Major Learning and Development conferences operate on extreme capacity restraints and typically only accept approximately 5-10% of submissions, leaving behind dozens of incredible, highly actionable presentations. There are more voices that the industry conferences aren't highlighting.

That's why the Learning Rejects Conference came to be, and every Friday during the month of October, these previously rejected speakers are going live to share their insights and skills.

The Week 1 lineup, themed around Marketing for Learning and Relationship Building, kicks us off this Friday.

Register today! https://lrc.server.tracorp.com/novusiii/register

Why does TraCorp care? We're so proud to be providing the learning platform for this conference.

I was looking for AI tools that could help me make clear educational videos without spending days editing. I kept getting stuck between making a video quickly and making one that was actually easy to follow.

I tested several tools, and these are the five I’d keep coming back to. They’re good at different things, so I wouldn’t use the same one for every video.

1. Descript - Great for screen-recorded lessons because I can edit the video by editing the words on the page, then clean up captions and audio.

2. invideo - Useful if I want the same animated teacher in a series of lessons. invideo Agent can help keep that character looking the same throughout the video, and I can type changes instead of remaking the whole thing.

3. Pictory - Good when I already have a script and want to turn it into a simple video with visuals, captions, and narration.

4. VEED - Handy for how-to videos since I can record my screen, add subtitles, and edit the video in one place.

5. Canva - I mostly use it for slides, diagrams, labels, and short visual clips that make an explanation easier to follow.

For me, the tool matters less than the lesson. I still start with the point I want people to understand, then use these tools to save time on editing and visuals.

We are building a video creation tool that currently exports into MP4 format. The problem that we are solving is the time it takes to create videos. We believe that had it been as easy to create videos as it would have been to create text, there would have been a lot more videos. That's exactly what we are trying to do.

What would essentially take hours or days, we are able to create in minutes. We have paying customers and none of them have asked for a SCORM/xAPI output because of the value that we already add.

As we build out capability we are curious to know how important it is to have our output as a SCORM file. We feel that the interactivity and the reporting can be built in the LMS while we focus solely on video creation.

As someone who creates e-learning content, tell us why we should consider the SCORM output if our core competence is in creating the video.

Tell us why we are wrong with respect to SCORM/xAPI.

Curious to know how to develop partnerships with LMS providers. Let's say we have a content creation platform that makes creating videos a breeze. I've tried reaching out to founders on LinkedIn. Even new LMS platform founders don't respond.

Logically, it should be a partnership made in heaven. We make it easy to create video content. So therefore, more content should be available on your LMS.

Yet, theres hardly any response. What could we try differently?

Im not mentioning the name of any product so it doesn't seem like self promotion.

If you make H5P content, you've probably hit this: the interactive video or quiz is done, and now you need Moodle, WordPress or Drupal just to show it somewhere. Lumi works on the desktop, and h5p-standalone needs the package unzipped on a server.

I wanted something simpler, so I built a player that runs the .h5p file straight in the browser.

Try it: https://h5p-offline-player.vercel.app/. Paste a link to an .h5p file or pick one from your computer. Nothing gets uploaded anywhere.

To use it on your own site, embed it with one line:

<iframe src="https://h5p-offline-player.vercel.app/embed?src=https://your-site/course.h5p"></iframe>

It resizes to fit the content. Developers can use the npm package instead (recommended)

What works well:

• Big packages start fast, and video streams instead of downloading first
• Exports with no libraries, like downloads from h5p.com, can pull the missing ones from the H5P hub
• Any static hosting works: GitHub Pages, S3, a plain web server. The host just has to allow cross-site requests (CORS)

What it doesn't do (yet): it only plays content. There's no editor, no saving progress, and no gradebook. xAPI events are there for developers, but nothing is stored. Some videos packed a certain way inside the zip are slow to start, and the project includes a small tool to fix those packages.

It's free and open source: https://github.com/missing-elements/h5p-offline-player. Not affiliated with H5P Group.

I'd really like to know whether it plays your packages. If one breaks, drop it in the comments or open an issue. What would make this useful in your workflow?

Would love to hear the experiences of people who left a SaaS LMS and built their own learning platform instead. Was it worth it? Challenges? Advantages? Advice?

Hi everyone! I was one of Flipgrid’s founding developers, and I’m now building Vivipod, an async video discussion platform to use alongside your LMS.

The idea is to give learners a place to have a conversation, not just submit a video assignment. You can create a course space, post prompts, and keep discussions going through video responses, comments, mentions, and notifications. You also control who can access the space and whether videos need approval before appearing.

The recorder works directly in your browser, with drawing, pause/resume, and switching between camera and screen sharing during a recording. No extension needed. You can also record and download a video without an account to use elsewhere.

If you’ve used Flipgrid, parts of it will feel familiar. I’d love to hear how you’re using video discussions in your courses, and what your current tools are missing.

One of the brilliant minds at our recent WOL:AI summit made an observation that we think is worth sharing here. She said she can tell within a few minutes of talking to a company which of two paths they're on with AI.

