Forum Discussion
How are you approaching learning creation in your organization beyond “traditional” L&D use cases?
Hey ELH community 👋,
We know that learning creation doesn’t live solely within L&D or instructional design teams. In large organizations especially, managers, training, enablement teams, and other departments are increasingly creating their own learning to meet team and business needs.
We’re curious how that’s playing out in your organization.
If you’re in L&D, what’s holding you back from bringing on more teams create courses in Articulate? Are there particular challenges—technical, process-related, or cultural—that make it harder to open things up?
And if you have scaled and democratized course creation with Articulate beyond L&D, what’s helped it work well?
We’d love to learn from your experiences; what’s working, what’s not, and what would make it easier.
~ The Articulate Research Team
6 Replies
Love this question! 🙌 We’re seeing a definite shift toward distributed learning creation across teams. When subject-matter experts and managers can build quick, targeted learning experiences themselves, it not only lightens the load on L&D but also keeps content hyper-relevant and timely.
That said, the biggest challenges we’ve seen usually come down to governance and consistency — ensuring quality, accessibility, and brand alignment while still empowering others to create. Clear templates, light design standards, and easy collaboration tools (like Rise and Review 360) make a huge difference in scaling effectively.
Excited to see how others are approaching this — it’s such an important conversation for the future of learning!
Such an interesting note on this, parkerethan84 — I'm curious, are there particular departments you work with that you're seeing wanting to create those quick targeted learning experiences the most?
Totally agree about those "content standards" to ensure all the learning is consistent from both an instructional design and brand perspective. I bet there are lots of folks in the community who are working on similar sets of guidelines, and I'm curious how much overlap there is between what all of those guidelines look like (other than the brand-specific stuff, of course!).
I am the "sole" instructional designer for our team of 5, and I enjoy it quite a bit. The other members jump in to work with Rise courses (prebuilt templates provided by Articulate), but for group-up projects, the task usually falls to me...and I can't complain at all as I LOVE doing what I do and have relied on Storyline (since version 1) and Rise (since its inception) to design, develop, and release training across multiple business units.
One of the main reasons we don't have a large team is due to budget constraints for sure, but we like to say that the reason we don't grow the team is because we don't need to. It would be a waste of both talent and company money to grow the team beyond what it is now as we are all very solid in what we do; we know our strengths and our manager allows us to focus on those projects that play on that.
Our training delivery focuses on both ILT and eLearning via an internal LMS; that's my focus. And I have projects that come from every business unit within our organization. Safety, OSHA, compliance, HR, FAA/EASA requirements, internal employee training focused on specific roles, etc. And it works very well for our company. We save time, and money, by internalizing the training needs, and, because we ARE internal, we can create content that is specific to our organization.
I've worked with some outside vendors in other contracts before and...wow...it was painful. Not only because the content itself was generic (and dare I say, utterly unprofessional in look, feel, and delivery) but the costs were outrageous (they should be ashamed of themselves for charging people for the "materials" they submitted for use).
Keeping things internal, and having a dedicated L&D team, I believe, saves a company money in the long-run as well as ensuring we have complete control over the entire process, from design to evaluation. Revisions can be made immediately (although we do have annual requirements set forth by the FAA and EASA) and being the designer and developer, I am in charge of the graphics, animations, video, audio, and supplemental/supporting material development, which, again, keeps costs to a minimum and ensures that all the materials for each businness unit maintains a high quality control and consistent branding across the enterprise while allowing for individual "uniqueness" to separate their content from other avenues within the company.
Until recently I was the sole elearning designer on a small training team for a large manufacturing site. There was no hope of outsourcing any elearning development across the departments as they were simply far too busy doing their own jobs. Also there's no way individual teams would have paid for an elearning license and without lots of courses being created there would have been insufficient ROI to pay for it out of our budget. Personally speaking, beyond certain motivated and interested individuals, I also don't believe the technical proficiency or learning knowledge would have been there for the training created to have been effective or anything beyond a read a click through. In which case teams could just create powerpoint decks (which they did).
Hey there!
Really interesting topic — I’ve definitely seen this shift happening. In our organization, teams outside of L&D (like sales enablement and operations) have started creating their own micro-courses using Articulate, mostly to address fast-changing processes.
The biggest challenge we’ve faced is maintaining consistency and quality across all that content. Everyone’s excited to build, but without a clear review process or shared design standards, things can get messy.
What’s worked for us is setting up templates and quick-start guidelines in Articulate, so non-L&D folks can still move fast but stay on-brand. It’s been a game changer for scaling internal learning while keeping quality high.
