Instructional Design: Build Online Courses That Work

This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Training that gets excellent satisfaction scores and changes nothing at work is the normal outcome, not the exception. People enjoyed it, learned something, went back to their desks and did exactly what they did before.

That gap has a name and a literature. It is called transfer, and almost nobody designs for it.

Why good courses fail

The course was built from the material available rather than from a diagnosed need. The objectives describe what will be covered instead of what someone will do differently. There is no plan for the week after, when the old habits reassert themselves and the manager who sent the person never asks about it. Evaluation, if it happens at all, measures whether people liked the session.

Online makes each of these worse. There is no room, no social pressure, and nobody notices when someone stops watching in week two.

Method before delivery

Thirty-four lessons. Ten on instructional design as a discipline: the ATD competency model, ADDIE, diagnosing a need and linking it to a business outcome, mapping a learning journey, the nine steps of how learning actually works, the sixteen factors that determine whether knowledge reaches the job, the role of the manager afterwards, performance support, six-step evaluation, and building a learning strategy connected to the rest of the organisation.

Then six on online course construction: how adults learn, the platform and tool stack, choosing a topic and building the programme, sources, homework that makes people work, running live sessions, engagement, and evaluating what landed.

The room, the group and AI

Then six on the trainer's craft, which online creators skip and then wonder why their videos feel flat. Dale's Cone, preparing a session down to room layout and coffee breaks, the four-stage learning cycle, group dynamics and their four phases, warm-ups, handling resistance, metaphors, sub-group rules, and how to close.

Then six on facilitation, which is what separates a discussion that decides something from a lecture with questions: preparing, holding focus, generating and prioritising ideas, assigning owners, handling the participant who challenges everything, and running it online or with an international group.

And six on AI: course generation platforms, producing text, video and assessment, personalised learning paths from skills analysis, AI analytics for effectiveness, and where this is going.

Who is teaching this

Mike, the number one HR instructor on Udemy. More than 1.6 million course enrolments, over 150,000 professionals trained, PHRi and SHRM-CP certified, HRCI representative in more than 10 countries. I built the people function of the unicorn Preply and worked at Wargaming, Alfa-Bank and iDeals. I have also built and launched over five hundred online courses, which is where most of the practical detail here comes from.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all course materials

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Practical assignments and real business cases

• A section with additional courses, tools and resources

Start with this

Take a course you delivered and write down what someone does differently at work because of it. If you cannot name a specific behaviour, the course was content rather than training. That distinction is what these thirty-four lessons are about. Enrol now and start the first lesson today.