L&D teams should look beyond their organisations and use open course contests to sharpen professional judgement, argues Tanya Galton. Comparing real instructional design work across industries can expose stronger practices, recurring weaknesses and fresh ideas, helping practitioners turn external feedback into concrete improvements in how learning is designed and reviewed.
The iSpring Course Creation Contest, now a global annual event for instructional designers, started out with a traditional competition format: people submit their work, experts judge it, and the strongest entries receive awards. But when more than 140 courses arrive from over 100 countries, covering different industries, audiences, and formats, the body of work becomes the source of unexpected insights.
The 2026 iSpring Course Creation Contest gave us an opportunity to look across a broad range of instructional design (ID) decisions made under comparable conditions. Their subjects included performance, cybersecurity, leadership, parenting, critical thinking, and everyday skills.
The ID industry should more often create open, structured opportunities for practitioners to put real work side by side
Analysing this outstanding work made a strong case for something I believe the ID industry should do more often: create open, structured opportunities for practitioners to put real work side by side, examine the decisions behind it, and learn from the patterns that emerge.
Why open, cross-industry practice is necessary
In mature L&D teams especially, courses go through peer review, subject matter expert (SME) review, stakeholder approval, testing, quality assurance (QA), and multiple rounds of revision before launch. These processes are built around the needs of a particular organisation, with questions like:
- Does the course solve our business problem?
- Does it meet our standards?
- Will it work for our learners?
However, they don’t naturally provide a view across industries and professional contexts. A designer working in healthcare may have little reason to examine how someone in aviation teaches emergency procedures. Or a corporate team-building leadership training may never compare its approach with a course created for retail or higher education.
Yet these comparisons can be incredibly insightful as they expose different ways of structuring practice, handling content, using scenarios, choosing formats, and interpreting the same instructional principles. The ID community already has an abundance of conferences, newsletters, communities, and webinars. What we need on top of that is opportunities toexamine a substantial amount of actual ID work side by side.
What makes a contest function as an industry laboratory
To become a tool for quality professional exchange, the format needs to meet a few specific criteria.
Comparable conditions
Participants in the iSpring contest worked within the same general timeframe, used the same authoring environment, and were evaluated against shared criteria.
The courses themselves could be completely different, which is part of the value. A cybersecurity course and a parenting course obviously solve different problems, but when they are developed within a common framework, it’s easier to compare the decisions behind them.
We looked into ID questions such as:
- How narrowly did the author define the objective?
- What does the learner actually do?
- How much information is presented before practice begins?
- How does the interface guide attention?
Cross-industry diversity
The 2026 entries came from different countries, sectors, audiences, and learning environments. The breadth shows how instructional principles behave outside a single professional bubble. Some decisions travel well across contexts, while others make sense only for a particular learner, environment, or performance problem.
For example, clear navigation is useful almost everywhere, but a character-driven story that works in a leadership course may feel forced in a technical troubleshooting module. Seeing both provides practitioners with a much stronger basis for judging which ideas can transfer to their own work and which should not leave the internal context of a team or company.
A complete range of work
Industry showcases tend, quite reasonably, to feature exceptional work. Portfolios show projects that people are proud to present, and conference case studies usually highlight approaches that produced very strong results.
A contest gives us a much wider range of entries to examine. You see excellent execution, promising ideas, conventional solutions, ambitious experiments, and courses in which one part works much better than another. From a professional-learning perspective, this diversity is more valuable than a smaller best-of set. It lets us discuss both what succeeds and where designers repeatedly run into difficulties.
Open critique
Contest experts, mentors, and peers evaluate entries in depth from multiple angles. We discuss why a scenario feels believable, why an activity doesn’t support the objective, or why an interface creates unnecessary confusion.
We also get to see where experienced practitioners agree and disagree, and which criteria they use to defend their judgments. This year, for example, judges paid particular attention to whether the course structure was transparent and if adult learners had enough autonomy to choose the learning sequence, rather than being pushed through a rigid path. They also weighed trade-offs between engagement, clarity, realism, accessibility, visual design, and business relevance.
This kind of discussion turns the course into a case for professional analysis, which gives other designers a clearer basis for reviewing their own work and articulating the decisions behind it.
