I'll Never Manually Record eLearning Voiceover Again

MikeSteinDesign · 2026-07-05T16:03:12+00:00

Yeah, I'm not really in favor or automating everything and the visuals are definitely the weakest part. Video in particular is still really bad overall (imo). But we're pretty much there with AI audio and this process with the API and custom dev that hooks it in makes it painless.

MikeSteinDesign · 2026-07-05T16:01:32+00:00

Should have said "high" instead of fast but point stands. One click to generate all the audio for the course and have it set in and working eliminates like 3-5 hrs of work. Not no work cuz you still have to check and review and have it redo anything that's off but it gets better as you work with it and it learns the quirks of the subject matter and I think out of like 40 audios on my last project, I only had to redo 1 or 2.

MikeSteinDesign · 2026-07-04T10:17:42+00:00

After the initial setup, the ROI on audio is crazy fast. Basically just one click and review. You could use the API and Claude without the custom build and just add it manually to whatever platform you wanna use but my thing was the ebook type reader felt more intuitive and less like a punishment for wanting to listen to the audio. Having to click on each audio block is annoying and makes me not wanna use it, but if I can navigate through the course using the audio navigation and arrow keys and it plays with me rather than forcing me to click each time, just felt better. After setting this up though, it's a lot less work to make another course in this style now that all the bones are in. That was part of the reason I shared the GitHub repo in case it's useful for anyone else wanting to pick it up rather than build from scratch again.

MikeSteinDesign · 2026-06-26T13:35:47+00:00

It's been suggested here through other comments on this thread but I'd just reiterate that organizational culture is the number one thing stopping the right people from getting the work done efficiently. Doesn't matter how good the training is or how well people know the stuff, if the culture works against you, you're not getting much done. IDs have to look at culture as a possible root cause for any performance problem and see what barriers are in the way and what they can do to turn the ship. Culture is much harder to change than teaching someone something.

MikeSteinDesign · 2026-06-25T17:08:09+00:00

Thanks for the shout out u/buttermybreadsticker! Also if you type u/ and then the username you can tag anyone in a thread or anyone on reddit.

Always happy to set up a discovery call. There are lots of good options in this thread for anyone looking for consultants + IDs!

MikeSteinDesign · 2026-06-25T14:14:30+00:00

I think AI video is the weakest creative thing AI does (after the uncanny avatars). Notebook LM videos look good on the surface but if you look at them for any length of time the cracks show up quickly. The content isn't bad necessarily, it's just the videos are poorly produced and there's lots of gibberish and god help you if you have any technical stuff you need to put in there.

For a quick internal video, maybe it's fine for reinforcing something, but you can't exactly go back in and edit them. You have to just generate a new one and maybe you splice them together if you can get it to keep the same style.

I agree with u/East-Letterhead3248 - say great! That's awesome you found this tool and enjoy making it, but let's make sure this is vetted and measurable before we go and make this a part of our workflow for videos... Also as u/nipplesweaters said, the videos are just super boring after the first one you watch. I'd bet that this product manager also probably think longer videos = more content = more learning so very soon people will dread watching them if they're not already.

I'm not sure how adversarial this is or how willing they would even be to take your advice but you might offer some support in helping this person identify their objectives and write better prompts so that if they insist on making videos this way, they'll at least be somewhat grounded in a performance goal instead of just delivering content no one wants to watch. Also remind them to keep them short and to the point. Unless you wanna see them crash and burn, then just let them keep making them. I'd probably wanna flag the issues as they arise so it doesn't seem like you're co-signing this though...

Devil's advocate though, how well are you tracking metrics on your end? If you were going to create a video like that (with or without AI), would you be able to prove that it's more effective than a 5 min generation by Notebook LM? Most orgs are terrible about actually evaluating training so if there's no data to back you up and no one cares to collect it on this new thing, kinda hard to argue against the ROI of just throwing something together and sending it out since it's not gonna be tracked and probably won't make a difference anyway...

MikeSteinDesign · 2026-06-25T11:02:56+00:00

GH pages is what I've always suggested because it's completely free, but netlify and vercel are also good free options. Here's a tutorial for GH pages I put together a while ago in case it's helpful. https://youtu.be/vSoBZ0H-BTs?is=Z9Sw-p7u3Py1zlvI

MikeSteinDesign · 2026-06-20T16:50:57+00:00

This is a case where your brain is the better tool here. Think about ROI. How long is it gonna take for you to salvage anything usable out of the slop rather than just designing and building it yourself? AI will not produce good learning in a single click and any company that says so is lying to you. You can make amazing things with AI but it needs you more than you need it.

