Speaking
I talk about where instructional design actually loses time, and what happens when somebody sets out to fix it.
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-three tools for the parts of the job nobody writes about and gave every one of them away. Twenty-eight years in, that combination 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
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.
The problems too small to be products
The same handful of tasks have stayed manual for twenty years. Not because they are hard, but because each one is too small for anybody to build a company around, and nothing gets built without a company behind it. That is a story about how software gets funded rather than a story about this profession, and the same gap sits in every field that has ever said “I have a spreadsheet for that.”
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. What works instead is less comfortable and considerably more useful.
Giving the utility layer away
Fifty-three tools, free, no account, nothing captured. Why that was the right call, what it has returned in reach and standing, and what it has plainly failed to return. An honest account of free as a strategy, including the parts that did not work, which is the half nobody puts in the talk.
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 go and 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 I am easy to schedule.
- Workshops. The same material 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.
curt@nextgenailearning.comOr reach me on LinkedIn.
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 consults on corporate learning strategy through Boston Learning Solutions.
- Instructional design
- Corporate learning strategy
- Course localization
- Learning technology