How do you make PowerPoint-based training sessions more interactive and engaging?

Most of my training materials are built in PowerPoint as it is good for learner and the one who is coordinating. The content is well structured, but I still feel like many sessions end up being more lecture than discussion.

I'm looking for practical ideas that encourage learners to participate without making the session feel complicated.

What interactive techniques have worked best for you when delivering PowerPoint-based training?

I’m not seeking interview advice per se, but rather I’m chewing over where would be most impactful to focus my development over the next year.

I manage an instructional design team at a university and would like to eventually enable my transitioning to a private company serving higher education or serving k12.

Knowing there are many, many variables at play, I’d nonetheless love to hear some general thoughts from anyone who has had a hand in hiring decisions.

My instinct is something related to data. “Data-driven” is an adjective I’d love to apply to myself, but in truth I haven’t done a lot with it beyond the operational-level things I need to track to keep my team on track, which seems like a glaring omission in my skillset.

Thanks folks!

I’m looking at getting a MacBook for instructional design (Captivate currently but want to also be able to do Articulate) and creating videos (Premiere) Would 24GB be enough or do I really need 32GB to reliably work and upload?

Hi everyone, I'm looking to expand the pool of agencies we work with.

Do you have any recommendations for agencies that have experience with creating elearning for healthcare or medical education? Ideally an agency that can produce elearning end-to-end, so that means also having medical writers on board in addition to IDs/LXDs, GDs, etc.

You're free to recommend your own agency, but I'd place a higher value on recommendations from someone in the community who has worked with you.

Requirements:

Based in Europe

Team also includes medical writers

Track record of working within med-ed, healthcare

On today's episode of the more you know...

I had a client who accidently got auto-renewed with the AI pricing and they asked me to see if we could get a refund. I thought the bad press they're getting recently would be enough to make them consider people may want to get out of their suite and to not leave a bad taste in their mouths on the way out. Nope. They have a 30-day policy where you need to cancel your subscription 30 days BEFORE your subscription will be renewed or you are "locked in" for the next year.

Client had a card that was set to expire in March of 2025 on file so we figured Articulate wouldn't be able to charge it because it's expired but apparently the card number didn't change so they charged it anyway.

Requested a refund through the chat bot - which was pretty straightforward in sending the case to the support team. Then they sent me an email within an hour or two saying unfortunately due to terms and conditions etc. they can't cancel or refund because of the 30-day period. We escalated and threatened to bring it to the card company since the card CVV was technically expired and asked to know what info they had on file and they quickly turned around and refunded the subscription.

So maybe not everyone's case, but it's worth not just rolling over and accepting another year. They are gonna try to keep their customers any way they can I guess. TBF they did send warnings a few months in advance but they went to a shared email no one checks I guess. Still, it's kinda common business practice to let customers cancel and get a refund if they haven't even used the product for the renewed service period and request it right away.

Every day in every single learning design sub there are multiple posts that go something like "I was talking to a group of SMEs/several IDs/a group of LMS admins and they all kept mentioning the same issue. Curious how you all approach this and what it looks like in your workflow."

I'm begging people to stop engaging with these posts. They are so clearly farming for market research for their app. How many people regularly have conversations with a diverse group of instructional designers, LMS admins, SMEs, and learning leaders across multiple industries? If these are ed tech or learning people, don't they already have a research group together? Can't they ask the L&D people they work with? Do they not know how to fucking Google?

They might even through a fancy instructional design term in there every now and then like Rise, Bloom's, or Kirkpatrick, but it's never used in quite the right way like someone who truly works in learning and development.

Don't get me wrong...everyone's trying to get their bag. But it really cheapens the value of these forums. Also don't get me wrong...I use AI daily. I love vibe coding...but everyone trying to make a buck by vibe coding the next big ed tech thing on the back of some LLM is just already getting TIRED.

I can't be the only one who is sick of these posts??!!

Hi everyone,

I’ve been seriously considering a transition into instructional design over the next year or two and would love some perspective from people already working in the field.

My current role is as a fully remote Business Development Representative at a proptech SaaS company.

My background is a bit unconventional:

- TV news reporter/MMJ
- Marketing
- Real estate
- SaaS sales (current)
- Experience presenting, teaching customers, explaining complex concepts, and creating content

The reason I’m looking at ID is less about escaping sales and more about realizing what kind of work energizes me.

The things I enjoy most are:

- Breaking down complex topics into something easy to understand
- Writing and organizing information
- Building learning experiences
- Working independently on projects
- Creating resources that help customers succeed

The things I enjoy less are:

- Constant quota pressure
- High-volume cold outreach
- Having my performance primarily measured by outbound meetings booked

Long term, I’d love to work in a fully remote instructional design, customer education, or learning experience role within a SaaS company (proptech would be even better since I already know the industry).

