The Real Reason E-Learning Is So Bad

You get an email about a mandatory three-hour harassment course. Your first reaction isn’t excitement. You’ve taken it before, or something close enough to know how it goes. Lots of slides, a few knowledge checks, a certificate at the end. The experience feels like a formality because, usually, it is.

That feeling is worth paying attention to. Because bad e-learning isn’t an accident. It’s the predictable output of a few specific conditions. And until those conditions change, the courses won’t.

The tools aren’t the problem

Despite all of the yammering from e-learning’s LinkedIn posse, the real reason boring e-learning keeps getting built has little to do with the software. They often get most of the blame for the state of e-learning. The argument is that we’ve made it too easy for untrained people to build courses. That’s an elitist take, and it misses the point.

Boring courses existed long before the modern e-learning tools showed up. Thirty years ago, they were just as dull, but they cost far more to make. The kicker is that they were built by instructional designers with full production budgets. At least a lot more than what people get today.

The tools didn’t create the problem. They just made it faster to produce more of the same thing. The root cause is somewhere else entirely.

Where AI fits in: A lot of people are worried about AI taking their jobs. That’s a fair concern, and it’s worth taking seriously. But in this context, AI is less of a threat and more of a thinking partner for people who don’t have a lot of design experience.

If you’re an organization with one overworked developer and no instructional design background, AI can quickly point you toward better questions. What’s the actual goal here? Who are the learners? What should they be able to do after this?

Good AI tools are trained on sound performance consulting and instructional design thinking. They can steer an inexperienced team in the right direction faster than trial and error will.

Organizations buy the software and call it done

Most organizations invest in a tool and stop there. Developers are left to figure out the rest on their own, usually working through a content backlog with minimal support.

Good courses need more than good software. They need graphic designers who can build visuals that support the content. They need UX thinking, multimedia support, and sometimes access to developers. The people building courses also need regular training to get more out of the tools they use every day.

What most organizations have instead is one or two overworked people with a long list of requests and not much backup. That’s the environment that produces boring courses. Not the software.

Where AI fits in: Can’t afford a graphics team? AI image and design tools have gotten good enough to help a solo developer produce visuals that don’t look like clip art from 2003. Need to think through your options on a project? Talk it through with an AI tool.

It’s decent at helping you see angles you might have missed. It won’t replace a real graphic designer or a seasoned instructional designer, but for teams working with very little, it raises the floor.

Content isn’t the same as learning

The biggest driver of bad e-learning is a content-first mindset. When something goes wrong at work, the default response is to share more information. We need more training! So we build a course. Add a slide. Throw a quiz at the end. That’s not learning!

Most of the dull e-learning out there takes existing documents and packages them to look like a course. Content without context or practice doesn’t change what people do on the job. For content to actually work, it needs two things: 1) it needs to be meaningful and 2) the learner needs to practice and apply what they’ll do outside the course.

Courses that skip those steps share information but don’t shift anything. The learner finishes, gets the certificate, and moves on. Nothing changes. That’s why so many of these courses feel pointless. Because they are.

Where AI fits in: This is where AI can do some of its most useful work, and where it needs the most supervision. Organizations tend to equate knowing content with training.

AI, if you ask it the right questions, will push back on that. It understands the difference between information transfer and behavior change. Ask it to help you define a learning objective and it’ll ask what learners should do differently, not just what they should know.

That’s the right instinct. The risk is letting AI generate the content itself without much direction. You’ll get something that sounds like a course but reflects nobody’s real experience. Use AI to sharpen your thinking. Write the course from that thinking.

Treat it as an intern who can collect and organize your thinking. But make sure you’re the “your” in the thinking. 😊

Key takeaways

Bad e-learning isn’t going anywhere. But if you want to build better courses, start by looking at what your organization actually invests in beyond the software. Push for the resources you need, lean into AI and then find time for your own training, and space to build context and practice into your work.

If you’re in a position to make the case for those things, make it. And if you’re not there yet, knowing what’s missing is still useful. It tells you what you’re working around, and where to focus when the opportunity opens up.