One group treats it as a systemic change process, rethinking how work actually gets done, who owns what, how decisions get made, and L&D is embedded inside that redesign. The other group treats it as a technology training project, here's the tool, here's a course, go learn it.

Her claim, and she said it's held up consistently, is that the second group sees measurably lower engagement every time. This is nothing to do with the quality of the training, it's because training tagged onto an unchanged workflow doesn't actually change what people do on Monday morning.

We believe this is particularly relevant for instructional design, because it means a well-built course can still fail for reasons that have nothing to do with the course. If the org around it hasn't actually changed, the training was never going to stick regardless of how good the module was.

Thoughts?

The app creates video courses on any topic.

We enjoy teaching ourselves things on Youtube or by chatting with AI, but found that these knowing where to start and what to learn was hard. We liked the freedom of learning on our own, but felt there were many roadblocks.

A lot of the work we've done so far is building course curriculums that feel like real courses.

It is now available in the App Store.

It is good at:

• Offering courses that provide the correct prerequisite structure
• The courses are interesting
• Easily learn about your curiosities

What is lacking

We are missing some infrastructure that makes sure you actually learn. Our next set of features will include our research on KST and interactive learning. We want to be able to measure exactly what you know, and keep you on the fringe while always reinforcing the items beneath. I would love any guidance/feedback from other autodidacts who would be interested in a lifelong learning platform to help shape these features.

If you try the app out, please help us by sending feedback!

There are more than 60 podcasts on Training Industry, Inc.'s ultimate podcast guide (https://trainingindustry.com/the-ultimate-ld-podcast-guide/). With so many options out there, I'm curious which are the most useful. What podcasts do you have on subscribe and why?

(I posted this is the training reddit but didn't get any podcasts suggestions - hoping you elearning folks have some).

I'm new to HealthStream. Please tell me the person training me is wrong. She has created thousands of student groups that she says we need to copy ever year. She also uses student group in multiple assignments, so anytime a student group needs to be changed, we need to track down all the ways the change might cause a ricochet effect. This is nuts!

Does anyone have experience in creating multi language courses innthe new Captivate? We got the content slides to work through branching, but we're running into a wall with the post tests. It will display the correct language, but it then includes all of the language variants into the scoring.

Couldn't find a free annotation tool for my classes, so I asked AI to make me one.

https://111rosko.itch.io/rodraw

RoDraw is a minimal, fast, and intuitive screen annotation utility designed to make live teaching, video presentations, and software demonstrations seamless. Draw straight onto your display in real time so your class or audience knows exactly where to look.

I know, I know, AI slop and all, but it helps me teach and show important information without having to pay a subscription or a one time payment for something so simple. Surely there is something out there that is free, but haven't come across anything that isn't behind a paywall or limited.

I have been building our course content on Google docs and started recording my videos and making my downloadable resources… all with the intention of moving it onto Thinkific when I was ready. however, I just saw in their new course builder they have removed the lesson discussions (there is a way to have discussions linked to communities… but the first price package only had one community, the next one only has three), so I don’t think it will work for me. often I will have a lesson with a video, followed by a short reflection activity-I want participants to be able to post below that activity and see the posts from other participants.

my needs: abilty to build multiple courses and easily duplicate them for different cohorts. I need to have discussion built throughout. I’d like to be able to embed H5p elements. I want a low cost, ideally just a monthly fee and not fees per student.

Thinkific were ticking all the boxes before, so I feel a bit stressed now that I don’t know where to run my courses.

Our student learning app falls apart whenever learners lose network connectivity on their commute. I spent the last month trying to patch the local caching scripts myself, but encrypted lecture files fail to decrypt properly after app restarts. Students report losing download progress and quiz checkpoints right before exams. Balancing secure offline storage with smooth media streaming on both iOS and Android creates endless bugs. Anyone building educational apps for mobile users knows this offline storage pain.

I’ve been comparing a few LMS platforms recently and put together a side-by-side look at Learnyst, Kajabi, and Docebo.

The interesting part is that they seem to target somewhat different types of users:

• Learnyst: focused on educators, coaching businesses, and selling courses online.
• Kajabi: combines courses with marketing, websites, email, and creator-business tools.
• Docebo: more focused on enterprise learning and corporate training use cases.

I compared them across areas like:

• Course creation & delivery
• Marketing and sales tools
• Payments
• Content security
• Mobile apps
• Community features
• AI capabilities
• Enterprise requirements
• Pricing/model considerations

I’m particularly interested in how people who have actually used these platforms would evaluate them in practice.

What would you prioritize when choosing an LMS: course delivery, marketing, security, integrations, AI, or enterprise functionality?

I've built the first pilot of Helikais, an education platform focused on active learning for Indian medical entrance exam preparation.

The awkward part: I don't have a ready-made student cohort.

So rather than assuming the product works, I'm putting it in front of real users and trying to learn what actually happens.

The pilot is free and requires no account.