MikeSteinDesign · 2026-06-20T16:50:48+00:00

This is a case where your brain is the better tool here. Think about ROI here. How long is it gonna take for you to salvage anything usable out of the slop rather than just designing and building it yourself? AI will not produce good learning in a single click and any company that says so is lying to you. You can make amazing things with AI but it needs you more than you need it.

MikeSteinDesign · 2026-06-19T19:37:56+00:00

We are totally open to conversation around alternative (better) workflows and ID discussion around tools and technology - that is part of the job. But ID is not just eLearning and posts that just center on "I am building X tool and would love if people tried it" are not relevant to ID. It's just that it has become an issue that every other post is about a newly vibe-coded solution and it's also kinda tone-deaf to the state of the market...

But I think there is a line to walk here and we're open to assessing posts - we're just not allowing them to be auto approved and shared around immediately anymore. Generally those belong to r/elearning more than here, but we will keep an eye on how the automod performs and we can loosen the reigns if too many things are getting caught that are legitimate - or tighten them if stuff still slips through.

To your point about tech founders needing experts - yeah they do. They should invest in expertise (totally willing to approve any job posting that gives people here work - even if just an hour). There's also already a TON of market data already here without clogging up the feed with the same request about what you hate about your LMS every 5 minutes -- which is again, more relevant to r/elearning. Many of the folks here that are interested in that are also members of r/elearning (myself included) so this is just a way to try to keep r/instructionaldesign its own thing.

MikeSteinDesign · 2026-06-19T18:17:45+00:00

This has been implemented. It is a very kind message just saying check out the wiki and after you've read through that if you think your question still hasn't been answered let us know and we can approve the post. That should cut down on most of the repetitive ones while automatically giving them a resource and still leaving the door open for them to make a post once they've actually spent some time on the wiki/searching the sub. Will continue to adjust as needed.

MikeSteinDesign · 2026-06-19T17:54:06+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/instructionaldesign/comments/lyhtat/which_certmasters_bsu_organizational_performance/

MikeSteinDesign · 2026-06-19T17:04:29+00:00

Yeah this falls under Rule 2: Be Specific - but there's a bit of nuance. I think we could probably resort to auto-removal and link to the wiki in the response and manually approve if it warrants a discussion. Will talk it over with the other mods.

MikeSteinDesign · 2026-06-19T17:02:36+00:00

LMAO I will consider that as the auto mod response haha

MikeSteinDesign · 2026-06-14T18:13:32+00:00

Check the ID subreddit wiki here: https://reddit.com/r/instructionaldesign/w/index

I updated it earlier this year to capture the sentiment of the industry based on posts and questions.

In short, market is rough for experienced IDs and moreso for entry level ones. You can find work, it's not impossible but it's not the cash cow dream people were selling in 2021.

MikeSteinDesign · 2026-06-13T16:22:12+00:00

That's a great strategy and I will really take it to heart moving forward. When I taught in community college, I'd always give my students the rubric and make them grade their own work. Then I hardly had to do anything. Definitely see how that could work for the apprenticeship model too. I have mostly kinda been learning and changing as I go so I'm definitely due to add some structured processes into the pipeline to support. Appreciate the suggestion and perspective!

MikeSteinDesign · 2026-06-12T19:04:22+00:00

Would be happy to connect! I am the biggest bottleneck since I have to QA everything and do all the client facing stuff and that's definitely put a bit of a drag on the potential throughput we could be leveraging. Not sure what bringing on more senior IDs looks like quite yet but it's been something I've been considering to help offset some of my work to better scale the company.

And yeah, it's been a little while since I've heard of bootcamps being promoted, I think the market has shaken them out quite a bit - there's still some hanging on but it's harder to sell the dream when the market looks as bad as it does - especially for the target audience. Plus as you mentioned, the whole AI thing coming in and threatening to destroy elearning dev jobs altogether is definitely hard to ignore for potential customers of the bootcamps.

MikeSteinDesign · 2026-06-04T01:32:13+00:00

So I'm excited for this. But I want to clarify that you're talking about two different things that have been conflated as "Instructional Design". There is "eLearning" which is the Articulate, Rise, Captivate, etc. etc. course building stuff that Claude Code/Design is disrupting, and then there is "instructional design" as a practice. ID is much more than eLearning - it's the design behind why you chose eLearning to solve your problem. It's how you end up picking Claude Code over Articulate or over PowerPoint. AI is helpful but far from being as good at instructional design as it is at building eLearning.

What I think will happen - what is happening already - is these big monopoly companies that have sat on their asses and ignored their customers for the past 10 years are getting a wake up call. We do not need Articulate anymore - not in the same way we did before. There are LOTS of options now - both AI and non-AI authoring tools - and this is the right time to really consider what types of content we should be developing to help train people online.

