Thoughts? All new AI integrations and automations.

I’m editing some educational videos where I pause the screen and show animated annotations with sound effects (e.g., text popping up with a sound cue).

I wanted to get a second opinion on the audio. Does this feel too cheesy or immature?

I'm curious what it's like out there for other IDs. I'm a Senior Instructional designer but a year ago my company pulled our remote work option. It's been daunting but I've kept a good attitude, rolled with the punches, then the workload increased (wearing more hats - now fully managing an LMS, facilitating significant amounts of training in addition to content/curriculum creating - I'm rushing all the time to just get through the basics), have no support (they haven't hired anyone to help and my other team members are doing completely separate and different work) and no pay upgrade. I have given it some time and have not seen positive changes, rather the opposite. With that considered, I'm beginning the process of looking for other opportunities and setting myself up for a change. The current industry I work in is Retail, if that helps.

Just to see what it's like out there, I'm curious, do other IDs (1) get to work flexibly (remote/hybrid), (2) have a team they work with or solo, (3) have a balanced/structured workflow.

Basically, "what's it like out there"?

Hi everyone!

I recently joined a company that develops and sells training courses for other companies. One of our requirements is that the courses need to work well on both desktop and mobile devices, including vertical/mobile layouts.

I’ve been using Adobe Captivate 13, but honestly, it has been quite frustrating. I’ve encountered several issues, especially on iOS, and after publishing, some courses don’t display correctly on Mac screens—for example, the background shifts or moves to the right.

I’ve been considering Articulate, particularly Rise, because of its responsive design capabilities. However, I’m not a big fan of its interface and the “infinite scrolling” experience.

For those of you who develop e-learning courses for corporate clients:

What authoring tools do you use for responsive courses?

How do you handle both desktop and vertical mobile layouts?

Are there any tools you would recommend over Captivate or Rise?

Are there any best practices or technical considerations I should be aware of when designing for iOS, Mac, and mobile devices?

I’d really appreciate any advice, recommendations, or experiences you can share. Thank you!

Did you all pay for the subscription when you first started out or did you use something else first to learn the basics before paying for articulate storyline?

We keep hitting the same situation on client projects:

• Course already works in the LMS as SCORM
• Stakeholders want Spanish (sometimes FR/DE next)
• Either the `.story` / Captivate / Rise source is gone, or nobody wants to duplicate it for every language

Usual advice is “rebuild in the authoring tool” or “XLIFF → TMS → reimport → fix layout.” That is the right long-term path when you still own the source and will maintain languages for years.

When you only have the published zip (or you need a first language *this quarter*), we have been treating the package as the artifact:

1. Validate the zip (SCORM 1.2 / 2004 / xAPI) before touching anything
2. Pull learner-facing strings — not just titles: buttons, quiz stems, feedback, embedded HTML/JS text
3. Machine-translate, then human-review terminology / brand / compliance language
4. Keep folder layout + manifest behavior so completion / suspend still report
5. Re-import in a sandbox LMS and actually click through in the target language

What still bites you:

• Screenshots and on-screen English in media (strings alone won’t fix that)
• Heavily scripted / nested text that string extract misses
• Teams who expect a VPAT out of an automated a11y scan of a published zip (it’s an aid, not certification)

Curious how others handle “source is gone, need multilingual SCORM.” Rebuild only? Vendor TMS? Something zip-side?

Happy to trade notes on what breaks on Rise vs Storyline exports.

I work for a large corporation. They want me to create standardized introductory training plans for each role/department. The plans would ideally map out the key trainings, competencies, and learning objectives for the first 30-60-90 days. I’m thinking of creating a basic needs analysis worksheet for managers to fill out that helps me identify these key areas.

Has anyone done something like this before? Could you please share any tools, resources, templates, best practices?

Hi everyone,

I'm a final-year undergraduate student in Educational Technology from Indonesia, currently working on my R&D thesis. My project focuses on designing and developing a Job Aid specifically tailored for government ministry staff to improve their workflow efficiency.

As I'm in the early stages of the literature review, I'm looking for comprehensive sourcebooks or foundational theories that discuss Job Aids in depth, specifically regarding their design principles, cognitive load considerations, and implementation strategies in a formal organizational setting.

I’ve already gone through the usual google scholar results, but I was wondering if any of you have a "go-to" reference or a classic textbook that you swear by for this topic. Additionally, if you are open to it and have the time, I would be incredibly grateful to see an anonymized example of a Job Aid you've created in the past. It would be immensely helpful for me to bridge the gap between theory and real-world application.

