More learning is moving online, but putting content on a screen does not automatically create a meaningful learning experience.

 

Too much digital learning still asks people to read, watch, click, and remember. The course may be polished. It may be technically interactive. But the learner is still mostly receiving information.

 

I believe we can design for more than that.

 

Learners should have opportunities to make decisions, recognize patterns, compare possibilities, organize information, weigh tradeoffs, practice judgment, and apply what they know.

 

The interaction should not exist simply because something needs to be clickable. It should shape what the learner is thinking about.

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That belief has shaped my work for more than 20 years.

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I began by teaching psychology. When that program was unexpectedly cut, I was asked to step in as the computer teacher, despite having no background in the subject and no textbooks to work from.

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I had to learn quickly and teach through backward design, starting with what students needed to be able to do and building the learning experience from there.

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That experience shaped the way I think about learning to this day.

I still believe variety, surprise, exploration, and play can be powerful parts of learning. But engagement is not the end goal.

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The goal is meaningful cognitive work.

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A learner may be sorting, exploring, choosing, comparing, or experimenting on the screen, but the real question is what that activity is asking them to think about.

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​The problem is often not the idea. It is building it.

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Over the years, I kept running into the same challenge in instructional design.

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The interaction exists in your mind long before it exists in the tool.

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You can see the scenario, the decision, the pattern, the comparison, the conversation, or the activity you want the learner to experience.

Then you open the authoring tool.

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Too often, bringing that idea to life requires complicated triggers and variables, custom development, a workaround, or a developer. Sometimes the idea gets simplified until it fits what the tool makes easy.

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That means the technology starts shaping the learning experience instead of the learning need shaping the technology.

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That is why I created eLearningDesign.org.

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eLearningDesign.org is a growing library of interactive HTML generators developed to give learning designers more ways to create meaningful digital learning experiences without having to build every interaction from scratch.

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Some interactions ask learners to:

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• make and defend decisions

• identify patterns

• sort and prioritize information

• compare competing factors

• practice conversations

• assess confidence

• explore relationships

• interpret evidence

• apply judgment

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The format changes because the thinking changes.

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The generators handle much of the technical build while the designer controls the learning.

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Each one produces flexible HTML that can work across platforms and authoring environments, including Articulate Rise and major learning management systems.

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AI expanded what I could build. It did not replace the designer.

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When AI tools arrived, I saw their value quickly.

Not as a shortcut for producing more generic content, but as a way to expand what one designer could create.

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AI helped make it possible to build tools and interactions that previously would have required far more development time. But the learning strategy, the judgment, the creativity, and the decisions about what the learner should actually be doing still belong to the designer.

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That human role matters even more as building becomes easier.

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The bigger idea is simple.

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I hold an MBA and a Master’s in Learning Experience Design and Adult Education Technology, but eLearningDesign.org is ultimately built around one belief:

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The future of online learning is not more content. It is better-designed thinking.

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I’m building the infrastructure that helps learning designers create it.

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You bring the content, the context, and the imagination.

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The Studio gives you more ways to turn that thinking into an experience.

 

It turns interactions into intent.

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