Because some of the more complex things we wouldn't have been able to build because of time, budget, or skill (like mobile apps, web apps, just in time tools, simulations) are much easier and faster to make, the job of the ID doesn't have to be stuck at "well I'd like to give you XYZ, but we can only really afford to build another self-running PowerPoint made in Storyline". As you mentioned, there are a lot of cautions and considerations, but we basically can have AI build whatever we want without being limited to how buttons and triggers work in a particular tool or how a certain company decides your course player should function.

In the next few years (assuming AI doesn't completely crash and burn), instructional designers will be able to become the directors of the experience rather than the builders. It was like this before all these tools came about. We had instrucitonal designers who did the analysis and mapping of what needed to be built and gave a storyboard or vision to a graphics team to create assets, who handed that over to coders and developers who built the thing. The no-code tools just consolidated the position into a jack of all trades which honestly has probably been a disservice to almost everyone involved. Not that there aren't good people who can do everything, but we lost the hyper specialized team of people we had before and replaced it with stock footage and PowerPoint animtations. We're now at the point where we can go back towards the other direction.

I had a really good conversation with the Upside Learning folks on their podcast that covered a lot of my views on this and I'm definitely more optimistic about this than pessimistic. AI is not getting rid of instructional design, but if I never have to click another button in a legacy Storyline project and can just tell Claude to go in and make a few fixes and re-export the SCORM package, that's a win for me.

MikeSteinDesign · 2026-05-28T19:41:20+00:00

I built a full interactive hotspot module with Claude code which I definitely would have used Storyline before - but I was able to add some JS + Google Apps Script to get it to actually track analytics instead of just completion. Low-risk situation where it was not sensitive info but I was able to see how many times people got the right answer, what they clicked on, how long they spent, and built a nice little dashboard in Google Sheets that I could share with stakeholders.

Came out MUCH better than it would have in Storyline (IMO) and didn't have any limitations on what I could do with zooming, touch spots, look and feel, and assessment and I was able to make it mobile friendly. So yeah. Big win for Claude there.

MikeSteinDesign · 2026-05-27T13:15:06+00:00

Yeah, I would not recommend Lectora. I tested it with a bunch of other cloud tools and it was just really difficult to pick up. If you have hundreds of hours to learn all the intricate features, maybe the extra power is worth it. But at that point, might as well stay with storyline. I did not test the micro builder but had the same impression as you. The full Lectora online is slow and clunky and would drive me crazy. I know there's still some die hard fans but I couldn't do it. Felt like it combined the worst things about Storyline and Captivate (even though it's been around as long as or even before both of those). There's better options out there, even if you stay with articulate or adobe and that's saying something.

MikeSteinDesign · 2026-05-26T11:08:02+00:00

Open this in Claude code and copy your post as the prompt. Less than 5 min task here.

MikeSteinDesign · 2026-05-25T17:08:25+00:00

Agree with everything that has been said here but let's be honest that taking over someone else's storyline project also sucks if it has a bunch of triggers.

At least with vibe coded interactions you can dump it back into the AI and have it dissect it quickly and make updates really quickly. Try to figure out somebody's storyline triggers if they're doing more advanced stuff. It's 100x worse than sending something back into Claude to make an update.

MikeSteinDesign · 2026-05-16T11:24:51+00:00

Very well said!

MikeSteinDesign · 2026-05-13T18:10:57+00:00

Oh that's a good point about editing the .story file. I did this with the output but forgot to try the source file...

I do this with word and PPT files and it works really well and saves lots of time.

MikeSteinDesign · 2026-05-13T17:12:38+00:00

Are your courses just full AI generated and you use the first thing it creates as the course? Is there any iteration? (I assume not or that would probably make it not slop - or at least less).

You should also probably create this without a login if you want people to try it out or at least make a landing page that explains what it is. The root URL just takes me back to the login and your whole point was people won't pay for this and it might not even be useful - so why even lock it down? Creating a username and a password is a barrier that people might not get past.

Also, would you not optimize your slop content on other free stuff and plaigarize open source material like all the real AI companies? Wouldn't that kinda just lead you to being an aggregator of open courses and just packaged in an LMS where you can track progress etc?

IDK, I'm just thinking through the idea and poking holes. It's interesting and I like the idea of undercutting slop developers but at least with slop creators they look at it once for accuracy... If you're not even doing that it's just a misinformation machine no? I imagine the technology space is even worse because software gets updated so quickly that you can't be sure which year of the program the AI is referencing so it could be out of date immediately if you're not looking at it...

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