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What Is Instructional Design?
Do you remember teaching someone something? What was it, and how did you do it?
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Learning is not something that happens only in classrooms.It is embedded in every designed experience you encounter.
When you hear "Instructional Design," what's your first instinct?
Every time you pick up a new app intuitively, follow a game tutorial without reading a manual, or understand a product without needing support —someone designed that learning experience deliberately.
When that invisible layer is well-crafted, you don't notice it.The experience just feels natural, intuitive, frictionless.The learning happened without you realizing you were being taught.
When it's missing or poorly designed, you feel it immediately —as confusion, frustration, abandonment, or the specific kind of anger that comes from feeling like the problem is you, when the real problem is the design.
The consequences of a missing learning layer show up across every domain:
Confusing apps that users abandon after day three
New hires who revert to old behavior a week after onboarding
Sales cycles that stall because the client never truly understood the value
Online courses that get purchased and never finished
The gap between what someone needs to be able to do and what they currently can do is not a personal failing.It is a design problem.And design problems have design solutions.
Part 2: What Instructional Design Actually Is
Instructional Design is the architecture of understanding.
It is the discipline of deliberately engineering the conditions under which learning — real, lasting, behavioral learning — occurs.
ID sits at the intersection of four domains: psychology, design, education, and technology.It borrows from all four and reduces to none of them.
Having knowledge is not the same as being able to transfer it.The gap between knowing something and being able to teach it effectively is where most well-intentioned learning experiences collapse.
This is what the Solomon Islands moment in the video illustrates. The information existed. The need was urgent. The stakes were real.But without a deliberate bridge between the data and the people who needed it, the knowledge stayed locked on the screen.
Instructional Design is not a luxury for large organizations with training budgets.It is the foundational skill of anyone who needs to transfer capability from one mind to another — which includes anyone who builds products, leads teams, sells ideas, or teaches anything to anyone.
For each of the following, decide: is this Instructional Design?
1/8
Writing clear documentation for a new software feature
Part 3: Who This Is For
Before any instructional designer builds anything,they analyze the audience.So let's do that now — for you.
This is not a course for passive consumers of information.It is designed for people who build things and need the people around them to be able to do things.
You are probably someone operatingat the intersection of knowledge and execution— a founder, a product designer, a team lead, a consultant, a developer, an educator, or someone who has recently realized thattheir ability to transfer knowledge is the limiting factor on their impact.
Turning vision into something others can actually run.
Making the first minutes of an experience teach, not confuse.
Getting capability out of your head and into the team.
Packaging expertise so clients execute, not just agree.
Explaining systems so the next person can change them safely.
Designing for behavior change, not just coverage.
You are smart enough to sense thatinformation alone doesn't change behavior.You've seen it fail. You've probably felt the specific frustration of explaining something clearly, correctly, and completely — and watching the person in front of you not change what they do.
What you likely don't yet have isthe vocabulary, the models, or the systemto diagnose why that's happening and fix it deliberately.That gap — between intuition and system — is exactly what this course closes.Think about a specific moment in the last six months where knowledge failed to transfer.
Maybe you tried to explain something and it didn't land. Maybe you built something and users couldn't use it. Maybe you trained someone and they reverted to old behavior.
Hey, thanks for pausing. What's one real moment from the last few months where teaching or explaining didn't quite land?
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Part 4: The Problem With How We Currently Teach
Traditional education was not designed to develop people.It was designed to sort them.
The model most of us experienced — sit, listen, memorize, test, repeat — was built for a world that needed to identify the naturals and filter out the rest.It was efficient for sorting. It is catastrophically inefficient for developing capability in everyone.
The traditional model fails for three specific reasons:
First, it separates theory from practice. You sit through the lecture before you are ever allowed to do anything. By the time you get to the doing, the theory has already started to evaporate.
Second, it ignores the learner's existing state. It doesn't matter where you are, what you already know, or what specific problem you are trying to solve. The content is the same for everyone, delivered at the same pace, regardless of fit.
Third, it measures the wrong thing. It measures recall under artificial conditions — a test, a quiz, a controlled environment — rather than performance under real conditions. Passing the test and being able to do the thing are not the same outcome.
The result is a world full of people who sat through enormous amounts of instruction and came out the other side unable to do the thing the instruction was supposedly teaching.
Instructional Design exists precisely to solve this.It starts from a different question entirely: not "what do I need to teach?" but "what does this specific person need to be able to do, and what is the most effective path to get them there?"
Which approach is most likely to produce lasting behavior change on the job—not just right after the session?
Part 5: The Learning Goal for This Course
Every well-designed learning experience has a specific, measurable goal.This one is no different.
Here is what this course is designed to produce:
Given any complex skill, any audience, and any constraint — you will be able to design a learning experience that actually changes behavior.
Theory without practice produces awareness.Practice without theory produces luck.This course gives you both, in the right sequence, so you can produce results deliberately.
Hey, who do you most need to help learn or get better at something?
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What Comes Next
You now know what Instructional Design is. You know the gap it closes. You know what this course is designed to produce — but knowing is not the same as being able to do.
The simulator below drops you into a post-apocalyptic settlement where people need to learn things in order to survive. No theory. No framework yet. Just your current instincts and a community that is counting on you. Your job is to go in and help them — using whatever you currently know.
Click below. Enter Walden. I'll see you on the other side.
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