Picture this: You greenlit work on a new eLearning resource. It’s beautifully developed. It features modern interactions and animations. Learners scored well on knowledge checks and rated it highly on the completion survey. Six weeks later, your field trainers report the opposite: learners can recite key concepts in the abstract, but they freeze the moment a key contact pushes back in the field.
What happened?
Often, a prevailing paradigm among trainers and vendors alike is that instructional design lives solely in the tool and development phase; everything that occurs before that—knowing what a rep should learn, research, drafting, and ensuring alignment all get filed under “content development,” as though those steps are somehow pre-instructional.
This framing is dangerously shortsighted.
Instructional design reaches across a continuum that stretches from ideation to publication. The decisions that go into drafting are the instructional architecture; the build ensures instructional design principles are operationalized into practice opportunities, branching, and retrieval practice. A great written copy with weak development underdelivers; so does a weak draft with brilliant development. Both pieces are vital instructional design, and neither exists solely as a support for the other.
So, what actually happens before the build? Multiple decisions are made at the drafting stage that carry as much weight as anything that happens once development begins.
Do Performance and Learning Objectives Stop at “Know,” or Push to “Do”?
Before the metaphorical pen ever hits paper, there’s a core challenge to face: what should a learner do differently after engaging with an eLearning resource, and how will this be measured? This is a scoping mechanism as important as determining a timeline, budget, modality, and audience. If this isn’t acknowledged early, learners may be able to pass a knowledge check, but they won’t be able to activate what they should have learned in the field.
The learning objectives are where performance objectives become buildable; they should be specific enough to shape the content, but they only hold up if they reinforce the performance objective. This distinction sounds semantic until you watch it play out: an objective that stops at “know” ensures a learner can recite a concept. An objective that pushes to “do” produces a learner who can apply that concept. CMR ensures every resource will be held to the latter standard before a single lesson is written.
What Information is Need-to-Know versus Nice-to-Know?
As drafting commences, a decision needs to be made about what information earns a place in the resource. Everything in a training resource competes for the same limited attention; include too much, and you’ll throw learners into cognitive overload. In dense, often regulated content, there’s a constant trade-off between what serves a real learning purpose and what’s merely supplementary. An eLearning resource that attempts to teach everything usually ends up teaching very little of it well. We treat this practice as an editorial discipline in its own right, not an afterthought to the draft itself.
Does this Assume the Right Starting Point?
The same clinical data serves a different purpose for an MSL, a sales rep, and a new hire. The facts may not change, but what each person already knows does. This is schema-building: anchoring new content onto existing knowledge when a framework is already there, or building that scaffold first when it doesn’t. Done well, a clinical data module built for an MSL and one built for a sales rep should be structured differently; those learners aren’t starting from the same place.
Does the Order of Information Make Sense?
Is a drug’s mechanism of action explained before adverse effects, or after? Is a compliance rule explained before the scenario that contextualizes it, or after? Sequencing logic determines whether the information presents as isolated facts, or as the answer to a question the learner is already considering. Get the order wrong, and a learner walks away able to recite something without any real sense of when it applies or connects to other concepts.
Would a Learner Recognize This in the Field?
Knowing which field interaction actually illustrates a concept is its own decision. A scenario needs to walk the line between specificity and applicability. This is known as cognitive fidelity: how closely a scenario’s ambiguity, pressure, and stakes match what a learner will actually encounter. If it’s too generic, it reads as hypothetical with no real use; if it’s too narrow, a learner won’t recognize a similar situation the next time it looks slightly different. We vet our scenarios and case studies through the same subject matter experts that ensure our eLearning resources are accurate; we don’t just base them on what sounds plausible on the page.
Is the Jargon Just Reworded, or Actually Usable?
How a policy, payment model, mechanism, or adverse effect is explained in plain language gives development something to build on. A diagram or animation can reinforce a well-translated concept, but it can’t rescue a poor one. Likewise, a strong translation can’t substitute for the visual that makes it click. Both serve an equally important purpose in conveying complicated ideas. We weigh the wording of every concept through the lens of a skeptical learner rather than assuming that what’s written makes sense.
Closing the Gap between Knowing and Doing
Think back to the learners who could define key concepts in the abstract but froze in the field. A more polished animation or crafty development probably wouldn’t have closed that gap. Instead, it could be traced upstream to an objective that never pushed past “know,” a scenario that never got close enough to a real interaction, or terminology that never evolved past jargon.
These issues seldom appear in a knowledge check or a completion survey; they materialize in the field well after the fact. That’s why we check for these issues before the build commences.
Innovative development and strong completion metrics may tell you a resource was built well. They don’t necessarily indicate that the resource was drafted with the same rigor. When the full instructional design process—from ideation through development and publication—is treated as a continuum rather than isolated boxes to check off, an eLearning resource has a real chance to do what you actually need it to do: not just score well on a completion survey, but deliver on the purpose for which it was built.
