A well-designed course should tell a clear story. Learners should understand what they are expected to learn, have opportunities to practice it, and then be asked to show what they know.
That sounds simple, but it is easy for those pieces to become disconnected.
A course might have a learning objective that asks students to analyze information, while the final quiz only asks them to remember definitions. Another course might ask learners to create something but never give them a chance to practice that skill before the final assignment.
This is where instructional design becomes especially valuable.
Learning objectives provide a starting point. From there, designers can ask what learners would need to do to demonstrate that they have reached each objective. If the objective asks learners to compare two ideas, the assessment should give them an opportunity to compare. If learners are expected to solve a problem, they should eventually be asked to solve one.
Activities, readings, videos, discussions, practice exercises, and assessments can then be built around those goals. When these pieces support one another, learners have a much clearer path through the course.
AI can make this process more efficient. An instructional designer might use AI to review a set of objectives and suggest possible assessments, practice activities, or discussion questions. AI can also help identify possible gaps between what an objective says and what an assessment actually measures.
That does not mean we should allow AI to make the final decisions. Context matters. The designer and subject matter expert still need to decide whether an assessment is appropriate for the learners, course level, subject, and learning environment.
For freelancers working with subject matter experts, this can be one of the most useful conversations we bring to a project. Instead of asking only, “What content should we include?” we can also ask, “What should learners be able to do when this is over?”
Once that question has a clear answer, designing the rest of the learning experience becomes much easier.