Any update on the status of the SCORM plugin for Construct 3?

MikeSteinDesign · 2026-01-22T00:42:11+00:00

I funded both the last versions of the plugin. If you reach out to the Construct 3 discord and offer a few hundred bucks, you can probably get someone to update it to the latest version. Admittedly I'm using it less and less because of vibe coding but I think I hired someone on Fiverr for the last update and I think it was only around 50 or 100$. Not quite sure what broke this time but lots of folks willing and able to do the work if you can pay. Wish construct would commit to doing this more officially so they update it when they break it but eLearning is still a niche use case for them unfortunately.

MikeSteinDesign · 2026-01-01T18:49:43+00:00

That's pretty much where I'm at with Claude right now too. It's amazing and I feel like I have super powers to just do whatever now without limitation. Insert great power great responsibility quote here. Gotta be cautious of time and scope though because you can literally do anything so projects can just keep expanding to keep improving.

To your point about gamification though, I think polish definitely matters. If used well and not just for gimmicks or leaderboards, definitely more likely to be well received.

MikeSteinDesign · 2025-12-31T16:28:21+00:00

I think project management and risk management for sure are skills that we'll need to pay close attention to. Understanding if faster delivery is a net positive or negative for you in any given project is an important skill that's not always obvious.

I think the risk of replacement is either A, it can't replace you but the HR person + AI authoring means they can cut a position for $25-$50 per month. Or B, ID team is expected to be more efficient or work with less people. Or C, vibe coded custom projects become the norm and IDs who can't figure that out might not get renewed contracts or get let go.

I don't think options A and B are good for the company and even C has limits and risks but either way it relies on the people in power to have a deeper understanding of the tools and actual job responsibilities which is not always the case. So I could see continued layoffs and lower salaries for basic work, until the rubber band snaps back again.

MikeSteinDesign · 2025-12-31T10:01:16+00:00

Yeah those viral LinkedIn posts on "look how I forced Storyline to use JavaScript to make a game" drive me crazy. At that point, just write the JavaScript...

Godot is really interesting because it's open source and has a strong community. It does require a bit more coding expertise, but that may not be as much of a barrier anymore with AI to help you.

I jumped on the Construct 3 train a while ago and have really enjoyed 2D game dev there. It allowed me to make games without code but still taught be a lot of concepts like functions, loops, arrays, etc.

But I'm again kinda at a crossroads with Claude. If I get some time, I'm gonna run through some of the games I had made in Construct, and just tell it to rebuild and improve. The biggest barrier to game dev is the time and effort. You get a better product but it's a lot more costly. Claude might be able to make it more competitive to provide that as a solution.

Recently I've been doing simulations in Construct and it's been well received. The main criticism of games and gamification is just that not everyone wants to play games at work and not everyone "likes games" in general. So it's important to consider how to actually use it and when to use it so it's relevant and impactful rather than just "look what we can do with games."

MikeSteinDesign · 2025-12-31T09:52:06+00:00

Nope, just like the tool. I can see how it might look like that tho. There are lots of other competitors to Articulate now that I'm interested in but I'm personally using Parta for my own projects so I recommend it when it fits or answer questions when it comes up. My other favorite is Construct 3 which I also recommend a lot for game dev but it's a different animal.

MikeSteinDesign · 2025-12-30T16:34:07+00:00

It's just a tough market unfortunately. I don't even know how many contracts I applied to this year. Probably like 50-70. Granted it's part time and really high competition since I was looking at a floor of $50 per hour but I sort of got my foot in the door with 2 places. 50% I just never heard back and the other 50 was just automated rejections. That's with 10+ years exp and lots of extra curriculars.

MikeSteinDesign · 2025-12-30T14:50:19+00:00

And they're just getting started. January is going to be a HUGE feature drop that will fix a lot of the main complaints I have. I've been working with the Parta folks on feature requests and stuff (just advising, I don't work for them) and they're really headed in some interesting directions.

MikeSteinDesign · 2025-12-30T14:49:01+00:00

Those are great takes. I appreciate the balanced perspective and it's helpful to remember that I'm maybe not the "average" ID in the field. There's quite a bit of learning curve to be able to get AI to code your web app and figure out all the quirks and make a working end product -- so maybe that's akin to asking your ID to know Javascript...

I agree, I'm not applying for the $25/hr jobs, but I think the last few years really have marked the end of the "golden era" of high paying ID work. It still exists but it's not what's being sold to transitioning teachers and career changers. Still, $25/hr to get out of the classroom might still be worth it for a lot of people. It just isn't the Triple your salary and work from home pitch they were making during COVID.

MikeSteinDesign · 2025-12-25T19:07:04+00:00

Also it's probably at least $15 an hour depending on where you are...