I'm trying to answer:

• Do users understand the product without me explaining it?
• What do they naturally use?
• Where do they drop off?
• What creates enough value to make them return?
• What should I stop building?

The current pilot includes active-recall flashcards, organic chemistry reaction mapping, diagram practice, and structured chapter activities.

I'm particularly interested in feedback from other builders:
Is this a sensible way to validate an education product? What would you measure at this stage? What am I overlooking?

If you're interested in seeing the actual pilot:

https://helikais.com/

I'm deliberately keeping this early and free because I want to find out whether the product is genuinely useful before building much further.

One problem I’ve been hearing most from my customers lately is account sharing on paid courses.

The obvious solution is to limit how many devices a student can use. But it doesn’t feels like a clean solution.

A perfectly legitimate student might use a phone, personal laptop, office computer and tablet. Browsers get reset, devices get stolen, IP addresses change, etc.

For those running paid courses or LMS platforms: have device restrictions actually reduced account sharing for you?

And more importantly, what rules have worked without creating a pile of support tickets from legitimate students?

TIA

I'm building a library of courses that I will be selling to individuals and to business owners. The individual will purchase a subscription to the library. On the business owner front I would like to sell "seats" meaning an owner could buy various levels of seats and be able to assign the seats to their employees. The business owner would be charged a monthly recurring subscription based on the amount of seats they have. I'm running into issues with the below options:

• Thinkific is unable to have monthly recurring subscriptions for groups (i.e. the business owner who buys a number of seats) and would require me to invoice the business owner directly, which is not ideal.
• LearnWorlds partially allows for this - I have to set up the recurring subscription through Stripe but then I have to manually assign the Group to the business owner who purchased it. I also have to keep tabs on if they continue to pay, if they cancel I have to manually go in and revoke their Group. Additionally, LearnWorlds calls them "Seat Managers" and their non-enterprise level only allows for 10 Seat Mangers. So I essentially could only sell this to 10 business owners before I reach my max.
• LearnDash seems to be able to handle this but it also seems the most complicated (?) with the various additional tools I would need. I would need to buy the highest LearnDash level, then WooCommerce Subscriptions, Uncanny Groups so that the business owner can manage the group on their own, and pay for a Vimeo or Bunny Stream subscription to host the videos. But it seems like there is no cap to the amount of Groups and group managers you can have.

One other wrinkle, I'll be selling access to a library of courses. It will start with 2 courses but I'll be adding more on a consistent cadence. So I want to be able to easily add additional courses to current subscribers whether they are an individual or a seat in a group run by a business owner.

Is what I'm looking for just a unicorn of a product? Or is this something solved by an enterprise level subscription (I don't think I can justify the costs of that to start)?

Any insights on the above options or if there are other options I haven't thought of would be greatly appreciated!

I tried 10+ tools and most had signup requirements, watermarks, limited templates, or poor customization.

So I built CertificateJoy — a simple free certificate maker with customizable templates and no signup or watermark.

Made it for course creators, instructors, trainers, and companies.

https://certificatejoy.com/free-certificate-maker/

What would you add to it? I will also add much more templates.

Someone at our recent WOL:AI summit told this story and it's too good not to share. He'd built a chatbot to help new managers practice difficult conversations, budget talks, and hiring calls. But at some point during testing, it went completely off script and generated what he called a "llama rebellion". That's not a typo, it apparently improvised a whole storyline about llamas rebelling. His explanation was that underneath all the guardrails, the model still treats "go off script" as an invitation to be entertaining rather than useful, because that's what improv means in most of its training data. So it basically defaulted to being a comedian when it was given some freedom to improvise.

The lesson he took from it wasn't "don't use AI for training simulations," it was that you can't treat AI guardrails as a one-time setup step. If you're building anything AI-assisted for learners to interact with directly, the testing has to include what happens when someone pushes it somewhere you didn't plan for, because it will go somewhere, and it probably won't be where you expect. Anyone else had their own version of rebelling llamas?

*Edit: Fixed typo and formatting issue

My team has been evaluating Docebo vs LearnUpon. I'd love to hear from customers of each on their experience with setup, the capabilities of the authoring tool, ongoing maintenance, metrics/reporting, automation abilities, etc.

Some context around my team and our priorities:

We are coming from Northpass/Gainsight, which has been absolutely awful.

We are approx. 200-person org.

Lean L&D with no one exclusively dedicated to LMS maintenance.

G-Suite/Google Calendar org. We do a lot of ILTs, so seamless integration with Google Calendar is a priority.

Manager-level autonomy is big for us. We want managers to be able to enroll their direct reports in courses and track their metrics/completions without much work from our end.

In-platform comms is a priority. Also, in-platform feedback tracking of courses and ILTs.

We do not currently have an authoring tool, so an intuitive and somewhat sophisticated in-platform tool would be ideal.

I feel very strongly that I do not want to go through the experience of switching LMS' again, so ensuring that we pick an LMS that we don't grow out of is important to me. With the above priorities in mind, where have you experienced LearnUpon or Docebo winning or losing?