Why Voice Matters in eLearning Courses

Great to see this ! A big thank you to N R Z Malik for sharing his experience with Mexty. What really stands out is the shift happening in eLearning: 👉 from building content manually 👉 to creating interactive, SCORM-ready experiences in minutes Less time building. This is exactly how learning is evolving 🚀 Hanene Maupas Alexandre Maupas Marva Okili Dominika Kalisz Nathalie R. #EdTech #Elearning #InstructionalDesign #AI #Mexty #SCORM

How To Motivate Learners Before, During and After an eLearning Course. Learning is a process, an experience, and continuous. It is NOT a one-time event. It helps to motivate attendees to a learning experience before, during and after that experience. This article helps you see how that can be done.

The Serious eLearning Manifesto quietly changed how I think about L&D... One of the most valuable shifts in my professional thinking came from the Serious eLearning Manifesto: - Do not assume learning is the solution. - Do not assume eLearning is the answer. Early in my career, that felt counterintuitive. As an eLearning designer, my default assumption was: if there is a business problem, we create training. Over time, I learned that many organizational problems are not capability problems. They are friction problems. Access problems. Workflow problems. Environment problems. And training can become a very expensive substitute for solving the actual issue. This came up again today in a discussion with colleagues from our AI Hub. We were exploring whether deploying a native GenAI application across 1000+ employee laptops could increase weekly usage compared to browser-only access. From a performance perspective, this is interesting because it changes the environment rather than relying primarily on instruction. Lower friction. Higher visibility. Faster access inside the flow of work. It is also relatively low-cost compared to designing and deploying large-scale training interventions. Of course, adoption data will tell us whether the assumption is correct. But I increasingly think this is where modern L&D creates value: not only through content creation, but through designing conditions that make desired behaviors easier and more likely. Have you seen environmental changes outperform formal training in your organization?

When we talk about “adaptive learning,” what do we actually mean? I think there’s an important distinction emerging in the AI era: -- Adaptive systems optimize within existing parameters -- Humans redefine the parameters themselves Most enterprise learning systems today say they are adaptive. And many truly personalize, recommend, automate, and adjust. But adaptability is something different entirely. It requires judgment, interpretation, transfer, and the ability to respond to conditions the system was never explicitly designed for. That distinction matters more than we may think. The organizations that win won’t just use AI to automate learning. They’ll combine machine adaptation with human adaptability. Why am I bringing this up? Because on Monday at Association for Talent Development (ATD)'s conference in Los Angeles, I’ll have the privilege of hosting a conversation with Michael Allen and Christopher Allen on Dr. Allen’s new book, “Rethinking eLearning.” We’ll be showing live demos of eLearning experiences that genuinely work — and discussing why so much modern eLearning still misses the mark... And at the very end of the session… we’re going to show you “one more thing.” Something that points toward a very different future for learning design and adaptable learning experiences. If you’re attending ATD, this is one session you may not want to miss. Book it! I guarantee you, it will change your way of thinking about what's possible. “Awesome eLearning Live: What Actually Works (and Why Most Doesn’t)” Monday, May 18 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM Room 515A | Level Two https://lnkd.in/gAU2CjK4

Is today’s e-learning everything it could be? Most of us who design, build, or support digital learning know the answer is: not always. E-learning has incredible potential, but too often it becomes content delivery rather than meaningful learning, practice, performance support, or behavior change. That’s why we’re excited to welcome Dr. Michael Allen to LDA for a Meet the Author session on his recent book, Rethinking eLearning. Drawing on more than 55 years of experience in teaching, developing, and shaping interactive learning and performance support systems, Michael will join us for a conversation about what works, what doesn’t, and what may be missing in the way we design e-learning today. Join us on July 9 at 2:00 PM ET for a thoughtful conversation about how we can move closer to e-learning that truly supports learning and performance. It’s free to attend! You can find more details and RSVP here: https://lnkd.in/gnJNBVrd

I built a complete eLearning course in English, Spanish, and Catalan — research, instructional design, level 3 interactions, copy — without opening Articulate or Storyline. Just Claude. The build is the easy part to talk about. The harder part is what it tells me about where L&D is heading. Sloppy thinking still produces sloppy courses, and AI doesn't change that. What it does change is who can build at scale: the people with strong instructional design judgment, not the people who happen to know the tools. The course argues that most AI training programs fail because they treat AI as a tool to be learned rather than a workflow to be redesigned. The framework underneath it is COM-B — capability, opportunity, motivation, behavior. I checked every source carefully and references are at the end. And before anyone asks: I can see the gaps as clearly as anyone else. The visual design isn't where it would be if I'd been working with Adil Sharif Momin, Harvey Everette, or Mat King — excellent visual designers I've collaborated with whose influence is notably absent here. There are also two interactive evaluators in the middle that, if I'm being honest, were fun to design, but don't earn their place from an LX perspective and probably distract from the triage tool at the end, which is actually the most useful thing in there (thanks to Zsolt Barath for his insight there!). Working alone with AI got me 80% of the way in just a few hours. The last 20% was ironing out kinks and making edits, and it still could use more humans in the loop with their own expertise and perspectives. Learning design is changing at light speed, and I'm interested in both the design conversations on the continued relevance of our current tools, and the big picture of how to think about what we need to learn, and what's stopping us. What are you seeing?

