Hi everyone, I’m new here! Finally made an account. I’m an instructional designer in the US, been doing it almost 3 years now after teaching for a year, and I build most of our courses in Compozer.
So I wanted to ask something that’s been on my mind alot lately. I use chatgpt and Claude for stuff all the time so I’m not anti AI or anything. I just can’t tell if this is another hype thing or if companies are really going to start having SMEs make their own training and cut ID roles. I’m 25 and kinda starting to wonder if I picked the wrong career lol
For those of you who’ve been doing this longer, how are you thinking about it? Are any of you using AI with course builds? …
Honestly it’s not just hype, but I don’t think it’s as scary as it sounds either. Some companies will definitely try having SMEs make their own training. That idea has been around for years though, and what you usually get without an ID involved is an info dump of everything the SME knows. AI just makes that faster, not better. Knowing the content and knowing how people learn it are two very different skills.
I use AI on pretty much every build now, mostly for the first draft stuff. Things like turning a pile of SME docs and PowerPoints into a rough storyboard, chunking content, picking which blocks might work and drafting knowledge check questions. It saves me a lot of time. But I check everything. It’ll happily add stuff that isn’t in the source, and it’ll write quiz questions where two of the answers are kind of right. The output is only as good as the rules you give it, and mine came from doing it the slow way first.
Where I do see things changing is the “take this PowerPoint and make it clickable” kind of work. That’s shrinking for sure. What I don’t see going anywhere is figuring out what people actually need to do on the job, cutting content (so much of this job is cutting content), building good scenarios and practice, and pushing back when something doesn’t need to be a course at all.
You have nothing to worry about. I use AI all the time to assist me in writing content and even then it can take me hours when I have little SME material or need to write something from scratch. Ai will never be perfect and will never replace an actual qualified instructional designer. Yes, it’s an amazing tool and yes we should embrace it or we will all be left behind, but we shouldn’t rely on it completely.
Side note, I find it performs best when you actually write your own content and give it instructions to only use that, or else it goes off on its own tangent and you end up wasting credits trying to fix the things it’s made up. I’ve kept a log of the time I spend trying to perfect a storyboard and it’s surprising how many hours can go into just one. I end up with V.24 and I still find issues in that document.
The SME thing is kinda what got me worried in the first place. It’s good to hear from people who’ve been doing this alot longer than me.
I guess it mostly comes down to budget though. Elearning budgets seem to be getting tighter and more companies are just getting SMEs to build courses in-house instead of using an ID. That’s been one of the big challenges where I work lately. Are you guys seeing the same thing?
Ask ten IDs, get ten answers. From where I’m sitting it’s a little of both. AI makes it quick and easy for just about anyone to put a course together, so yes, there’ll be less ID roles. Is the training going to be as good? No. But like you said, budgets are tight and a cheaper option is hard for companies to pass up. ID won’t disappear though. Somebody still has to feed the content in, put it in order and chase down the SMEs. We’ve already been through it.
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