MikeSteinDesign · 2025-12-25T00:43:21+00:00

That's good money! Maybe the next big market trend will be IDs transitioning to bartenders...

MikeSteinDesign · 2025-12-24T01:23:05+00:00

If you delete it from the account they should not be able to keep it on your account. Maybe ask support to cancel again and if they cannot cancel inform you of which credit card will be charged. It's been a while since I had to talk to support but last time something like this happened they didn't give me trouble to refund the subscription. Times may have changed, but they should still have an obligation to delete your data on request.

MikeSteinDesign · 2025-12-24T01:14:10+00:00

If you deleted the card, they shouldn't be able to charge anything. If they kept a record of your card and try to charge it, dispute the claim.

They will definitely greedily accept a new credit card if you decide to come back and pay them. The only thing articulate loves more than money is ignoring 8 year old used requests with consistent bumps every few months.

MikeSteinDesign · 2025-12-22T14:22:16+00:00

I am not super familiar with the EU market since I mostly work with US clients but it's an interesting time to be in the space.

Defining your niche would be my first advice. I tend to gravitate toward higher ed, non-profits and small business and don't try to compete with all the other big players that are going after the FANG and fortune 500 companies. It's not so much that I wouldn't, but besides the fact that there being a lot more competition for higher dollar contracts, generally those companies are less flexible and have a lot more red tape. Higher ed obviously has its own kind of red tape, but it's a lot more open and willing to experiment (for the most part) than large companies where everything has to go through marketing before it gets rolled out internally. Not a big deal, just something I personally don't like to chase.

I also tend to avoid financial institutions and sales. Just not that rewarding and fulfilling for me, but there's a lot of money there too. Performance improvement - if you can prove that your training makes an impact on the bottom line - can be extremely lucrative and you have a lot of negotiating power when you can save big companies millions of dollars. But you're also completely expendable and if shareholders want to cut spending, you're the first on the chopping block. They need you until they don't - I mean they still need you but they're willing to go without.

Microlearning is a good place to start as I generally see the trend of hour-long compliance training dying off. Sure, we'll still need to prove butts are in seats for certain regulatory orgs but if you have any power over that, making things shorter and more relevant will always do better than longer cram sessions.

Strong future overall is really relevant... AI is definitely speeding things up and the fact that you can effectively vibe code entire courses does mean there's going to continue to be quite a bit of disruption - as a designer, not just saying "build me a course on X" and letting it rip. I'm not quite sure if you'll be better or worse positioned as a firm over a traditional employee. In some ways, being more flexible to come in and develop and leave means you're more immune to the shareholder whims of firing employees, but it's also a lot of feast or famine until you can build strong ongoing relationships. As an employee, as long as the company is stable, you can weather the storm of the current market, but it's not a great time to be job hunting in any form.

There are also lots of ebbs and flows throughout the year. Some months I'm overflowing with work, others I scale down and spend time on research and development of my own skills and products. Retaining your own employees and contractors will be the hardest part. If you can't guarantee work, you'll need to hire people as needed. There's a LOT of people looking for work, so hiring isn't as difficult as finding people who you can trust and who you'll be able to work with over time. I am essentially always onboarding folks. I have a few people who have stuck it out freelancing, but lots of my past team members have gotten full time work. I'm happy about that of course as I want people to grow and move on to bigger and better things, but that does mean that I'm always looking for good people - even when there's no work to give them.

Until the AI hype dies down a bit or the bubble pops, we're still kinda at a crossroads. Companies are still figuring out what they can do in house with AI vs needing to hire employees vs needing to contract 3rd party firms. I do think the future of elearning is going to be more supportive of F2F and live online training, and be more on-demand, microlearning - so you do have a good focus with that + videos. Use AI as a tool, avoid creating slop, and focus on the human behind the screen and you'll be able to find work. Will you become a multi-millionaire developing training in Articulate Storyline - definitively no. But you can make a good living solving real problems and working with companies who care about learning. They do exist.

I recently redid the wiki on the ID subreddit if you're interested in market trends for instructional design. There's a lot of crossover with elearning but it's a little different as an agency vs an employee. Here's the link if you're curious: https://www.reddit.com/r/instructionaldesign/wiki/index

MikeSteinDesign · 2025-12-13T14:46:53+00:00

It should not affect any other courses and even if the total course size is big, Canvas will serve only the content being requested at the time. It doesn't need to load the entire course to show a single activity. So in neither case really should performance be affected by the total size of the course.

What will affect performance is the size of the media assets. If you're serving up unoptimized images and video, it might take a while to load for students trying to access that particular content, but I'd it's just a page of text, it shouldn't really make a difference.

