10 Things Instructional Designers Don’t Like to Hear

E-Learning Challenge #56: Challenge | Recap

In earlier challenges, you explained what e-learning designers do, shared instructional design tips, and let us peek into your course design toolkit. Even though our industry is relatively new, there are phrases and questions that always come up.

The comments can be positive, such as “I love taking online courses” or “I’d love to know more about your job”. Then, there are the questions and phrases that drive you nuts.

And that’s what this week’s challenge is all about!

Challenge of the week

This week your challenge is to design an infographic, poster, or a simple list of the top 10 things instructional designers don’t like to hear. And then share your ideas for how to best reply to each.

This is a lighter challenge so don’t feel obligated to build a rich interaction to share your list. Keep it simple and have fun!

 Wishing you a positive week, E-Learning Heroes! 

Last week's zombie training challenge 

Before you tell us what you don't like hearing, take a look at what you should do to survive a zombie apocalypse:

Zombie Survival Training

E-Learning Challenge #55: Challenge | Recap

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38 Comments
Richard Watson

"We must have our logo on EVERY page." "There's nothing wrong with the video, it has a lot of very useful information in it. (The video was 1 1/2 hours long; no interactions; just talking... Each tutorial must start with, "In this tutorial, you will learn"...(this gets to be a little annoying after 10 short tutorials) "Could you move that button over about 2 pixels..." Sure, let's ignore the 3 paragraphs of text as long as the button is placed 2 pixels to the right. By the way, there was nothing it had to be aligned with. "Would you be willing to trade services?" "It's Thursday at 4PM and you receive a call..."I have this elearning thing I wanted you to help me with. Do you think you can finish it up by Monday 8AM? 50 slides, no graphics provided, etc. "C... Expand

Jackie Van Nice
Kristin Anthony
Nick Leffler

Why this is all jumbled together as one huge paragraph, I don't know. 10 things that make me cringe: - The navigation/timeline needs to be locked down so "learners" can see all of my wonderful content. - I'm an eLearning designer so that's the proper solution, never-mind doing a proper analysis to see if it's even necessary. - Just use next buttons to progress through software training, we don't need to make an accurate environment. - We need to cover all the learning styles to make sure everyone learns. - Let's create a virtual instructor led course, and an eLearning course, and a video, and a bunch of job aids. More is better right? - For previous releases we had a few videos walking users through the application so we should do that again (when task based job aids w... Expand

Heather Beaudoin
Miranda Verswijvelen

I love all your recogisable examples! Just some samples from my career that immediately spring to mind:" -it's nice, but I thought e-learning would move around more' (read: consequently added gratuitous animation on three quarters of content) 'This interactive simulation is great, but why don't you just make it 'next-next-next' so people are finished sooner?' 'Fantastic scenario-based ideas. But don't forget we need the CEO's speech in the beginning.' 'Can the certificate have a more curly border? It does not look real enough.' 'Oh I'd grown really attached to my little clipart characters in the Powerpoint. Why did you change them?' (because you used about 50 different ones all in different styles?) 'We need the pictures of the full team in the beginning' (three weeks later: John h... Expand

Melanie Scott