Spoiler: It’s not the tool. It’s the design … or lack of it.
Let me share with you something I keep seeing across every project that comes 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 click through, hit next, hit next, hit next, take the quiz they could pass without watching anything, and forget all of it by Friday.
Then leadership looks at the engagement numbers and wonders what went wrong.
The last 15 years of instructional design have seen companies go from using tools like Flash to no code tools like Lectora and Storyline, and then to more modern mobile friendly tools like Evolve and Rise trying to solve this issue, but the real problem is that somewhere along the way, “course” came to mean “60-slide click-through with a multiple-choice quiz at the end” — and our industry just kept building that, year after year, deck after deck.
Now, AI has opened a new chapter for eLearning where power users are already building full courses that can be uploaded directly to your LMS in less than 40 hours.
But how can we ensure we don’t keep delivering the same corporate training that feels tedious, monotonous, and mandatory.
eLearning’s whole superpower is flexibility — anywhere, anytime, on demand. The pandemic proved that. When offices closed, eLearning kept training moving. But the industry mostly used that flexibility to deliver more of the same: long, generic, one-size-fits-no-one courses with zero customization and almost 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, flip cards, and hotspots, all of which are just decorated ways to make the learner reveal 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 The course didn’t fail because the content was wrong. It failed because the design asked people to 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 right move is to 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 A simple frame the brain can hold onto: Why If it’s a process, give them the steps. If it’s a decision, give them the criteria. The structure doesn’t need a fancy name. It just needs to make the content 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 was booked for 60 minutes. eLearning has no such excuse. Its actual advantage is that an employee can take it during a quiet 8 minutes between meetings. Don’t waste that on a 45-minute clickthrough nobody asked for. Smaller chunks, more often, will out-perform the giant annual course every single time. Your people might 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 of accordions, flip cards, and hotspots. I’m hoping — Here’s the thing nobody in this industry says out loud: an “interaction” every three slides is not engagement. It’s a polite way to make the learner click before they’re allowed to move on.\
What you actually want is an Two questions to ask before you sign off on any course: Is this knowledge or a skill?\
A real example: nuking a 60-slide cybersecurity course\
In 2019, I worked with my first Gen Z subject matter expert on a project I won’t forget. The brief was the standard one: revamp the annual cybersecurity policy training. The catch was that the company had been running this course for The SME and I started talking about short-form video — what was taking off on social at the time. I’d been eyeing 7taps (a microlearning tool built around bite-sized, mobile-first cards) for a while because my manager and I had a hunch that short-form was the future of corporate training. So we went all in. The 60-slide course got nuked. Here’s what we built instead: We kept the certification, because compliance is compliance.The course opened 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 card linking out to deeper resources — including the cybersecurity team’s own intranet posts, which were already excellent and weren’t being read.The cert was the main event. Pass it, you’re done. Fail it, the course routed the learner back through the carousel — this time with a real reason to read it. Engagement went up. Knowledge retention went up. The learner got treated like an adult with a job to do. That course wasn’t fancier than the one before it. It was So — why is your eLearning boring? Honestly? Probably because it’s still trying to be a textbook in disguise. The agencies still selling 80-slide compliance courses with a flip card every three pages aren’t bad at their jobs. They’re selling what’s easy to scope, easy to invoice, and easy to template. That format is the safe one. It’s also 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 your team can actually use. Got a course you’re not sure about? Drop a comment — I read all of them.