You’re an instructional designer who has invested lots of time and energy into creating beautiful online modules for a corporate course. You’ve followed your stakeholders’ wants and needs to a T. You’ve created animations and quizzes. However, once your course is live, you find learner engagement is dismal and your completion rates low. Does this sound familiar? No lasting learning occurred—what went wrong?

It’s Not You, It’s Instructional Design

According to Deloitte’s 2019 Global Human Capital Trends report, organizations rank “changing the way employees learn” as the primary challenge they are currently facing. The training we have been building as instructional designers isn’t cutting it anymore. It’s not enough to focus on creating “instruction,” but instead we must focus on developing engaging and collaborative experiences that extend outside the bounds of the course to elicit long-lasting change. For that to happen, we need a mindset shift.

Enter Learning Experience Design

Meet the next evolution of instructional design: learning experience design (commonly referred to as LXD). It’s not just a trendy new name; it’s the answer to the problems of corporate learning.

Margaret Weigel, from Six Red Marbles, defines LXD as “a synthesis of instructional design, educational pedagogy, neuroscience, social sciences, design thinking, and user experience design.” It truly takes the best practices of each of these fields and combines them to create learning that is experiential, engaging, impactful, and designed with the learner (instead of the instructor) in mind.

This is exactly what employees want but are not getting in their training. Research coming out of Middlesex University supports this; 74 percent of employees feel like they aren’t meeting their potential at work due to lack of meaningful development opportunities.

Real Learning Doesn’t Happen Through Instruction

Traditional instructional design is dated; advances in cognitive science consistently show that learning doesn’t happen through instruction but through experiences.

Take a minute and think about it. What was your most memorable learning moment in school? It probably wasn’t your history teacher’s presentation on World War I or your biology instructor’s 80-question true-or-false quiz. It was likely an interactive, collaborative project or discussion that you still remember years later.

The same goes for training in the corporate world, whether it’s onboarding, leadership, or executive education. According to a 24x7 Learning study, 88 percent of employees said they do not apply the skills from training to their jobs. LXD helps change that with its focus on the 70-20-10 model of learning. This model suggests that only 10 percent of employee learning comes from traditional instruction, whereas 70 percent comes from experiential and 20 percent from social learning. Concentrating on that combined 90 percent is what will help you design sticky experiences that result in lasting behavioral changes in your learners.

Learning Design Must Evolve

As designers, we need to ditch dated instructional design practices and bring in the pedagogical heavy hitters. With collaboration, social learning, active facilitation, project-based learning, and peer feedback—the hallmarks of learning experience design—we are not only able to improve the training we design for our learners but also create paradigm shifts within our organizations.