AI in Articulate: Excited or worried?

On one hand, AI is making it possible for almost anyone to create something that looks like a well-designed course. That will inevitably make some organisations question whether they still need specialist instructional designers and e-learning developers.

But I also think we need to separate appearance from effectiveness. There are already plenty of poor e-learning courses out there. AI can help people produce them faster and make them look more polished, but a bad course with better graphics is still a bad course.

A good instructional designer will use AI differently. They’ll use it to remove the mundane work, generate ideas, create prototypes, speed up development and act as a second brain. The real value has never been clicking buttons in an authoring tool. It’s understanding the audience, identifying the performance problem, designing meaningful learning experiences and evaluating whether they actually work.

I think we’re in a transition period. Some people see AI and think, “Great, I don’t need to build my own courses anymore.” In reality, I think the industry will continue to need developers and instructional designers, but the role will evolve. The best practitioners will spend less time on repetitive production tasks and more time on strategy, design, performance consulting and quality.

Overall, I think AI will raise the baseline quality of e-learning. Courses that would previously have looked poor may now look quite good. But the gap between content that simply looks professional and content that genuinely changes behaviour or improves performance will still exist. The people who understand that difference, and know how to design for it, will continue to be valuable.