How Close is AI to Taking Over the Role of the Instructional Designer?
A crowdsourced experiment
One question we explore a lot in my bootcamp is: how close is AI to taking over the role of the instructional designer (ID)?
This week, I decided to try to start to answer this question more concretely by running a short crowdsourced experiment.
The Experiment
First, I create a course brief:
💼 Course Brief
Design a course which equips entrepreneurs and marketing professionals with the practical skills and strategies so that they can effectively market and grow innovative products and services in dynamic environments.
Next, I picked three common ID tasks of varied complexity:
Write learning objectives
Select an instructional strategy
Create a course outline
Finally, I asked three colleagues to complete each task using the same course brief, but different methods:
Colleague 1 > The Experienced Instructional Designer + No AI
An experienced human ID who completed the tasks with no help from AI.
Hypothesis: manual ID with no input from AI produces the best quality design outputs.
Colleague 2 > The Non-Expert Instructional Designer + AI
A human who’s not an ID who completed the tasks with help from AI, specifically ChatGPT 4o + Consensus GPT.
Hypothesis: AI empowers anyone to be a great ID.
Colleague 3 > The Experienced Instructional Designer + AI
An experienced human ID who completed the tasks with help from AI (ChatGPT 4o + Consensus GPT).
Hypothesis: AI makes experienced IDs both faster & more effective at ID tasks.
The Results
The big question is: who completed the tasks most effectively?
To answer this, I need your help!
👉 If you want to take part, you can blind score the outputs & test your AI-detections skills. It'll take approx. 10 mins to complete. By taking part, you'll help to understand what AI can and can't do without the help of an expert human ID.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff4719156-533e-4388-a612-ec83ff7d4095_1280x1900.png)
I’ll share the results in next week’s blog post - stay tuned!
Happy experimenting!
Phil 👋
PS: If you want to get hands on and experiment with AI supported by me, you can apply for a place on my AI-Powered Learning Design Bootcamp.