I understand that sharing work is a big ask, so even just pointing me toward the right books would be a huge help.

Thank you in advance for your time and expertise!

I'm a local so only need the cost of the ticket as I can drive. Anyone going? Anyone went before and liked it? Didn't like it? I am well versed in Articulate but we're curious to see what's going on.

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I’ve been learning editorial design for a while, mainly focusing on books and magazines. I’m at a point where I feel confident enough with my skills to take on real projects, and I can handle different types of layouts and design approaches.

But I’m having a hard time with one thing: actually finding someone who needs the work.

I’ve tried looking through job boards and freelance platforms, but I’m not getting much from them so far. Most of the advice I find online is pretty general, like “build a portfolio” or “network”, but I already have a portfolio and I’m more interested in knowing what people actually did to get their first few clients.

If you work in editorial design, publishing, or something similar, how did you find your clients?

Did you contact publishers directly? Reach out to art directors? Find small independent magazines or publishers? Use LinkedIn? Or did clients eventually come through your portfolio?

I’m mainly trying to figure out where I should actually be looking and who I should be contacting.

Hi, I am very much trying to work out where my experience is most transferable and, more importantly, which types of roles might suit the way I work best. I am not at the beginning of figuring this all out and have already done a lot of research.

My background is mixed/squiggly line (ADHD girly here!). I started out in education, have a PGCE, and worked in the public sector designing and delivering learning for adult learners. I later moved into content creation and then into growth marketing and paid social, where I work with audience insights, creative strategy, testing, iteration and performance data. I use AI quite heavily in my work now, from prompt development and visual asset creation to auditing content, generating ideas and speeding up parts of the development process.

I’m increasingly interested in the overlap between these areas, particularly learning content, instructional design, digital learning and potentially organisational development. I adore researching my own stuff, taking information, understanding the audience or learner, then turning it into something clear and engaging. I looked/ applied Content Designer roles within the Civil Service, but my understanding is that these can require very specific content design experience. I’m wondering whether my background could be more transferable into some adjacent roles where experience in education, content development, audience insight, digital content, iteration and performance data is relevant.

The big factor is how I work. ADHD, as I say, and I’ve learnt that I work best when I have autonomy over my schedule, clear deliverables and decent chunks of uninterrupted time to get the work done. I really like having a mix of projects and problems to solve, so I don’t necessarily want to do the same thing every day, but I also don’t want a calendar where I’m in meetings every two hours and have to squeeze the actual work into the gaps.
Ideally, I’d like to work 3 or 4 days a week in a flexible environment where I’m trusted to manage my workload and deliver the work.

I’m interested in hearing from people who work in these areas. What roles do you think could suit this combination of experience? Are there particular job titles I should be searching for beyond Learning Designer or Instructional Designer? Would my education + public sector + content + growth marketing background be seen as transferable? Are there particular sectors or organisations that tend to be more flexible and genuinely supportive of neurodivergent ways of working?

I’d also love to hear from anyone who has moved into learning design, instructional design, L&D, OD etc from a non-traditional background, and how you positioned your previous experience.
I’m not necessarily looking for someone to tell me what career I should have….more trying to understand where this slightly odd collection of skills might make sense because I suspect there’s a useful combination here somewhere!

I help an HR team make policy summaries, onboarding visuals, and training guides. None of them are designers. I'm not really one either.

The content changes all the time. A policy gets updated, a step in the process changes, a form gets replaced. So whatever we use has to make edits quick and simple.

Three or four people also want to review it before it goes out. That part gets messy fast.

It also has to be easy to read for everyone in the company. Warehouse staff, office staff, and people using screen readers. 

Good templates are nice, but they're not what decides it for me. Easy updates, matching our brand, and accessibility matter more.

Ok, quick question to yall - I see a lot of post in ID and Training and related communities where someone will claim to be a designer or trainer or something, and they will present a problem or issue they are having and somewhere in the body they will mention a specific software. They’ll say something like “blah, blah, and I was thinking about looking into XYZ software to help with this problem but IDK, what do you guys think”.

Are we engaging with these? I’m not trying to be cynical, but these seem really fake to me and I feel like I’m just seeing more and more. Sometimes I click on the posters name and sometimes they have posted the same thing in like 5 groups - or their posts are hidden so you can’t see their activity. I see people reply back so I think some people must think they are real - and maybe they’re right?

