Beyond the Headlines: Lessons for L&D (5/5/25)
- marleegeiger
- May 5
- 4 min read
“We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” — Marshall McLuhan
There’s always something in the back of my mind when I’m creating learning content. It hovers over my shoulder as I hit publish.
Am I designing learning that is going to change minds? Or am I designing for metrics?
I found that this week that cloud that hovers over all our shoulders made its way into the headlines. All of them glimpses into a design philosophy in motion. The future of learning design, if you will. Every messy aspect.
Below I looked at five of the past week’s articles. It shows us not only where LxD is going, but also what kind of professionals we’re becoming in the process.
I’ve been a LxD professional for a long time, and I remember a time when AI in learning felt more like a sci-fi novel than a reality. It was distant, it was weird, and it was, frankly, a bit scary. But now it’s here, and we’re forced to meet it face to face.
Learning News lets us envisions a new relationship between the LxD professional and AI. Not as something that may one day replace us, but as something that can help us be more creative with our work. While we can refocus ourselves on the human parts of Learning Design, AI can start to help us with diving into post-course surveys that would take us hours to analyze.
But AI isn’t just a tool that we can let run free. We need to enter into dialogue with it. We need to push back on the easy answers that AI may give us and focus on creating more human focused content. Always focusing on what feels right for the real humans that will be taking in our content.
So now we shouldn’t focus on what AI can do, but what it lets us do more. Gives us time back for context, nuance, and back to being a designer.
As professionals that are in the professional development space, sometimes we forget about our own professional development. But there are some really exciting events going on lately.
The Women in Learning & Development 2025 conference is taking aim at expanding the emotional terrain of our field. Some of the topics that will be focused on include designing for neurodiversity, inclusive tech choices, and the motional labor of L&D leadership. Talks that truly matter.
As an LxD professional, sometimes admittedly stretched thin, events like these are rare moments where I can take a step back and breath. It’s a reminder that design isn’t just about data. It’s cultural, it’s emotional, and it’s political.
Attending doesn’t just sharpen your skills. It reminds you why you have them in the first place.
Adobe’s breakdown of digital learning trends could have easily fallen into familiar tropes. Instead, it shows a new design pattern quietly appearing. One that’s more improvisational than instructional.
Trend #1: Generative AI as ideation partner.
Trend #2: Personalized learning journeys informed by real-time data.
Trend #3: Seamless hybrid environments that feel less like patchwork and more like choreography.
These aren’t temporary fads, but fundamental shifts in how we think about relationships between content, context, and learning empowerment. It shows us as LxD professionals that we are leaving linear design paths in the past. Our future is branching and shifting and alive.
Instead of just being instructional designers, we need to start thinking like experience designers. We are inviting them into a living, breathing ecosystem and guiding their journey through it.
At UNC, in a medical Spanish course, there is a secret masterclass in soul-centered learning design.
I took Spanish in middle school (and then French in high school) and could not tell you how to say much to this day. The learning was drilling conjugations into our heads and hoping it sticks. Instead, at UNC, the students are reading literature and then using those narratives to role-play real-life patient conversations.
Through this, the students are not only learning more, but also feeling empathy through the stories. I think that this is a great reminder to go beyond content and into the meaning of the content. The most efficient way to teach something may be quick and easy, but it might just take the human element out of it.
We could build compliance courses through stories. Cybersecurity training having characters that the learner can relate to.
This case study reminds us that learners can handle depth, and it may just make them enjoy the training that much more.
Our last article is from Adobe, who gathered learning leaders to figure out what really is the future of LxD.
The trend line? Less command and control, and more co-creation. Learning isn’t supposed to be just a business function. It’s meant to be a relationship that is reciprocal. It adapts, even when that creates mess.
Furthermore, it’s a temperature check for us. If our dashboards are only tracking completion rates, we may already be behind. The future tracks behavior, decision-making, and confidence.
We are in a unique placement as LxD professionals. We have to speak to both the boardroom and the break room. It’s our job to advocate for meaning without losing business value. It’s for sure not easy, but if we slow down we may just be able to make the most transformative designs.
The Takeaway
The age of the passive learner is over, and the articles this week prove that fact.
We’re moving into an era where our learners are collaborators, AIs are our apprentices, and where the most powerful learning experience feels like it was built exactly for you.
That’s great news. We’re not a content churning machine. We create experiences. We build culture.
So the question isn’t “Are you keeping up?”
It’s: What kind of future are you designing toward?
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