practice.
The goal is not to do more work but to do the right work.
If you’re looking at a course that feels like it needs a full rebuild, it may not be the case. The challenge is knowing which changes will actually move the needle, and which ones won’t. I help organizations make those decisions with clarity, so they can improve outcomes without unnecessary redesign. Request a course audit here.
Leave a Reply