The AI Field Guide for Learning Designers
Hands-on Strategies for Education, Training, and Instructional Design
AI for learning designers isn’t coming. It’s already here.
The question is no longer whether AI belongs in the design process. It’s how we work with it thoughtfully, practically, and without giving up the human judgment that makes good learning design possible.
The AI Field Guide for Learning Designers is a hands-on guide to doing exactly that: using AI as a collaborator across analysis, development, feedback, evaluation, and everything messy in between.
For learning designers, instructional designers, educators, trainers, and anyone trying to make thoughtful decisions about AI while still getting real work done.
Design Through AI — not just around it.
AI can accelerate research, ideation, drafting, prototyping, feedback, and revision. But speed alone does not make better learning. The designer still has to make sense of context, weigh tradeoffs, preserve intent, and decide what should change.
The Field Guide is built around that partnership: AI expands what’s possible; humans provide direction, judgment, and meaning.
Framed by TED: Technology. Education. Design.
Technology
Understand the tools, prompting practices, capabilities, limitations, and workflows shaping AI-enabled design.
Education
Keep learning science, assessment, ethics, equity, accessibility, and the human experience at the center.
Design
Turn ideas into prototypes, collaborate with people and AI, solve real problems, and translate your work across contexts.
Ten chapters move from AI foundations and prompting through pedagogy, ethics, prototyping, collaboration, and professional practice.
The future of learning design isn’t human or machine. It’s a partnership.
The interesting work is figuring out how to design that partnership well.