Trying to turn your expertise into a marketable online course? As information professionals who curate knowledge for a living, building and selling online courses is a natural next step for many of us. But without a plan, creating an online course can feel overwhelming. Where do you start?
That is where instructional design comes in.
What is Instructional Design?
Instructional design is the art and science of creating engaging, effective learning experiences. It involves understanding how people learn and structuring content to improve learning.
At its core, instructional design involves:
Defining the knowledge and skills learners should have acquired by the end of the course.
Creating learning materials that capture attention and encourage learning.
Assessing whether learners have achieved the intended goals.
Several instructional design models guide course development. ADDIE is one of these models. ADDIE stands for Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, and Evaluate.
Editor’s note: This is part of our “Retirement” series to address challenges and opportunities many of our members facing retirement are experiencing.
Off-ramp to Where Exactly?
A couple of years ago, I mentioned to a client that I was starting to think about retirement, but I wasn’t sure how to approach it as an independent consultant. What were the pros and cons of ‘going cold turkey’ versus just slowing down? Would my personality allow me to “just slow down”? She coined the phrase “off-ramp” that day at breakfast, and I’ve been using it ever since.
The theme for AIIP 2025 – Proudly Independent and Globally Connected – set the tone for the Association’s virtual Symposium held April 8-10, 2025.
AIIP 2025 was hosted on Whova and seamlessly synced with Zoom. AIIP attendees always want plenty of time to meet and chat.
Each day started with an online Coffee Catch Up meeting, and as usual Day 1 featured each attendee making an introduction and describing his or her business.
Other opportunities to globally connect included online speed networking and topic takedowns for small groups to share tips and ideas.
One of the best events I have joined in the past 25 years. The AIIP “gang” provides value, support, and community on a very high level. Proud to belong to it! Udo Hohlfeld, INO+DATEN, Germany
[AIIP 2025 Coffee Catch Up – Photo by Kelly Berry]
In line with the theme of “proudly independent and globally connected”, AIIP 2025 featured a lineup of five speakers from the US, Canada, Australia, and Britain, all distinguished information professionals or self-employed individuals.
Karen Wickre, founder of Knox Media and author of Taking the work out of networking, opened AIIP 2025 with an engaging session offering practical tips to resolve the ongoing challenge of making and keeping great connections. That is an ongoing challenge for many attendees, particularly as longtime client contacts move on and new contacts need to be developed.
Each year, the Past Presidents fund the Roger Summit Lecture Award to bring an inspiring and stimulating speaker to AIIP’s annual Symposium.
For AIIP 2025, Emily Green, Entrepreneur and founder of Grace Communications and Emily Green LLC, delivered the opening lecture and shared tips on the secret ingredients to build long-lasting client relationships.
On Day 2, Megumi Miki, based in Melbourne, Australia, and author of Quietly Powerful: How your quiet nature is your hidden leadership strength, delivered an interactive session for attendees engaging with her from US, Canada, UK, Europe, and Australia.
Megumi shared helpful tips on how to be known for what others find useful about what you do so that you can be of service and share your unique perspective.
Her strategies to reframe your perspective, appreciate yourself, and help to connect with others resonated and inspired our not so quiet as well as quiet attendees.
The tips from Megumi Miki were especially helpful and inspirational as I work to become more visible to my audience in a way that is comfortable to me. AIIP 2025 attendee feedback
Sarah Townsend, UK based copywriter and author of several books including Survival Skills for Freelancers, presented an engaging session on Freelance Confidence and shared proven strategies to help you grow in confidence and show self-employment who’s boss.
She stressed that while experts claim the future is freelance, there are some reality bite statistics regarding freelance life:
90% of freelancers experience isolation
37% took less than 14 days off during 2024
70% don’t feel they have adequate support for their mental health
Sarah shared tips to help with wellbeing, resilience, and confidence – all essential if you are going to survive as a freelancer.
She started by highlighting the very important step that all AIIP members must undertake – realize that you’re not alone, and find your community and make connections with people who understand freelance life.
Dr Michael Ridley, Librarian Emeritus, University of Guelph, based in Canada has a strong research interest in Explainable AI. His publications can be found on his website michaelridley.ca.
Mike started his presentation with a good question to ponder – if artificial intelligence is so smart, why doesn’t it explain itself?
Explainable AI (also known as XAI) Is “concerned with developing approaches to … make artificial systems understandable to human stakeholders” (Langer et al, 2021).
In reality, XAI is focused on “opening the black box” and shining a light on the opaque nature of AI.
Great speakers and fun networking.
AIIP 2025 attendee feedback
Attendees who missed any of these events may catch them all on the Whova platform until October 7, 2025.
Heather Carine is Principal of Carine Research, a specialist market intelligence research service for companies wanting to connect the dots in their market.
She is a seasoned market intelligence specialist with over fifteen years of commercial world experience in investigative research for major corporations, investment bankers, law firms, and commercial advisers.
Heather served on the AIIP 2025 Symposium Committee.
In your bio, you describe yourself as a content strategist who focuses on customer service knowledge management. In two sentences, what do content strategists do?
Working as a content strategist in a customer service setting is analogous to being an air traffic controller who is focused on content development instead of planes. As the company changes its product and/or policies, content strategists identify the information impacted thereby and estimate the resources required to make adjustments.
Editors note: This is part of our “Retirement” series to address challenges and opportunities many of our members facing retirement are experiencing.
My path to retirement has been a slow and gentle one.
I enjoy learning – I have degrees in Aerospace Engineering, History, and Information Studies – and, while I no longer want to invest the amount of time required to obtain another degree, I haven’t wanted to stop working and learning completely. To that end, I have treasured the wide variety of projects in which I have been involved over the past 30 or more years because they have often provided me with niche learning opportunities.
Editor’s Note: This is a great example of copyright issues we can all potentially face and a shining example of AIIP’s community coming to the rescue.
I’d like to share the story of my recent experience with Copytrack, a Berlin-based company that enforces image rights, in hopes that it might benefit others caught up in Copytrack’s net. This story also serves as a real-life demonstration of the practical value of belonging to a network of professional colleagues who are willing to help one another.
Competitive intelligence is a process for evaluating your organization and its business position within a given industry.
Before there is a collective “throwing of hands in the air” and saying we are not Procter & Gamble or Nvidia (big companies familiar with their competitors), let’s take a look at some of the basic steps in competitive intelligence analysis that are also very familiar in the nonprofit world.
Editor’s note: Occasionally we post legacy content that is still relevant today. Enjoy this piece By Kelly Schrank.
Before I get started, I want to offer this disclaimer: I know that lots of people like checklists! People have TO-DO lists for daily tasks, they have packing lists for travel, they use grocery lists. But Atul Gawande, a well-known staff writer for The New Yorker and author of four bestsellers, wrote a whole book, The Checklist Manifesto, on how checklists are used by people in a variety of industries to save lives, fly planes, and manage large-scale construction projects. His book covers checklists as people use them in the workplace, and much of the motivation behind how I approach checklists comes from his discussion of why and how professionals use checklists in their work lives.
