Practical perspectives on instructional design, eLearning strategy, and the science of how people learn - written for L&D professionals and the organizations they serve.
Most compliance training fails for the same reason: it was designed to document that training happened, not to change what people do. The difference between those two goals produces entirely different learning experiences - and entirely different outcomes. Here's how to tell which one you have, and what to do about it.
Uploading a slide deck to an LMS is not instructional design. It's digitized information delivery - and there's a meaningful difference. When organizations convert PowerPoints to eLearning without rethinking the design, they don't create learning. They create longer, more expensive versions of something that wasn't working in the first place.
Action mapping, developed by Cathy Moore, starts with a single question that most training programs skip entirely: what do we need people to do differently? Not know. Do. That question changes everything - from the structure of your content to the design of your assessments to the way you measure success.
Most organizations approach accessibility as something you add at the end - an audit, a remediation, a legal obligation. The problem is that adding accessibility after the fact is significantly harder, more expensive, and less effective than building it in from the start. Inclusive design isn't a constraint. It's a practice.
Cognitive load theory tells us that working memory is limited - and when learning experiences demand more than it can hold, people disengage. Not because they're lazy or unmotivated, but because the design is working against them. Understanding cognitive load is the fastest way to improve any training program.
In healthcare, the stakes of poor training are not performance gaps - they're patient outcomes. Clinical staff retention, procedural accuracy, and protocol compliance all depend on whether training actually worked. Designing for healthcare requires behavioral precision that most eLearning doesn't deliver.
Before a storyboard is written, before a single interaction is designed, before any content is gathered - every learning project should begin with one question: is training actually the solution here? Knowing how to answer that question honestly saves organizations significant time, money, and frustrated learners.
Whether you're an L&D manager, HR leader, or organizational decision-maker, these topics are written with your specific context in mind.