Learning Guild

Undercurrents surfaces insights from leaders driving capacity-building and performance improvement beyond traditional L&D to explore where learning happens and where it’s headed. By Mark Britz Paul Liberatore began his career where you might expect a learning professional to begin: He studied instructional design, learned the models, understood the importance of analysis, and spent years developing training.

Great interactions do more than keep learners clicking; they help learners think, decide, practice, and apply. In this webinar, we’ll explore how instructional designers can move beyond interactions that simply add visual interest and instead create experiences that support meaningful learning outcomes.

AI-powered digital coaches need more than a strong interface. They need current, governed learning content behind them. Without that foundation, coaches risk delivering inaccurate answers, outdated information, or the wrong resources. In this demo, see how MadCap Create and MadCap Syndicate make approved learning content available to AI agents through search, APIs, and MCP.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming a more integrated part of course development. Beyond drafting text, today’s AI capabilities can support tasks across the production workflow, from developing course structures and creating visuals to generating narration and translating content. AI Innovation in Course Development: The iSpring Suite AI Example explores six practical ways AI is changing course production, using iSpring Suite AI as a case in point.

By Faith Steward A course can be technically accessible and thoughtfully inclusive and still work better for some learners than others. When that idea really clicked for me, I felt both excited and a little uncomfortable. Excited because I had found a new way to think about learning design. Uncomfortable because I could immediately see places in my own work where I had made assumptions about learners without realizing I was making them.

By George Hall In a related article, When Learning Feels Like a Vulnerability, I argued that learning can feel personally risky for adult learners, especially in an environment of constant change. People do not only absorb content. They also interpret what “needing to learn” may imply about their competence, status, confidence, role, and future value. That idea becomes even more important as organizations continue to move toward skills-based talent strategies and continuous learning models.

Tristia Hennessey’s path into learning and development began with risk management training for banks, continued through onboarding and administrative work, and eventually led her to enterprise L&D strategy and program delivery. Today, as Senior Instructional Technology Strategist at Evolve Solutions Group, she helps organizations address challenges that extend far beyond a single course or training objective.

We will examine what worked really well and what didn’t. I will share outcomes that surprised us as I walk through our design decisions and show where we saw genuine value, where AI fell short, and what we would do differently. You’ll map your own programs against an AI-readiness framework and receive a downloadable AI Coaching Integration Checklist, a practical one-page tool that walks through key questions to ask.

This practical session introduces an AI-powered workflow for transforming unstructured SME input into a clear, usable learning blueprint while keeping instructional judgment firmly in human hands.

This session explores the practical boundaries between human decision-making and AI-supported work in instructional design. It introduces a clear distinction between traditional automation and generative AI and examines how each can be used effectively without compromising accuracy, compliance, or defensibility.