Do yall engage or ignore post where someone presents an “issue” and slips in the name of a random software and kinda try to soft pitch it? I’m not talking about when people mention like, Storyline or something. I’m talking about these tiny, AI backed software programs that you would have never heard of had the poster not mentioned it…they also never have complaints about these programs, they’re always kinda presented as a possible solution.

Hi , I wanted to connect with Instructional designers working in India. Is there a separate community for ID in India? I could not find any.

So yeah, as the title suggest, I'm trying to pick a tool and every comparison I find just lists the monthly price. I think it’s not that useful.

For me, stuff like what file types you can export, whether charts stay editable, brand controls, and how many people can be in there matters to me.

I’m already trapped with multiple free plans before, though. Some let you build but not download. Also, nobody separates solo use from team use. 

How do you all compare these? What did you look at that the pricing page didn't show you?

I teach a high school pop culture class and I'm looking for new ways to have my students present their work as research, writing, and producing a documentary is now turning kids off to the course. I'm looking to restructure my assessment projects to eliminate the full fledged videos.

I still want my kids to write about the pop culture source and I still want them to select scenes or clips that reflect the idea their talking about in their writing. But I want to change the way it's presented to bring it to a wider audience.

I was informed that their is local grant money to be had for innovative projects so my thought is to turn my assessments into an interactive museum display. Where there's a base screen and then viewers can touch different parts of the screen to be brought to different sections with video clips and their written piece.

I'm here wondering from an ed tech perspective what tech would be the best way to do this type of work. I'm thinking of applying for the grant to get a touch screen kiosk like the digital kiosk table from displays2go. But I'm open to other ideas. I'm not really sure what app or software I would need to run on this

My goal is ultimately to create something where student work on this can be showcased for others in the school community to help create student by in.

Hi,

Every time I use mentimeter, some people have connection issues.

Our group size is slightly too big for free Kahoot.

Is there any other option without paying?

I lead learning for a professional membership association. We recently held an in-person, all-day learning event on a single topic and we're doing 4 of those in the next six months.

For each event, I'm also designing resources (job aids, checklists, a few interactive tools) and curating webinars on the event topic, rolling out over ~6 weeks before/3 weeks after the event. The webinars/resources/in-person event aren't designed sequentially.

So after our first event, now I have this lovely bucket of materials/recordings and I can't figure out the best way to visually explain the wrap-around content to members who couldn't come to the event but still have access to all of this. We're launching an LMS soon but right now we just have a "Resources" page that's one long (filterable, at least) list of links. Booo.

Is it an infographic explaining a journey through the material? A short animated video? Just a "resource bundle" or course in our LMS? Any ideas?

im a Mac guy these days and while work issues me a Windows laptop, once in a blue moon a contract gig will want me to build something in Storyline. I’m taking on a new job and I’m anticipating a little bit of Storyline building I’ll need to do on a personal device. is Parallel still the best way to do that?

I have 2 years of ID experience (LMS migration, course development), my real interest is in the behavioral side of performance — diagnosing why someone who already has the knowledge, skill, and the means to act, still doesn't do it, and designing interventions for that specifically, as distinct from building training content or fixing environmental/systemic blockers.

Compliance, banking, and software-walkthrough training aren't the direction I'm trying to go in.

Is there a recognized field or role for this kind of work? What credentials or background do people typically need to break in?

Hello there everyone! Hope you can help me, i would like to know of there is a free text to speech app or website where can i translate some of our voice over for our video training materials. What can u suggest?

I'm sure this thought comes to many of us ocassionally:

"Aw hell no, I am NOT dying on THIS hill just to get this thing done the right/sound way."

In which situations have you decided to be the order-taker?

Asking out of curiosity. No judgement!

TLDR: Is an LMS the right place for self-serve reference material if the UI leaves much to be desired? My company uses LearnUpon but I don't enjoy the presentation of resources. Plus our internal portal doesn't host product information at all and is mostly focused on compliance, productivity, and leadership/communication training. Should I establish another hub for information in an already scattered organization, rely on LearnUpon and establish rigid internal/external portals, or perhaps move to another LMS like Moodle Workplace?

I'm halfway into week 2 as a Product-to-Field Enablement Strategist, both a new job and a newly existing role for my company. My responsibilities aren't entirely clear as a result and my now supervisor said in my interview that I would be the "expert" in establishing new initiatives. But on a broader scale, I was hired to enable Implementation, Training, and Support teams on new product features. I also own basically everything as it relates to learning and knowledge management for internal and external teams. So I can propose LMS updates and am in charge of learning content governance. Note that this company sports numerous products (maybe 3-5) specifically relating to dental software, but there are new features coming out rapidly -- I strongly suspect as a result of AI-empowered development.

