Instructional Design Mistakes to Avoid in E-Learning Courses

Mark Sheppard Five pages of corrections. Five. Pages. I beta tested an eLearning course and came back with enough notes to write a short novella. Packed slides. Clip art that had no business being there. Animations that couldn't commit to a consistent style. Zero white space. Layouts that shifted every other screen for no apparent reason. The content was solid. The design was working against every learner who would have had to sit through it. Management scrapped it and started over. Honestly, the right call. If you've been in this field for more than a minute, you're nodding right now. We've all got one — the course that got killed, the training that went live when it shouldn't have, or the redesign that finally clicked because someone slowed down and thought about the learner first. And if you're newer to ID — this is exactly the kind of thing I want to help you avoid. I'm writing a book called The Five Pillars of Good Instructional Design, built around real stories from practitioners in the field. Not textbook theory. The actual experiences that shaped how we design — the mistakes that taught us something and the wins worth repeating. I'd love to hear yours. What's a training experience that missed the mark — or one that got it exactly right? Drop it in the comments or reach out directly at jmiller@tridentelearningcenter.com. If your example makes it into the book, I'll credit you or keep you anonymous — whatever you prefer.

Five pages of corrections. That's what came back from a beta test on an eLearning course I was reviewing. Packed slides. Random images. Inconsistent animations. No white space. Layouts that shifted constantly. The content was accurate. The design was working against the learner. Management scrapped the entire course and rebuilt it from scratch. I've carried that story ever since — not because it was unusual, but because almost every instructional designer has a version of it. I'm writing a book built around a framework I call the Five Pillars of Good Instructional Design, and I want to fill it with exactly those kinds of real-world moments. The course that missed the mark. The redesign that finally got it right. The training that drove measurable results — and the one that buried learners in information they couldn't use. I'm looking for both. The good and the bad. Specifically, examples like: • Training focused on content instead of job performance — or training that drove real results • Misaligned objectives, activities, and assessments — or ones that worked in perfect sync • Design that made learning harder than it needed to be — or design that got out of the way entirely If you have a story, I'd love to hear it. Respond here or reach out directly at jmiller@tridentelearningcenter.com. If your example makes it into the book, I'll credit you — or keep you anonymous, your call.

Ever feel like course design starts as a messy pile of ideas? That’s where most of us begin. The ADDIE model helps turn that chaos into something clear, structured, and actually manageable. In this post, I break it down in a way that’s practical, simple, and easy to apply—whether you’re new to instructional design or just need a refresher. 👉 Read more at www.silvercalico.com #InstructionalDesign #ADDIEModel #OnlineLearning #CourseDesign #HigherEd

Most instructional design work doesn’t start with a problem. It starts with a request. “Can you build a training on this?” “We need an eLearning module.” “Can you put something together for the team?” And in most cases…people just start building. That’s exactly what we tackled in Week 2 of our 8-week Instructional Design Certificate Program. Instead of jumping straight into development, participants focused on what actually happens before any training should be created…needs analysis. We anchored the entire week around three simple questions: 1️⃣ What are people currently doing? 2️⃣ What do we want them to be doing? 3️⃣ Why aren’t they doing it? That third question changes everything. Because once you start digging into it, you quickly realize that many “training requests” aren’t training problems at all. Sometimes it’s a knowledge gap. Sometimes it’s a skill issue. Sometimes it’s motivation. And sometimes the process itself is broken. Each of those requires a very different solution. From there, participants worked through how to make a recommendation and, just as importantly, how to communicate that recommendation in a way stakeholders will actually understand and accept. All of this was done inside a real-world case study that runs across the full eight weeks of the program. So instead of learning needs analysis in isolation, participants are applying it in a messy, realistic scenario with incomplete information and competing priorities. That’s the difference. Not just learning what instructional design is…but practicing how it actually works. Our Instructional Design Certificate Program is an 8-week, live, virtual, hands-on experience designed to help you build real-world capability and move beyond taking training requests at face value. Enrollment is now open for our Summer and Fall sessions, and seats are filling up quickly. 🔗 Learn more and view upcoming dates here: https://bit.ly/4cugk7X #eLearning #InstructionalDesign #LearningAndDevelopment

