There are certain types of phrases that can trigger an instructional designer. Learning styles, using “understand” in learning objectives, cognitive overload, last minute stakeholder changes, and more are enough to drive the best instructional designer crazy. Over the years, I’ve had to channel these grievances into more productive ways with sharing best practices. But even now, there are still some things that pop up where I shake my head and pray for divine intervention. So come commiserate with me as we talk about my top three instructional design pet peeves.

(1) Death by Multiple Choice Questions

There is a time and place for multiple choice questions (MCQs). Dr. Patti Shank has an entire book on how to write effective MCQs. My problem isn’t with MCQs in particular, but my problem is that MCQs are by far overused in every form of training and course I can think of. Do a mental exercise with me and envision your last training at work. How did they assess your knowledge? Five hundred bucks says it was through a series of multiple choice questions on Rise.

For recalling facts, definitions, terminology, and getting a hang of the basics, this makes sense. But when there is a meaningful training that HR wants you to go through, is this the best way to evaluate your progress? I don’t think so. The worst is when you arrive at a conclusion of a module and then have to take some kind of 50 multiple choice question exam like we are back in middle school. My favorite, insert all the sarcasm I can muster, is when they try to trick you by just ever so slightly changing the phrasing.

All I keep thinking about is a Best Buy training I found on Reddit that says, “We should greet all Best Buy customers” with the option of being true and false. The incorrect answer was true because instead of greeting the customers, employees should be welcoming them.

I know that this was a true or false question, but you get my point. There is a right way and a wrong way when it comes to MCQs and unfortunately, the wrong way is in the forefront.

(2) Overuse of the Term Engagement

Go ahead and Google anything pertaining to teaching, learning, and design and I promise you, you’ll find the term “engagement” somewhere on the website. This is nothing new and I’ll admit that I have absolutely said that I design meaningful, relevant, and engaging learning experiences. But the more and more I kept on looking around, I realized that engagement has become this catchall buzzword that has truly lost all meaning.

My question for you is what does engagement mean? How do we assess engagement? What it has come to mean through marketing is how many times someone clicks on a tool, or logs into an LMS, or by how many discussion board posts there are. Can these be accurate measurements? Yes, under the right circumstances, but for the most part, they are surface level metrics.

For instance, I have taught online courses for a decade. I can confidently tell you that I have seen forced engagement in the discussion posts where a student simply says, “I agree,” and then that’s the end of the response. Is that engagement? No. Of course not. Now, on the flip side, I have seen courses where I asked students to respond to two to three peers and instead, they respond to even more and then generate new organic conversations with additional threads. Is that engagement? Yes, it absolutely is.

The other part of engagement is the variability of things becoming more gamified. If I am going through a gamified training and it is just painful, I am smashing the next button as fast as I possibly can. One could count the number of clicks as engagement. But in reality, my mind is completely in another plane and thinking about something more relevant for my work. Now, if you were to observe my behavior and see how I interacted with the training in real-time, that’s a whole different conversation. And to be clear, amazing instructional designers out there are indeed creating engaging learning experiences! But for the most part, we’ve lost this word to marketing. RIP the use of the word engagement.

(3) Zero Effort and Creativity

Have you ever taken a course before where you could 100% tell it was done in a rush? Or you noticed that it straight up lacked any amount of care? This is my fear with AI in the worlds of instructional design and higher education. The point of AI is to not produce crap e-learning faster, but that’s the direction many folks are heading.

Before we had access to Generative AI though, this was already a problem. I mentioned in a podcast episode that came out in June about how stunned I was to hear that one university abandoned scenario-based learning. Come to find out, there was absolutely zero effort and creative within the scenarios, so of course, they were awful. I don’t know all the details. Maybe the timeline was absolutely rushed. Maybe some people quit or there were layoffs. Maybe the budget was slashed and it was the best someone could muster under stressful circumstances. Whatever the case may have been, creativity was not there, and it has to be in the designs.

Every time I hear from someone about how they are building a technical course so it can’t be creative, I hear from another person who found a way to infuse life into that same topic. Even if you are creating a course on a topic that is the definition of dry and boring, you have to at least try. And now, speaking of Generative AI, you can use LLMs about how to make a dry topic more interesting.

The question I ask myself when designing learning experiences is, “Why should they care?” I have these learners’ attention, now what am I going to do with it? Time is the most important resource we have, so let’s put it to good use.

There is no silver bullet when it comes to designing learning experiences and a considerable amount of time has to be spent on perfecting this craft. It’s not an easy task, but we have the ability to make this happen. As IDs, we face challenges constantly and need to keep on pushing through.

Well, those are my instructional design pet peeves. What are yours?

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