Are we forgetting about design?
As far as I'm concerned, disruption and transformation within the education industry cannot come soon enough. I want to be a part of the shift from telling the learners what and how to learn, to learner empowerment and choice.
As the world of AI continues to take hold, all of these changes are even closer than ever.
Yes to all this change!
Yes to turning the way we create learning upside down!
But let's not forget about those first few steps in Instructional Design.
Just like we can't build a house to code without proper architecture and blueprints — we simply can't build learning experiences if we skip design.
Image Description: A woman with medium skin sitting at a desk using a laptop with her right hand and taking notes with her left. She is smiling as she looks at the laptop screen.
It's no secret that a huge pain point in our industry is time: we never have enough. Everyday I see new efforts from authorware applications and learning management systems to simply input existing source content into a beautiful course. And they are right - it does look beautiful because these programs were created to easily present content in a way that is visually pleasing.
But what about the quality and accessibility of the content we are offering?
Are we forgetting about the very important step that is design?
At KnowledgeNow, we have had the opportunity to collaborate with incredible clients. A question we are often asked as we go through the steps of the project is whether or not the outcomes and the alignment with topics are necessary, and if we can skip to the content development. As we know, this can result in hundreds of pages of un-focused (and very often inaccessible) content that didn’t actually need to be there - a nightmare for our learners, and honestly, a waste of money.
“Can we just ask Chat GPT to take this content and write it for us to create a course as a first step?” No.
“Can we use Chat GPT as a tool to reword and improve already-written and aligned content?” Absolutely
Image Description: A woman with dark skin sitting at a desk with a laptop and a notebook. She is smiling widely and has her hands clasped together at about chin height as she looks at the laptop screen.
I'm not saying to back away from this type of technology - quite the opposite! I'm suggesting we cast a wider scope before our industry finds itself back to where we were in 2021. With an incredible amount of content that just isn't effective for our learners, with no real plan for its management and maintenance - and a huge loss of money.
Let's go back to the roots of really good course design and ask ourselves how we can empower more people to follow best practices using AI and automation. How can we streamline the process without skipping any important steps? Because as we answer these questions, we will start opening up our industry to big, impactful change.
Let's build the technology we need to support the impending changes in education—where learning paths are truly in the hands of the learners.
And ask me about KnowledgeNow’s Learning Design System ;)
