An eLearning Course May Be Teaching More Than You Intended
After many years in instructional design and eLearning, I’ve come to question something we often take for granted about learning. We tend to think of it in simple terms: The learner learned it. The learner didn’t. The course worked. The course failed. But I don’t think learning works that way. People always learn something. The more important question is: What are they learning? Consider a poorly designed eLearning course. An employee attends a course because they genuinely want to learn. But the content is difficult to follow, the activities feel disconnected, and the experience becomes frustrating. The course doesn’t help with the problems they actually face at work. We might conclude that the learner simply didn’t get much out of it. But they may have learned something very different from what we intended: “I could have spent this time getting my work done.” Or “eLearning is a waste of time.” That is still learning. It’s just not the learning outcome we intended. And if that happens repeatedly, something else happens. We spend a great deal of effort trying to motivate learners, get them interested, and hook them into the learning experience. But several poor learning experiences can work in the opposite direction. Learners may become more guarded and less receptive, even when they are later required to learn. There is an interesting example in Taiwan. The government has invested heavily in eLearning for public servants, offering a large number of courses across different topics and allowing employees to choose based on their needs and interests. There are many good courses among them, but the quality is mixed. In 2018, a proposal was submitted on Taiwan’s Public Policy Participation Platform calling for the abolition of the eLearning program for public servants. One of the complaints was that requiring 20 to 40 hours of eLearning each year was a waste of time with little effect. The proposal received nearly 8,000 endorsements in just three days. What interests me is not whether the program was good or bad. It’s this: If people repeatedly experience learning that feels ineffective, what are they learning about learning itself? Maybe: “This isn’t worth my time.” And that may be a bigger problem than one ineffective course. A poor course doesn’t simply fail to teach what we intended. It may teach learners to distrust the learning experience itself. So perhaps we need to ask a different question when we talk about learning effectiveness: Not just, “Did they learn what we wanted them to learn?” But: “What else did they learn from the experience?”ID Toolbox
Practical tools for e-learning developers… Over the past several months I've built a set of browser tools for the bits of Storyline and Rise that used to cost me hours. Eleven of them, all completely free, no signup, no accounts, nothing to install. They run entirely in your browser. Nothing is uploaded anywhere, which for me was the whole point, I wasn't keen on posting client content to a website just to check something… ID ToolboxThe Red Pen
AI drafts fast, confidently, and about half of it is wallpaper. This course teaches you to edit it, spot the six tells, fix them without swapping one kind of slop for another, and check the numbers a model will invent with a straight face. The Red Pen | Rise Tools used: Canva, Gemini and Rise CanvasWhat tools do you use?
What are your go to tools you use everyday and wouldn't be without in your authoring process? Here's mine. There's one thing they all have in common, and for me it's the important bit, nothing gets uploaded. They're plain HTML and JavaScript running in your browser. When you drop a .story file, an image or a SCORM zip on one of these, it gets read in memory on your own machine and that's the end of it. No server, no account, no sign up. Most of what I work on is client material and I'd rather not be posting it to a third party site. I suspect I'm not alone in that. They're all completely free, no trial, no limits, no nonsense! Story Auditor Variable health checks Storyline project files. Finds broken and at risk JavaScript references, unused variables and script issues before you ship. Story Documenter A complete written specification from a .story file. Every slide, every trigger in plain English, every quiz answer etc, ready to print or share with clients. Great for creating storyboards. Image Press Resize, compress and convert images in the browser. E-learning size presets, a target file size, batch zip download, and image metadata stripped on output. Great free tool for managing images for projects. SCORM Bench Run a SCORM package against a logging LMS runtime, without uploading it. Every API call visible, live data model, the manifest checked. Works with SCORM 1.2 and 2004. And a quick question; what's the thing in your workflow that still doesn't have a tool? These only existed because I moaned about something enough and then got annoyed enough to fix it!Swatch Library
A recent post by randykepple inspired me to share this. Randy's solution is also great so check that out! With Swatch Library you can create a palette per brand or project, and every swatch is one click to copy, in hex or RGB. Nothing to install, no sign-up, and nothing stored on a server. Your colours save automatically in your own browser. Type or paste a code, bulk-paste a whole list at once or, in Chrome/Edge, use the eyedropper to pick colours from anywhere on your screen, a client's website, a brand PDF, a Storyline slide. You can drop a logo or brand asset onto the tool and it will pull the dominant colours out and build a palette from them. Everything happens in the browser, nothing is uploaded anywhere. You untick any strays, name it, and it is done. I find this the quickest way to get a client palette in. Beyond that there is a WCAG 2.2 contrast checker built in, set a foreground and background colour, get the ratio, and see pass/fail for AA and AAA body text, large text and non-text elements like icons and focus indicators. That is useful enough on its own, but the thing I am most pleased with is the contrast grid. Each palette has a