Don’t Just Click—Think: The Power of Guiding Questions in eLearning Most eLearning modules are full of clicks. Very few make learners stop and think. Click-and-reveal is often mistaken for interactivity, but it isn’t. It’s navigation. True interactivity begins when the learner pauses and thinks. That’s where guiding questions come in. Well-placed questions do more than check knowledge: they shape thinking. They pull learners into the flow, make them alert, and help them build a mental map of what’s coming. Instead of passively consuming content, learners begin to probe, reflect, and connect. Think about how we operate in real life. Before acting, we ask ourselves: * What am I trying to achieve? * What could go wrong? * Is there a better way? That internal questioning is learning in motion. Why should eLearning be any different? Here is what that looks like in practice. Examples of Guiding Questions * Explorative: What do you think is happening in this situation? What factors might influence this outcome? * Discovery: Can you spot the pattern here? What insight emerges if you compare these two cases? * Reflective: Have you faced a similar situation before? What did you do? What would you do differently now? * Decision-making: Given these options, what would you choose, and why? What are the consequences of each choice? When a learner responds to a guiding question, they expose their thinking—and that exposure is an opportunity. Feedback tied to a question doesn’t just correct; it explains and reframes. A well-designed question isn’t merely an input prompt; it is the beginning of a conversation between the learner and the content. Guiding questions activate curiosity, the first essential spark that makes a learner lean in rather than tune out. From there, they encourage deeper processing, pushing the mind beyond surface recall into genuine engagement with ideas. This naturally supports problem-solving, because a learner who is thinking is also weighing, questioning, and deciding. The result is a learning experience that feels less like a download and more like a dialogue. Great thinkers didn’t just deliver answers; they asked better questions. From Socrates to scientists to explorers, progress has always followed inquiry. If we want learning that truly engages, we must rethink what we ask of the learner. Moving from clicking to thinking, and from delivering content to provoking genuine cognitive engagement, is not a design tweak; it is a fundamental change in intent. One treats the learner as a navigator. The other treats them as a thinker. Learning doesn’t stick when information is revealed. It sticks when the mind is engaged, when it is not a passive receiver but an active participant.  

Last week, I spent one afternoon building a complete eLearning journey for one of my clients. No Articulate. No Rise. No $1,500+ license. Here's what happened: I was working with a client whose target audience is startup founders. They needed more practical eLearning journeys about financials. So, I designed a 5-module interactive learning journey without an authoring tool (just using Claude). The part that would've taken me days in a traditional tool? A live pricing calculator where founders input their own costs and instantly see their minimum viable price. Interactive. Responsive. Downloadable. Done in under three hours! Honestly, it didn't drain my tokens the way I expected. When you give AI real context (who the learners are, what they've been through, what they need to do after, and more of a concrete storyboard), it stops generating generic content and starts thinking with you. Although creating learning modules using Claude has its challenges regarding accessibility, packaging, learner tracking, and analytics, I've seen very good potential in creating more complex learning experiences, which I will keep exploring. In my opinion, we're not at the end of authoring tools. But we're at the end of instructional designers who are just tool operators. Companies must also let go of their rigidity in using only one famous, expensive authoring tool, and be open to engaging learning designers as problem solvers, not just tool operators! This conversation started a while ago in the eLearning designers community. What do you think about that? And have you tried Claude in e-learning yet? Check the financial calculator in the comments.

Nobody finishes a 45-minute e-learning course anymore. Let's be honest. We skim. We skip. We tab out. That's not a learner problem, it's a design problem. Enter microlearning: bite-sized lessons that respect your learners' time. Think 3–5 minutes. One concept. Clear action. Here's what it looks like in practice: Instead of a 1-hour compliance module... → A 4-minute scenario on handling a customer complaint. Instead of a 30-slide onboarding deck... → Five short videos, one per key responsibility. Something your learners will actually finish. Why does microlearning work so well? ✓Our brains love small wins. ✓Short bursts reduce cognitive load significantly. ✓Spaced repetition makes knowledge stick longer. ✓It also fits real work schedules. Nobody has a whole uninterrupted hour anymore. But five minutes? That's a coffee break. As an Instructional Designer, this is my approach: ~Strip every lesson to its core need. Ask: what must the learner DO after this? ~Design backwards from that single outcome. Less content. More impact. Better results. If your training isn't getting finished, it needs redesigning, not more content. Microlearning might be exactly what your team needs. Now let me know; What's your experience with microlearning?