If you’ve ever felt stuck at the beginning of a course design project, you’re not alone. One of the biggest challenges in instructional design isn’t knowing what to do—it’s knowing where to start. That’s exactly why I created the Instructional Design Starter Kit. Inside, you’ll find: Planning worksheets (ADDIE, objectives, course outline) Checklists to keep you on track Quick-win guides for fast progress Ready-to-use templates for modules, discussions, and announcements It’s designed to help you move from overwhelmed to in motion. 📖 Read the full blog post + explore the kit: 👉 https://lnkd.in/dy-QVpsa #InstructionalDesign #CourseDesign #LearningExperienceDesign #EdTech #AdultLearning #SilverCalico

My idea about an Instructional Designer was someone who just builds e-learning courses. Turns out, there’s a lot more to it. The deeper I go, the more I’m realising that what I thought was one role is actually three distinct processes, each one responsible for a different stage of bringing a course to life. The first which is: 📍 Instructional Design: The blueprint Where you figure out what needs to be taught and why. You specify the learning needs, objectives, content structure. 📍 Learning Experience Design: this is where the blueprint becomes a journey. At this point is where you project your solutions into scenes. The emotion, engagement, and motivation come in. It’s what makes learning feel human. 📍eLearning Development: The build. This is where everything comes to life. The, Interactions, visuals, texts,SCORM-ready modules. What everyone sees is one course, but behind the scenes, different process goes on. Ever since I started seeing them this way, my work process has become so much easier and clearer. I know what I’m doing, why I’m doing it, and what comes next. That kind of clarity changes everything. Now I want to hear from you. Which of these three processes do you enjoy the most? Drop it in the comments. Welcome to a new week. #instructionaldesigner #eLearningdeveloper

♨️ Hot take: Most eLearning isn’t designed… It’s decorated. Click next courses. Overloaded slides. “Engagement” that’s really just interaction without intention. That’s not instructional design; that’s content dumping with better visuals. Real instructional design is about decisions: ✔️ What does the learner need to do? ✔️ What mistakes will they make? ✔️ How do we design for that moment? Because if learning doesn’t change behavior… it didn’t work. ✨ Question: What’s one thing you think instructional designers need to stop doing, and start doing instead?

Content that makes perfect sense to an expert often makes no sense to a learner. Experts think in complete systems. Learners need to build understanding step by step. Without a high-level design to plan your sequence, you end up presenting information in whatever order it was given to you—which is rarely the order people need to learn it. Then you wonder why learners are confused. This is the bridge between your analysis (what learners need) and your development (what you're building). Skip it, and you're building a house by nailing up whatever materials happen to be lying around. Find out why high-level design is critical: 

I have sat on both sides of bad e-learning design. As a learner, clicking through slides that looked polished, ticking completion boxes, and walking away with nothing I could actually use. Now as someone building courses, I understand exactly how that happens. And it comes down to one thing most designers skip entirely. ✔️Creative empathy. Creative empathy in instructional design is the deliberate act of stepping fully into your learner’s reality before you design a single screen. Not just who they are demographically, but what they are carrying when they sit down to learn. Are they distracted, skeptical, or they have short attention span? Have they failed at this before? Most courses are built from the designer’s perspective, which is what the designer knows or think is important. Here is what building with creative empathy actually looks like in practice: 📍Start with the learner’s frustration, not the content. 📍 Design the emotion, not just the information. 📍 Read your course as a skeptic. 📍Remove everything that serves you, not them. I took too many courses that were clearly built without this. Visually clean, structurally sound, and completely forgettable. Now that I am on the building side, one question sits at the centre of everything I design; will this person perform differently because of what I built? That is the only brief worth designing to. If you are an instructional designer or L&D professional, how do you practice creative empathy in your process? Drop it below, let’s all learn. #Instructionaldesign #eLearning #creativeempathy

I was in a conversation last week with a group of high-performing professionals. Different fields. Different backgrounds. But one idea from the facilitator idea stuck with me: Be. Do. Have. Most people approach change in reverse. They ask: “What do I need to do to get the result I want?” It’s a fair question. But it often leads to scattered effort. Because the better question is: Who do I need to become to create that result? I see this a lot with people trying to transition into instructional design. They focus on: • What courses to take • What tools to learn • What projects to build All important. But without clarity on how an instructional designer actually thinks… Those actions don’t always translate into results. Because doing without becoming leads to inconsistency. Be - Do - Have. Not the other way around.