Grid button that opens a matrix of every colour pair in that palette, painted with the actual pair so you can see at a glance which combinations work for text and which do not. One click on any cell opens the full checker for that pair. If you have ever wondered whether your brand colours are actually safe to use together, this answers it quickly. There is also a colour vision preview. A Vision button on each palette shows it as it appears to people with protanopia, deuteranopia and tritanopia, plus a greyscale row for print. It automatically flags any pairs that become hard to tell apart, named with their perceptual distance score. Each swatch has a tints and shades button that opens a nine-step ramp from light to dark, and you can click any step to copy it or add it to the palette. Useful for hover states and backgrounds. You can drag swatches to reorder or move them between palettes, filter palettes once your library grows, and use Export/Import to back everything up or share a brand palette file with your team so everyone's working from the same set. There's a built-in guide for the full tour. It can be used directly in the linked Rise course, or used online via the link. All free, no downloads, no signup, no nonsense! Swatch Library - Rise Swatch Library OnlineNewbie starting eLearning series; Templates
I am leading an effort to do the following: Create a style guide for eLearning design and development for training on and salesforce and subsequent implementation. (done) Create three types of eLearning templates in Storyline to create: demo try it test it Getting started is the hardest! I have a semi-template design idea and we have our guidelines, but are there best practices to creating standard templates that will be replicated for the many 'steps/processes' our learners will need to learn, do and test out. We will have end-users who will use these eLearnings as pre-work. They have to test out to move onto the next eLearning and then the in-person training. Thank you for helping get us started!How are you handling certificate delivery?
Certificate delivery keeps coming up, so I wanted to share the approach I settled on after trying a few and hear how others are doing it. The recurring problem: a learner finishes a course, and you want them to get a certificate that (a) looks exactly like the slide you designed, (b) lands in their inbox automatically, and (c) is recorded somewhere you can look up later. Native print-to-PDF and LMS certificates got me part of the way, but not all three. What I ended up building: On the certificate slide, the Send button runs an Execute JavaScript trigger that posts the slide to a small backend endpoint. The backend renders that actual slide, so the PDF is pixel-perfect; no rebuilding the layout server-side and hoping the fonts match. It emails the PDF to the learner over SMTP, and logs every issue to a database with a simple admin dashboard (search, re-send, download). It runs on ordinary cPanel hosting - no monthly third-party service and no per-certificate fees - and one backend serves multiple courses. How's everyone else handling this native download, LMS-issued certs, Google Sheets/Zapier, a paid service? Curious what's working for you. I do this kind of Storyline-to-backend integration, so happy to go deeper on any of it if it's useful.Less Is More Is Not Just About Content, but About Learning Experience
After working in instructional design for many years, I've come to realize that "less is more" is often misunderstood. It is usually associated with simplifying content, such as making courses shorter, reducing information, or avoiding overload. But in my experience, it goes beyond that. Even when we have correctly identified what learners need to know, do, or change in order to meet business goals, there is still another important question: How should we design the learning experience itself? The goal should be to help learners learn with the least unnecessary effort. Not by removing depth or rigor, but by removing friction that does not contribute to learning. Over the years, I've seen many different approaches to learning design. Some learning experiences feel under-designed, where the lack of structure or intention makes it difficult for learners to stay engaged or understand the purpose of the content. I've also seen cases where, in an effort to avoid being "too simple" or "boring," additional layers of interaction, visual elements, or gamification are introduced. Many of us have probably spent hours building advanced interactions in Storyline or carefully structuring a Rise course because we wanted the learning experience to feel more engaging. There is nothing wrong with using these features. The question is whether they genuinely support learning. Sometimes these additions are driven more by what the tool allows us to build than by what learners actually need. As a result, learners may end up spending more time completing interactions than understanding, retaining, or applying the knowledge that really matters. This is especially important in corporate learning. Learners are often balancing training with their daily responsibilities. Time is limited, and attention is limited. That is why I believe we should be intentional about where we add complexity. Interaction is not the problem. In fact, meaningful interaction is essential for learning. The key word is meaningful. The most valuable learning experiences are those that help learners understand concepts more deeply, retain what they have learned, and apply that knowledge in real work situations. This is where I choose to focus my design effort. Not on adding interaction for its own sake, but on identifying the moments in learning that truly matter. Instead of asking, "What cool Storyline feature can I use here?", I think we should be asking, "How does this interaction help learners understand, retain, or apply what they need to learn?" When we design with that intention, learning can often become simpler while also becoming more effective. That's the kind of learning experience I continue to strive for. I'd love to hear how you decide when an interaction is truly worth adding.
