I was a trained web developer before I became an instructional designer, so I’ve always been resistant to the “industry standard” tools like Articulate Storyline and Adobe Captivate that most instructional designers have built their careers in.
I became an instructional designer the same year Ste...
I had been wanting to re‐platform TedCurran.net onto a flat file CMS for a long time. As much as I love Wordpress, the security risks and slow load times of a database‐driven application have real downsides compared to a modern flat file CMS like Grav.
So when I woke up this morning and saw...
I was brought in to redesign an internal training program aimed at upskilling a new sales team to handle incoming customer inquiries via web chat. A third‐party firm had originally been hired to teach chat‐specific communication and sales skills, addressing how text‐based chat’s impersonal nature ca...
My instructional design workflow always starts with stripping all content back down to markdown formatted text because it’s such a great starting point for building it back up into different formats – documents, presentations, websites… and now VIDEO.
I have been exploring the new frontier of dev...
At Autodesk, our learning design group uses a well‐defined process for kicking off a training development project. Our Subject Matter Experts don’t just throw a PowerPoint over the fence to us and expect a canned eLearning product in return. Instead, we take an agile, consultative approach to deep...
As AI has been deeply permeating the industry standard software packages that Instructional Designers have historically depended on, it has also bridged the gap between the toolset of an ID and the wider range of more powerful tools that are common in the world of web development. Real web teams cre...
As I’ve moved from traditional high school and university education into corporate Sales Enablement training, a very noticeable change is the culture and expectations about how instructors demand time from their learners.
The culture around tradition...
In response to: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2026/02/mastodon-is-for-the-people/
We also haven’t forgotten about mastodon.online. We want to do something wildly different there and push the limits of what the software can do. We have some thoughts, but we don’t really know what this looks like...
After more than 200 recorded episodes over eight years, the Authoring Innovation Meeting (AIM) has grown from a humble team stand‐up into a vital cross‐organizational community of practice for learning designers at Autodesk. This post explores the origins, structure, and transformative effects of th...
Long before AI, it was my teaching philosophy that a teacher’s goal is not only to implant knowledge into learners’ brains, but to help them develop their own second brain – AKA a digital database of their learning journey that they can take with them beyond the walls of my classroom and the limit...