Key industry observations behind the Open 2026 Course Collection Assessment
Another major value of an open industry competition is the chance to spot emerging patterns in how ID practitioners approach their craft. Across this year’s entries, several stood out:
- The first was audience insight. Stronger courses felt like they had been made for a very specific type of learner. The target audience context affected the language, examples, scenarios, characters, and tone
- Another recurring strength was a clear connection between learning and application. The best courses stayed focused on something the learner ultimately needed to understand, decide, or do
- We also saw authors handle scope and cognitive load particularly well. Top entries narrowed the objective and built a clear progression around it. Microlearning found solid application here
- Storytelling was another common feature, although its effectiveness depended heavily on how it was used. Contestants did a good job of making the story part of the learning structure. It gave the learner a role, created stakes, and carried the experience forward
- The same was true of practice. Strong entries gave learners opportunities to make decisions, see consequences, and receive explanatory feedback
Other patterns pointed to areas for growth:
- Visual design and user interface (UI) quality varied considerably. Some courses used hierarchy, spacing, imagery, and animation to make information easier to understand. Others had solid instructional thinking, but a cluttered interface that made the experience harder to follow. There’s a clear demand for better visual design resources to help IDs improve this aspect of their work
- We also saw continued growth in scrollable courses, which increased from 37% to 45% of entries year over year. They worked particularly well for shorter experiences, continuous narratives, and reference-style learning. Slide-based formats remained effective when the learner needed checkpoints, controlled sequencing, scenarios, or more structured practice
- AI was, understandably, featured prominently. Better content came from authors who treated AI output as raw material to be refined. Where human review appeared weaker, the same problems surfaced repeatedly: generic copy, little contextual detail, inconsistent imagery, and material that didn’t feel particularly intentional.
These observations don’t describe the entire ID industry. However, an open collection of courses from the contest provided us with a concrete basis for spotting recurring patterns and grounding industry conversations in real work.
What these findings mean for Instructional Design
We need to discuss decisions, not only deliverables
It’s easy to look at a finished course and decide whether we like it. Yet, greater professional value comes from understanding the decisions that went into it, like the choice of format, the placement and type of practice, the structure of assessment, or the pacing of the content.
Making these decisions explicit helps practitioners develop judgment in addition to collecting examples of good practice. It shows how experienced designers balance learner needs, business goals, time constraints, format limitations, and cognitive load. For open industry initiatives, this should be part of the format itself.
Quality needs to stay connected to the learning problem
The contest also reinforced how difficult it is to judge a course in isolation from its purpose. The central question an ID practitioner should answer is: What does this learner need, and does the design help them get there?
In other words, making the learning problem explicit before development begins and keeping it visible throughout the review process is key. Reviewers can then assess every major design choice (format, practice, assessment, and visuals) against this logic.
For L&D teams, this means evaluating whether each design choice supports the stated objective and learner context rather than rewarding complexity, novelty, or visual polish on their own. Open industry initiatives can reinforce the same discipline by asking participants to submit a short design rationale alongside the course.
Shared examples make professional standards more tangible
Instructional design uses plenty of terms, including learner-centred, engaging, performance-focused, meaningful interaction, and effective AI use. They might sound clear, that is, until we try to apply them.
When you put several real courses on the screen, these ideas become much easier to interrogate (and integrate!). For example:
- Learner-centred design becomes visible in the choice of examples, language, scenarios, and level of challenge
- Meaningful interaction can be judged by whether it requires learners to apply knowledge
- Interface quality can be evaluated by how well hierarchy, navigation, and visual structure support comprehension
The profession benefits from having more shared examples, because they give practitioners a concrete basis for understanding and applying key ID concepts.
How L&D leaders can turn participation into team development
I’m not encouraging every company to start its own internal course competition. What I suggest is that organisations keep an eye out for external contests and similar initiatives as part of professional development.
- Start with a capability an employee wants to strengthen, such as scenario design, assessment writing, visual communication, storytelling, AI use, or mobile-first learning
- Then give them room to participate in an external initiative where they can work outside the team’s usual patterns and receive feedback from people who don’t share the same organisational assumptions
- Review some of the public entries together. Discuss the external feedback and whether it exposes anything the team tends to overlook. Compare those observations with your own standards and processes
- Turn the exercise into one specific change: revise a review checklist, improve assessment guidelines, clarify how formats are selected, update a course template, or define stronger quality-control rules for AI-assisted development.
The sequence is simple and easy to reproduce:
External participation → comparative review →
professional reflection → internal practice improvement
A case for more open practice
Bringing diverse pieces of ID content into a single comparable, open space provides practitioners and L&D teams with material they can analyse, challenge, and learn from together.
I would like to see more professional communities, industry organisations, educators, and vendors treat course contests like iSpring’s as opportunities to build an open practice around real work. The awards may bring people into the contest, but the lasting value lies in the open feedback it enables and the stronger professional judgment these discussions can build within the industry.
Tanya Galton is Chief Learning Officer and Executive Director of iSpring Academy at iSpring Solutions
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