Learning Design 3.0
Learning Design 3.0
How to get & stay ahead of the learning design game in a post-AI world
AI is already impacting how we design learning experiences. There’s been a lot of discussion recently about how content creation tools will impact the role and work of the learning designer. But this misses a critical point.
The winners in the online learning space will be those who focus not just on getting to grips with AI-driven content creation tools but also dedicate time to understanding an emerging field unknown even by AI - learning science.
In this post I’ll summarise everything you need to know about how to optimise your role in a post-AI world.
Get to Know AI Content Creation Tools
AI is already impacting how we create content. Thanks to Ai, writing, creating images, creating video is becoming increasingly quick, cheap and commoditised.
I’ve done some in depth digging around and come up with this list of the key tools that you should get to know better:
Images, Logos & Photos: Image creators like Midjourney and OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 can create an infinite array of images in virtually any style, almost instantly, including logos, cartoons, artistic styles or photorealistic images.
Text: OpenAI’s ChatGPT 3.5 in particular, has seen a meteoric rise in usage, reaching over 1mm users in less than a week after launch with its ability to generate textual responses. AI writing assistant tools like Compose AI & Rytr are already changing how we create high-quality content.
Avatars: Companies like Lensa, Synthesia and Artflow are taking over Instagram as people create still and animated avatars of themselves and others.
Audio (Music and Voices): Other uses are close behind, like Google’s AudioLM, which has the ability to hear a snippet of a song and continue playing it or to rapidly learn voices and then create original, modulated voices with emotion, pitch and speed.
3D Models: Nvidia just announced Magic3D, which can generate 3d models of objects from simple text descriptions.
Use AI to Research Your Subject
In order to design robust experiences, learning designers need to understand the subject and develop an amount of domain expertise.
There are some interesting tools emerging to help do just this better & faster than ever before.
Elicit: Uses language models to automate & accelerate the research process & help anyone become an expert in anything, quickly.
Explainpaper: Enables users to upload complex, specialised papers, highlight confusing text & get an explanation.
ChatGPT: Can generate information about any topic, then respond to your questions about it.
If you only do one thing…. Learn About How Humans Learn
In a world where content creation & domain expertise is automated & commoditised, the role and value of the human designer becomes increasingly focused on their pedagogical expertise - i.e. their ability to make robust, evidence-based decisions about what sort of content to generate, in what mode & for what purpose.
The winners in the online learning space will be those who focus not just on getting to grips with AI-driven tools but also dedicate time to understanding the fundamentals of learning science, i.e. how humans learn.
Only by understanding how humans learn will you be able to make full and meaningful use of the technology.
Here are six ways to get started on your journey into the world of learning science & pedagogy.
Get to Know the Basics:
Read Eric Mazur’s work on Peer Instruction (there’s a great summary in his podcast here)
Listen to my Learning Science 101 podcast episode
Read up on my Learning Science 101 Framework
Use Google Scholar: set up alerts for articles published on learning design, learning experience design & instructional design. Set a working day aside each month to review the research and apply it to your work. Or…
Subscribe to the Learning Science Digest: a monthly digest of the most important learning science research, distilled into learning design practices [I do the hard work, so you don’t have to!].
Follow me on LinkedIn: where I share practical tips & content recommendations with thousands of designers every week.
Subscribe to the Course Design Newsletter: a free weekly newsletter on how to bake learning science into course design.
Apply for a place on the Course Design Accelerator: a four week cohort-based course led by me, which makes it easy to bake 250+ pieces of learning science research into every step of your course design process.
Happy designing 👋