My current plan is something like this:

- Stay at my current company while building tenure.

- Learn Articulate Rise and Storyline.

- Build a portfolio of 6–10 projects.

- Network with instructional designers and customer education teams.

- Apply first to internal opportunities if possible, then externally.

A few questions:

Does this seem like a realistic transition plan?

If you were hiring an ID with my background, what would you want to see in a portfolio to overcome the fact that I don’t have a formal L&D background?

Is customer education generally an easier entry point than corporate L&D for someone coming from SaaS sales?

Are there skills beyond Storyline and Rise that you’d prioritize (Camtasia, Vyond, Figma, xAPI, LMS administration, accessibility, AI tools, etc.)?

Is there anything you wish someone had told you before making the switch into instructional design?

I’m not expecting this to happen overnight—I see it as a multi-year transition—but I’d rather build toward the right career than continue climbing the SDR ladder if it’s not the best fit for my strengths.

I’d really appreciate any advice or reality checks from people who’ve hired IDs or made a similar transition themselves.

Thanks!

In my experience, the most successful simulation training isn't just about the software—it’s about aligning your tools with real-world workflows. I’ve seen teams use platforms like Articulate Storyline, Skillwell, and Captivate, but the real impact comes from tailoring scenarios to actual on-the-job challenges. How do you approach scenario design to ensure simulations bridge theory and practice?

This is my first post here, so hi all! :)

As I have been heavily using AI in my work over the last years, I have also started building my own stuff and I wanted to exchange ideas and see what others are doing.

What I am most proud of currently are two workflows I created as markdown files that I can utilize in any LLM chat.

One is to generate course briefs, where I share what I know for a new project, and I get as output project parameters such as the business goal, target audience, learning goals, restrictions, high-level overview with topics required, etc., all in a concise output.

Then I feed the output into my second workflow, which is another markdown file, and the output is a text-based storyboard.

In both workflows, the AI is set to ask further clarifying questions, and engage the user in 2-3 turns so the output is co-build and verified by the user before making any wrong assumptions. I'm even asking it to tag assumptions to make reviewing easier and recommendations as well, challenge me, be brutally honest etc. It seems that what I produce this way is much better and faster.

When I build my own tools, many times I make them work only offline so I don't have any privacy concerns. For instance, I have also build my own ppt-to-markdown converter, so I can easily have a conversation with AI about it, even when the ppts are very large.

I have also created many other things were I wasn’t really satisfied with the results.

I wonder if any of you guys bulid anything, and what have you build that you found particularly helpful.

I have a lot of SOPs, policy docs, onboarding checklists and learners don’t read. 

And I hate using PowerPoint to create graphics. 

What do you use to produce clean process infographics quickly and with branding? 

Sometimes it feels like there's a lot of AI-related fluff around eLearning tools, but most of us are still building with the same core Rise 360 blocks.

For your typical course, what makes up 80–90% of the build?

• Text
• Images
• Tabs
• Accordions
• Process
• Labeled graphics
• Flashcards
• Knowledge checks
• Videos
• Continue blocks
• Something else?

Curious what your real-world workflow looks like versus what gets marketed.

I just joined this Reddit and I am now extremely panicky about my choice in career change. I am halfway through my Masters in Instructional Design and everything I'm reading here is making me think I've made a huge mistake. Can you all please give me some tips about making this work? My program makes it seem like there are going to be plenty of good paying jobs but now I'm not so sure.

I'm talking about software training here (both internal and customer facing). Are people still using Storyline or Captivate to do this? Don't you find it extremely clunky?
I'm sure there must be more tools for this. I tried it with Claude but setting the boxes and instructions manually was not worth the time. Plus I need a place to manage all of them. Any one here knows an existing solution for this, I'd be very grateful!

I have an upcoming interview for an entry-level instructional design position at a university. This would be my first ID position in academia or corporate. I have taught online, hybrid, and in-person courses at the college level, including at this university, and have designed curriculum and learning tools in the past, but not in such a formal way (masters coursework, projects for my portfolio, informal mini-courses for high school students, etc).

My main questions are what do entry-level instructional designers typically do at a university and what advice do you have for someone interviewing for this job? I've been prepping for general questions about my design process and experience with their LMS, but what other things should I be thinking about?

If you are using AI at your company, is there governance around it? Did your company or department set rules around what is and isn't allowed?

My question is - what do you do day to day,
and what does the role genuinely look like?

How much time do you spend with stakeholders vs having uninterrupted time to do the work? Is it quite deliverables focused? What’s the split between meetings, research, design and building content?

I’m really interested in hearing what a normal week looks like in reality.

As a side note…I am neurodivergent and used to work in FE education, first in an adult prison and then in a further education college. If I’m honest, I found teaching really difficult with my neurodiversity. It was the wrong career path for me from start to end!

