Why is your eLearning boring?
Spoiler: It’s not the tool. It’s thedesign … or lack of it.
Let me share with you something I keep seeing across every project thatcomes across my desk.
Most corporate eLearning gives L&D teams across the world a bad name.
It’s long. It’s flat. The people taking it know it’s bad. They clickthrough, hit next, hit next, hit next, take the quiz they could pass withoutwatching anything, and forget all of it by Friday.
Then leadership looks at the engagement numbers and wonders what wentwrong.
The last 15 years of instructional design have seen companies go fromusing tools like Flash to no code tools like Lectora and Storyline, and then tomore modern mobile friendly tools like Evolve and Rise trying to solve thisissue, but the real problem is that somewhere along the way, “course”came to mean “60-slide click-through with a multiple-choice quiz at theend” — and our industry just kept building that, year after year, deckafter deck.
Now, AI has opened a new chapter for eLearning where power users arealready building full courses that can be uploaded directly to your LMS in lessthan 40 hours.
But how can we ensure we don’t keep delivering the same corporatetraining that feels tedious, monotonous, and mandatory.
eLearning’s whole superpower is flexibility — anywhere, anytime, ondemand. The pandemic proved that. When offices closed, eLearning kept trainingmoving. But the industry mostly used that flexibility to deliver more of thesame: long, generic, one-size-fits-no-one courses with zero customization andalmost no thought given to how people actually learn.
Exhibit A: the policy training
If you’ve ever asked an agency to turn a company policy into training,here’s what you probably got back.
An 80-slide course. A long intro. The content, slide by slide. A few”interactive” elements sprinkled in — clickable accordions, flipcards, and hotspots, all of which are just decorated ways to make the learnerreveal information piece by piece. And a multiple-choice quiz at the end to”test memory.”
Here’s what actually happens after launch.
An employee runs into the situation the policy was supposed to cover.They vaguely remember sitting through something about it once. They turnaround and ask their colleague or their manager. Sometimes that information isright. Often, it isn’t.
The course didn’t fail because the content was wrong. It failed becausethe design asked people to memorize a policy instead of teaching themwhat to do when the policy is relevant.
Here’s what to ask for instead. Drop the recap-and-quiz format entirely.Ask your training partner for a handful of realistic scenarios where the rightmove is to consult the policy — not recite it from memory. The courseshouldn’t teach the policy. It should teach the agency to slow down, check thesource, and act with confidence. As a bonus, employees learn exactly where thepolicy lives, so when the moment comes for real, they know where to go.
That’s a skill. The 80-slide version was a memory test.
Scaffold the content. Don’t dump it.
Once the audience and the goals are clear, the designer’s job isn’t to presentthe content. It’s to structure it.
A simple frame the brain can hold onto:
- Why does this matter?
- What do they need to know?
- How are they going to use it?
If it’s a process, give them the steps. If it’s a decision, give them thecriteria. The structure doesn’t need a fancy name. It just needs to make thecontent easier to file away mentally and pull back out when it counts.
And then shrink the deck. Hard.
Old-school classroom training was 60 minutes long because the room wasbooked for 60 minutes. eLearning has no such excuse. Its actual advantage isthat an employee can take it during a quiet 8 minutes between meetings. Don’twaste that on a 45-minute clickthrough nobody asked for. Smaller chunks, moreoften, will out-perform the giant annual course every single time. Your peoplemight even thank you.
Activities, not interactions
This is the part where I get a little spicy.
I know the 60-slide course your agency just delivered is full ofaccordions, flip cards, and hotspots. I’m hoping — praying — there areno sliders or radial dials in there pretending to be engagement. (They’re anaccessibility nightmare and they teach almost nothing.)
Here’s the thing nobody in this industry says out loud: an”interaction” every three slides is not engagement. It’s a polite wayto make the learner click before they’re allowed to move on.
What you actually want is an activity — a moment where the learnerhas to make a decision close to how they’d make it in real life.
Two questions to ask before you sign off on any course:
- Is this knowledge or a skill? If it’s pure knowledge, a job aid (a one-page reference, a quick guide,a checklist) will probably do more for your team than a course will. Be honestabout that. Not everything needs to be a course.
- If it’s a skill, where doesthe decision happen in real life? The course should be built around thatmoment. Your team should have access to the same tools they’d actually have onthe job — the intranet, a colleague, a manager, the company website. Let themchoose whether to review the content first or jump in and use the resources asthey go. That choice is part of the learning.
A real example
In 2019, I worked with my first Gen Z subject matter expert on a projectI won’t forget.
The brief was the standard one: revamp the annual cybersecurity policytraining. The catch was that the company had been running this course for years,and the test results showed people across every age group still couldn’treliably identify or report a threat. The course wasn’t working. Everyone kindof knew it. Nobody was sure what to do about it.
The SME and I started talking about short-form video — what was takingoff on social at the time. I’d been eyeing 7taps (a microlearning tool builtaround bite-sized, mobile-first cards) for a while because my manager and I hada hunch that short-form was the future of corporate training. So we went allin.
The 60-slide course got nuked. Here’s what we built instead:
We kept the certification, because compliance is compliance.The courseopened with a choice: skim the content first, or jump straight to the cert.The”content” became a tight carousel of the top cyber threats, each cardlinking out to deeper resources — including the cybersecurity team’s ownintranet posts, which were already excellent and weren’t being read.The certwas the main event. Pass it, you’re done. Fail it, the course routed thelearner back through the carousel — this time with a real reason to read it.
Engagement went up. Knowledge retention went up. The learner got treatedlike an adult with a job to do.
That course wasn’t fancier than the one before it. It was designeddifferently.
So — why is your eLearning boring?
Honestly? Probably because it’s still trying to be a textbook indisguise.
The agencies still selling 80-slide compliance courses with a flip cardevery three pages aren’t bad at their jobs. They’re selling what’s easy toscope, easy to invoice, and easy to template. That format is the safe one. It’salso the one your team is checking out of.
You don’t need a bigger budget. You don’t need fancier authoring tools.You don’t even need AI yet.
You need to stop accepting courses and start asking for experiences yourteam can actually use.
Got a course you’re not sure about? Send us a message.