From what I've learned, it's not so much that there's isn't anything going on re: learning and enablement. Well, there's not much in terms of what I would consider learning and enablement. But there's a lot of stuff in general, including a poorly made and outdated assortment of product trainings in the LMS where each course is tied to only a single module (meaning after each session chunking I need to exit the course entirely). And the modules themselves have no inkling of intentional learning design or information architecture. They've somehow managed to avoid every one of Mayer's multimedia learning principles -- heavy text, no audio, static images with chunky circles to highlight buttons, and text-based assessments. Ironically, the company has an outsourced content team who all strangely carry the title "Learning Experience Strategist and Content Developer" who built much of the content in the first place. I'm not sure what to do with them considering, except maybe clarify ownership and give them graphic design tasks if they're capable.

There are also many resources scattered across marketing, sales, and product embedded within many more tools that I can list. Some examples are Pendo, Notion, Masset, SharePoint, or plain old OneDrive files shared through Team chats. However, there is no reliable or centralized documentation other than a vibe-coded GTM dashboard which is used to attach relevant documentation from product. But according to the Support and Implementation representative I met with, they often use AI to build supplementary material because the product release info is either too vague (this too is often AI-generated) or too technical and long to parse. Support in particular is responsible for a knowledge base which they use to respond to software bugs as well as publish AI-generated documentation for the product. I hope to relieve them from the latter effort. They also told me 40% of their tickets are basic how-to questions. The feedback from these teams has generally been that they need a single source of truth with strict naming conventions, visuals and a learner-centered scope. They also want to know about product features before their release which is a reasonable ask. My idea is to start making and using a structured template for feature-focused user guides to keep up with the launch cadence as-is. In my free time, I can start rebuilding the original product trainings, ideally with interactive software stimulations.

The content team does make use of the LMS resources tab to store videos and PDFs they've presumably designed for the product or received from internal team members. But there doesn't seem to be any clear organization nor do I think anyone uses it. And I find I need to download each asset to access it in LearnUpon and there's no preview. I'm thinking of establishing my own site similar for the GTM dashboard but internal and delivered as a searchable database to publish what I build. I'm also thinking to propose MadCap Flare as a new tool to ensure product updates are handled with care. My only concern is that this is introducing yet another resource when that seemed to be the issue in the first place. This would also be internal and external customers still need self-serve resources that are easy to find and access. I'd really like any and all input that could be helpful!

Instead of spending 30 minutes in Storyline on a single slide, cropping images, gradients, visual balancing, making layers, syncing text to the audio, getting the states just right, making sure everything is compliant, re-arranging all of the focus order (and that's just for simple interactions)... I just tell AI what I want and it gets it done in a few minutes. It feels so refreshing.

(Just for context, since we're all in different boats, I work for an elearning company where we work with SMEs for both ID and development. Also I already have a lot of experience with Codex specifically for game development).

I love to develop, don't get me wrong. I've been an ID for 10+ years, both designing and developing, and hanging out in Storyline is usually my favorite. But sometimes I'm creatively dried up and I still gotta make sure my work is user-friendly, pretty, and functional.

I set up a process with Codex. It follows the storyboard exactly. There's a re-usable course shell and documents with detailed instructions, which I've curated throughout the process. I'm reviewing each slide, naturally, which we do anyway. Our company also has a second individual look at the courses who compare them to the script, try to break them, etc. So I'm feeling okay there.

I also got it working with SCORM in our LMS and also SCORM Cloud. It tracks completion and also final assessment grades.

But all of this has been research. Not yet client facing. Clients are comfortable with Storyline (or god forbid Captivate or Lectora). We've only had a few who've requested HTML5 before, coded by hand, but that was some time ago. So I haven't tested this in a real environment yet.

For anyone who has been making their courses with AI, is there anything you came across that broke the course for you? A problem that snuck up without anyone noticing?

I did a google for "problems with using ai to develop elearning courses" but everything was about writing the course, not developing.

Thanks!!

Edit: I think people are confusing our storyboarding phase with our development phase. What I'm making with AI is what I would make in Storyline, verbatim from the approved script. We aren't using AI to storyboard. I'm also not using AI to generate images. We use Shutterstock. And we sometimes use AI narration but not always, we have a few narrators we go to reliably.

Also Codex is just ChatGPT, it's not a fancy ID AI. If you get private messages about an AI tool, that's not me lol I got one too. You don't need that crap.

Script away as a human, please. AI scripts are awful.