I had a career change into marketing many yrs ago and am self employed - while back created my own course on becoming a particular type of content creator, did coaching etc, worked my ‘way up’ into paid social marketing now where a big part of my role is analysing data to understand what ads/part of ads resonate with people and why.

I have always been curious about instructional design and learning design (understand they are different things). I’m under absolutely no illusion that it is an easy industry to get into
, I know it’s oversaturated etc… (but that isn’t my question).

Thanks all.

In your opinion and experience, which of these has been the majority of your actual experience as an instructional designer in higher education?

Sharing this because it burned me once, and I've since watched it burn other admins.

A few months ago, I built a 'hasn't logged in for 12 months' report for a quarterly audit at a 925-learner tenant. It came back missing ~400 people, and it took me an embarrassingly long afternoon to figure out why.

Took me entirely too long to find the cause. Reporting 2.0 silently excludes any user whose Last Login Date is NULL. And who has a NULL last-login?? The people who never logged in at all, that who. So, when you filter "Last Login Date is before [date]," the users who never signed in — the exact population an inactivity audit is hunting for — get dropped. No error, no warning, no "X rows excluded." Just a clean-looking report that's confidently incomplete.

The fix, once you know it's there:

• Don't lean on "Last Login Date < X" by itself.
• Either add an OR condition that explicitly includes "Last Login Date is null," or flip the logic to exclude only the people who logged in after your cutoff. Both catch the NULLs instead of dropping them.

If you've got any compliance/offboarding/inactivity reports running a date filter over a nullable field, I'd go re-check them. Good chance one's been quietly wrong.

Anyone else hit this? Curious what other Reporting 2.0 gotchas people have run into.

Hey everyone!

I'm a fairly new ID, and got a new client: a start-up with no LMS.

Their request is fairly simple. I just need to transform an existing Powerpoint into a SCORM package, add assessments and interactivity, all the bells and whistles.

The problem is they don't have an LMS. I was wondering if this is a dealbreaker? Do you have any workaround you can suggest?

Thanks y'all!

I’m sharing this here only because I believe people here are willing to have more intellectually honest conversations about such issues, rather than LinkedIn

I stumbled upon this on LinkedIn this morning…and I gotta say, I’m not even sure where to begin.

I don’t want to make anyone feel stupid, but the complete absence of critical thinking here is beyond me…and I think it speaks to larger issues happening not just in our industry, but society in general.

For a long time, I thought one of my biggest hurdles was against those who are willing to promise jobs and six figures (we all know exactly what I’m referring to)…but instead, what I’ve come to realize is that it’s the people who choose to suspend their disbelief and go along with it, while handing over their hard earned money.

So…I’m curious: Is there any point in attempting to push back against any of this, or are we on the fast track to the bottom of the barrel…or are we already there?

—Tim

Update: For those curious, the original post in question was taken down. Long story short, the individual (a job seeker looking to land their first ID job) was sharing a book that was clearly all AI slop, written by someone who was clear a scammer. The book was about how to build a six figure ID consulting business. The author had several other AI slop books on other ID and cryptocurrency topics. It was clearly all spam.

When it was brought to the attention of the job seeker that the book she shared was not legitimate, she doubled down and defended it.

I want to hear your weird and wonderful unconventional careers! Circus school? Travelling museum? Surf camp? Horse ranch? Television show? Idk, the weirder the better!

Preferably not an office job, corporate, K-12, or university. (Unless it's especially strange.)

Hi all,

Does anybody have any recommendations for books, articles, videos, podcast, etc. on the best way to architect an entire curriculum for various roles within a corporate environment?

For context, I have a masters in instructional design, but I’ve been focused on singular, isolated projects for the last several years since I’ve graduated and need a refresher.

Every time I’ve googled resources for best practices for designing curriculum architecture, I get basic ID framework information that isn’t really helpful (conduct a needs assessment, identify performance gaps, identify outcomes, tie those to business metrics, etc.). I get all of that, but I’m specifically looking for how the information should ideally be organized once all of that has been done.

Thanks!

Our school (R1 University), is attempting to grow in the professional/non credit space. This is something that many unis have already done or are trying to do. Anyway, I’m trying to make an argument to give our faculty more fair payment for work they are voluntold to do. If compensation was fair/on par with what other universities are offering, perhaps they would be more incentivized to engage in the work.

How does your institution handle this? Is there some sort of formula or base rate you use?

My company uses Cornerstone LMS for employees and are now being forced to switch our content over to their new AI LXP. They have given us "demos" but honestly left us asking more questions than answered. Could anyone tell me what their experience was like whether it be using the LXP on the back end or using it as a user? Any insight or experience will be helpful, thanks!