Speaking
I talk about getting training to market faster. Speed that comes from expertise, not from replacing the people who have it.
Rapid authoring development has been my specialty for most of my career: the strategies and methods that compress a build without the learner ever noticing it was compressed. Those methods existed long before AI. What AI changed is which parts of them stopped being expensive, and the two together are quicker than either was alone.
Since 2008 I have led NextGen AI Learning, now a community of nearly 90,000 people working in this field. This year I built fifty-four tools for the parts of the job nobody writes about and gave every one of them away. Twenty-eight years in, that is what I have to say something useful about: what practitioners struggle with at scale, and what it takes to do something about it rather than write about it.
What I speak about
Rapid authoring development
How to bring training to market in a fraction of the conventional time, and why the usual attempt fails. Speed is normally bought by trading away quality or retention, and it does not have to be. The methods are unglamorous, they are mostly decisions made before anybody opens the authoring tool, and they compound. None of it works by taking the instructional designer out of the loop. It works by moving their judgment earlier.
What AI actually changed, and what it did not
The rapid development playbook is older than the technology. AI did not invent it; it removed the specific bottlenecks that made it hard to run. Which parts of a build genuinely got faster, which parts did not move at all, and where the time people think they are saving quietly reappears later in the review cycle.
Where instructional design actually loses time
Not where people assume. Counting narration words for a translation quote. Hunting the asset that pushed a course past the LMS file limit. Auditing caption coverage across fifty slides by hand, again. I built a tool for each of these and can say which ones people actually reach for, which is a different list from the one any of us would have predicted.
What ninety thousand members will and will not tell you
Running a professional community since 2008, and the distance between what an audience says it wants and what it actually uses. Asking people directly is the least reliable research method available, and it is the one almost everybody relies on.
Also happy to cover
- Why the same small problems in this field have stayed unsolved for twenty years, and what that says about how software gets funded
- Giving the utility layer away: what fifty-four free tools returned, and what they plainly did not
- Accessibility as a constraint you build under rather than a check you fail at the end
- What makes a course cheap or expensive to localize, decided long before anybody sends it to a vendor
- Why published courses fail in the LMS, and the handful of causes that account for most of it
Everything I say is checkable
The material is not assembled from other people’s conference talks. It comes out of building the things, and the things are public. If a claim about SCORM packaging sounds convenient, the validator is on this site and you can put a real package through it. If the point is about what course files actually contain, the inspector will open one of yours. An audience can test the argument during the session, which is a good discipline for the person making it.
Formats
- Conference sessions and keynotes. Forty-five to sixty minutes, or a shorter opening slot.
- Panels. Especially where somebody is needed to disagree with the consensus rather than round it out.
- Podcasts and interviews. Remote, and usually bookable inside a week.
- Workshops. Rapid development run as a working session, where a team leaves having found the places their own process leaks.
Get in touch
Tell me the audience, the date and roughly how long you want. I will tell you which of these is the right fit, or say so if none of them is.
Pick a slot that suits you. No introduction email needed first.
Curt has designed learning programs across manufacturing, retail, consumer technology and medical education, starting with enterprise learning systems in Europe in the late nineties.
He holds an MA in Educational Technology from the University of San Francisco, and ran his own learning consultancy, Boston Learning Solutions, until 2019.
- Instructional design
- Corporate learning strategy
- Course localization
- Learning technology