When did you last hear someone say an eLearning module was worth their time?
I ask because I've been putting that question to people for years, from graduates through to executives, and I'm still waiting. What I get instead is a particular kind of snigger, followed by some version of "get it done quick and get back to work". It's remarkably consistent. I don't think people hate eLearning. They just don't take it seriously, which I suspect is worse.
For a long time I assumed the problem was production values, or the writing, or the simple fact that nobody enjoys being told to do things. I'm now fairly sure it's something else, and it's rarely talked about.
I think the modules are too easy. And I don't think that's an accident.
The phrase that causes it
"Design for the lowest common denominator."
If you've worked in learning and development for more than a week, you've heard it. It sounds sensible. It even sounds kind. But I don't think we often follow the logic through to where it lands.
If you design every screen for the person who will struggle most, you have set the difficulty for everyone. Everybody else now coasts through content that asks nothing of them. Nothing to work out, nothing to look up, nothing they could plausibly get wrong.
We all know what that produces, because we have all sat through it. The click-next module. Skim, click, skim, click, then a multi-choice assessment where the two wrong answers look like they've been included out of politeness. Six minutes later there's a green tick and the organisation records another completion, which I'd argue mostly measures how many people successfully closed a browser tab.
Easy is the expensive option
I don't think difficulty is the only culprit, and I won't pretend it is. Procurement, fixed seat times, sign-off committees and "everyone must pass" expectations all push design in the same direction.
But here's what I keep coming back to, and it's the part I'm most confident about. Easy modules probably aren't a design failure at all. I think they're a fairly accurate product, built against what was actually ordered.
If the thing being purchased is evidence of compliance, then completion rate, audit trail and an absence of complaints are the real specification. An easy module hits all three. It isn't a bad version of learning. It's a good version of something else.
And the maths on that is worse than it first looks. If people pass without learning anything, every dollar spent building the module and every hour of staff time spent completing it has bought a row in a database. A module that's simple to pass and teaches nothing isn't cheap training. I'd argue it's expensive admin.
What the research says
I'm fairly convinced the fix isn't technology or budget. I think it's a design decision, and not a complicated one. Make it harder.
That isn't only a hunch, which is the part I find reassuring. Robert and Elizabeth Bjork at UCLA have spent decades on what they call desirable difficulties, conditions that make learning feel slower and harder at the time while producing learning that lasts. A 2017 meta-analysis in the Review of Educational Research pooled 217 studies on practice testing and found that being properly tested beats simply re-reading the material. It holds up in real classrooms as well as laboratories, and the advantage grows when the test arrives a day or more later.
There's a second one I find even more persuasive. A 2021 review in the same journal examined 53 studies on what researchers call productive failure. Learners who wrestled with a problem before being taught the solution consistently outperformed those taught first and given practice afterwards. On that evidence the struggle isn't an obstacle to the learning. It looks like the mechanism.
I'd add one thing from our own work, which is far less rigorous but harder for me to ignore. In the workshops we run, the room reliably comes alive at the exact moment people are working on something they can't answer on autopilot. You can watch it happen. I'm not going to pretend a room full of engaged faces counts as evidence, but it does line up with everything above.
What challenge isn't
I should be clear about what I mean here, because "make it harder" is easy to misread.
Challenge means working through a genuine problem. It doesn't mean struggling to decode jargon, or badly structured content, or a policy written for lawyers rather than the people who have to follow it. That's a different failure entirely, and it's most of what we spend our days fixing.
I'd add a second caveat, and I hold this one a bit more loosely. I'm not sure difficulty helps much if the problem isn't recognisably the learner's own job. Hard and generic is probably worse than easy and generic, because now you've wasted someone's time and patronised them in the same sitting.
And not everything needs this. A hand hygiene refresher doesn't need to develop anyone's judgement. It needs to be short and correct.
Raise the support, don't lower the bar
What about the people who genuinely need more help? They matter, and I think this is where the industry's standard answer has it backwards.
We lower the challenge for everyone rather than raising the support for the few who need it. Support might mean summaries, prompts, worked examples, or simply somewhere to ask a question. Keep the bar where it is and build the scaffolding that helps people reach it. I'm fairly sure that's a better deal for the struggling learner too, because passing something easy teaches them nothing about what they're actually capable of.
The AI part
One more pressure worth naming, because it's arriving quickly. More organisations are being told to just create it with AI.
AI will make content faster and cheaper to produce, and I don't think there's much argument about that. But if we hand it the design philosophy we're currently using, I think all we get is tick-box modules at a scale we've never managed before. Speed doesn't fix a design problem. It multiplies it.
Where I've landed
I'll finish with a statement rather than a question, which I accept isn't quite in keeping with the rest of this.
The money is already committed. The hours are already being given up. The only real variable left is how much we ask of the person sitting in front of the screen, and at the moment the answer is close to nothing.
So where you have the room, ask more of people. Give them something they genuinely have to think about, and build proper support for the ones who need it.
And if you're the one buying the training rather than building it, I'd gently suggest that if you buy completion rates, completion rates are exactly what you'll get.