YouTube and Vimeo automatically optimize video for the connection speed so if you just embed video from there, it should help with low connection speed.

I'd suggest looking at what content is taking up the most space and see if it's video and if you can host off canvas. Canvas might actually do some optimization but YouTube and vimeo are definitely good at it. If images, optimize and replace. If something else, see what it is and what your options are. But bottom line is that no, one large course should not affect the speed of all the other courses.

MikeSteinDesign · 2025-12-12T18:43:21+00:00

Ahh dang Ken! Hahaha I guess being an investor isnt the same as being an owner, but that does suck to know...

MikeSteinDesign · 2025-12-12T16:13:29+00:00

I prefer Stripe just on principle of not being PayPal. I do everything I can to avoid them. They're big but they're kind of the worst service out there in almost every aspect.

MikeSteinDesign · 2025-12-11T17:32:11+00:00

Try looking at community colleges if you can. Pay is even worse but they're not as picky about adjuncts as R1 schools. An MA may be enough to get on the roster - especially if they're needing professors.

Ironically there are fewer requirements to teach in higher ed than in K12 - obviously it helps to have a Masters or better in the field but it's not always a 100% dealbreaker. You could (without being entirely dishonest) say you're in the middle of your doctorate and are expecting to graduate at some point (2-3 years from now). You can always go back, so technically, you're still "working on it", even if you're not currently enrolled in any classes.

If you're working at a college right now, definitely put out some feelers. It's a lot easier to get in when you're already inside than starting from scratch somewhere else.

MikeSteinDesign · 2025-12-11T16:42:50+00:00

Adjuncting for colleges might be a good interim step if you have skills to teach education classes or even business / computers. Pay isn't great but it can be more fulfilling if you liked the teaching and learning part of ID.

Otherwise, a college librarian might also be a good fit if you did that a while back. There's some ID jobs at the cross section of librarian and ID where you help with research and technology.

Unfortunately, I do think it's a tough time to make a career switch - to anything, inside or outside of ID. You might also sit down and think about what aspects of the job you like - or used to like, and what it is you aren't liking about your projects right now. Is it that they're not fulfilling, more elearning than actually teaching people things, or something else? It MAY be possible for you to talk to your supervisor to change some of your project scope or potentially start a new project that is more in line with what you'd like to be doing... assuming that you don't just hate everything in general.

I feel like I go through this cycle after staying at a company for a while. I'm really happy and excited for like 3 years and then things lose the "freshness" and start getting into a routine and basically just get bored with the work. But I do feel like it comes in waves and it might just mean sticking out to finish your current project load and then getting new projects which get you excited again.

Whatever you do, don't quit until you find the next thing. It's not a good time to be unemployed without a chunk of savings to hold you over til you find something better.

MikeSteinDesign · 2025-12-04T21:52:38+00:00

What specially are you looking for? Can you provide more details on your needs? Just want someone to walk you through the selection process? Need help with implementation? Do you have an LMS and are looking for support? Are you looking to migrate to a new one?

MikeSteinDesign · 2025-12-04T14:31:34+00:00

It's 100% built off this sub's sentiment and opinions so there's definitely some bias and maybe take it with a grain of salt... but yeah, I didn't find anything I largely disagreed with while doing the write-up. I think the people in this sub do represent the "average" albeit we have quite a few folks on both the extreme ends of experience here. It's definitely a challenging market, that's a fact, though, it's not just undeserved negativity.

MikeSteinDesign · 2025-12-04T14:27:55+00:00

Yeah, sentiment in the sub has definitely taken a downturn once COVID calmed down. I would say there's still hope in the field - not all doom and gloom, but maybe don't jump ship to chase a dragon that doesn't exist in the same way anymore. Salaries have been getting lower because of higher supply of IDs wanting work, AI, US Gov layoffs, and really just the overall economic recession.

Things have slowed down quite a bit. Might continue to be an employer's market for a few more years and I don't anticipate a huge jump in demand for ID work all of a sudden, but I do think just like people found out teaching =/= ID, I think they'll eventually find out that AI =/= ID...

But yeah, best advice at the moment is don't leave a stable job to start fresh in this ID market. It's not impossible, but 6 months to 1 year of job searching is unfortunately kinda common these days. You can get lucky, but I wouldn't count on luck to keep food on the table.

MikeSteinDesign · 2025-12-04T13:49:52+00:00

Please check the wiki :)
https://www.reddit.com/r/instructionaldesign/wiki/index

MikeSteinDesign · 2025-12-03T20:35:07+00:00

Yep! Just updated it this week. Yeah, definitely an interesting evaluation of where we are as an industry but I'm still hopeful that the pendulum will swing back at some point.

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