How AI is Transforming Instructional Design with Jeff Batt

Todd Kirk: This is sas therapy. Hello, uh, everyone, and welcome to Another edition of SaaS Therapy, the show where we help you save your most important business relationships, your customers. I'm your host, Todd Kirk. I'm joined by my co host, Casey Trujillo, and I actually want to start this episode a little bit different than I normally do with. We usually ask you at the end to follow us and to subscribe and come in. We have a great audience. We do this every week. We love having you come back and engage with us. Just as a reminder, uh, come back, hopefully we have fun. Kasey, you can be fun, right? You're not just a curmudgeon all the time.

Casey Trujillo: Uh, most of the time. But no. Hey, I got a recommendation for anybody. If you're going to New York and you love Broadway plays to huge recommendations. Number one, outsiders. If you're old like myself, you're forced to read that book. They made it into a play, and the play is about a thousand times better than the book. So high recommendation. The second one. And I think our guest, I think, I guess Jeff and yourself, Todd, will love this one. It's called maybe happy ending. And it's about. It's super. It's in the future. It's in South Korea. And they have embedded. Well, I mean, we have it now, but both bots that are humans that are basically, you know, your. Your companion, but they. They're. They look like humans. Right? And obviously, because we're in our world today, you know, after so many times, your. Your bot becomes useless because there's a new bot that comes out. And so there's a retirement home for these bots or these, you know, these. These AI bots of. Of humans. And it's about those two people falling in love. And it is probably one of the most creative stories. And the. And the actors have to pretend like they're robots, but they're not robots. But they are robots. It's insanely good. Like, I didn't think it would be good, but it was probably top three plays I've ever seen. So there's my recommendations. I know that's not what our audience comes to listen to us for, but again, outsiders, maybe happy ending. Go check it out.

Todd Kirk: I don't know. You know what? If you come back every once in a while, you might get weird recommendations for Broadway plays from Casey, who knows? Or the go eat at tomorrow's pizza as a joke for what to do in New York.

Casey Trujillo: So.

Todd Kirk: So we are super pumped, actually to have on a new guest today, Jeff Batt. Who has 17 plus years of experience in the digital learning and media industry. He's the founder and he's and a trainer at Learning Dojo, a company dedicated to training you to become a software ninja in various elearning web mobile related software applications. He's worked for Amazon as a learning experience designer and has been in the program been the Program Manager over DevLearn for the learning Guild helping program conferences. Jeff often speaks on developmental technologies such as AI X API, HTML5, mobile development, eLearning development tools and more. So basically someone who uh, I believe he also has a YouTube channel where he teaches people how to use a lot of these tools for authoring elearning. So pumped to have you on Jeff. Welcome to SAS Therapy.

Jeff Batt: Yeah, thank you. Excited to be here Jeff.

Casey Trujillo: All right, let's get started. You just did Dev learning just happened right? And you had a ah, session there. Tell uh, from online pictures. Unless you just got a good angle, that thing was packed with people inside of there. Explain what the Dev Learn conference is just in case somebody doesn't know. And what was your session about?

Jeff Batt: Yeah, so Dev learn was in October, so a little bit. But I also spoke on the same topic at atd26 which was in Los Angeles for the atd conference and also both of them were packed. Um, we were talking about vibe coding. So being able to create learning content, they're both learning conferences and being able to create learning interactions without having to know code. So this means being able to uh, create like a game for example, like a Jeopardy style game, even like inside a storyline. If you're familiar with storyline or other kind of elearning authoring tools, you'd have to go in and you'd have to still be familiar with like variables and triggers and conditions to create something really interactive. But with Vibe coding you don't have to. So you basically just use your own words to describe the exact type of game that you want. And it will keep track of all the, it will do all of the triggers, conditions and uh, keep track of variables and other things like that. And so that's, that's what the session was about. And people were just, they've heard the term vibe coding and so they were just very curious on, on how that's, on how that is. And in ATD we had a smaller room but it was actually they had to turn people away because we were packed like 15 minutes before that even started. So the interest is there. People are trying to figure out what is vibe coding. How do I get started with vibe coding? And so that was one of this, that was the session, uh, at both of those conferences. And I think it went really well.

Todd Kirk: Yeah. And I would, I would guess a lot of the people who listen to our show are probably using AI in their jobs. And there's kind of that, that entry level tier where people are coming in and using it to help them draft emails and, you know, answer questions and you know, be a kind of a thought partner and that kind of a scenario. But then there's that tier above where all of a sudden you're using it to, to unlock work that you weren't able to do in the past. And I do, I would guess there's a lot of people out there that are using it for, or using AI, using Claude, using ChatGPT or whatever other solution they're using for Vibe coding purposes. The question is, uh, I don't, I don't know how many people out there are, have heard the idea and taken the next step. Meaning there's a lot of people who are like, uh, Vibe coding sounds cool. It sounds awesome. In your experience, what is it the, what is it that kind of is the main catalyst for you and getting, getting started here, like to actually say, yeah, I should do something. I think this would be really cool. I want to go design a cool interactive, learning, you know, widget or something. Right. So what, what, what do you think's the biggest blocker that stops people from getting started?

Jeff Batt: I, I think they, I mean, it sounds intimidating. Even though Vibe coding, initially when I thought of it, uh, when I heard of it, I'm like, well, that just sounds like lazy coding. So I was thinking like Vibe coding like you're on the beach and you know, you're just letting it do it. But so it's, it's still intimidating because it's still creating contents that is web content. And often at, uh, conferences, whenever, you know, before AI, I would create custom content using web because I'm actually a web developer by. That's what I got my degree in. And so I would create content using web and then I would show people the web content and they'd be like, immediately people would be like, no, no, that's code. I don't want to even look at that. So I think there's still kind of that mentality a little bit of like, I still have to deal with code files, but really where it's like, it becomes a little bit easier because even in tools like Storyline or Rise or something like that, you get to a point when you're creating These elearning using these elearning tools where you want to do more, where you want to go beyond what's available out of the box. And you don't want to have to create all of these different, uh, variables and conditions and triggers all custom. And you want to, you want it to look better too. So I think that's really what piques somebody interest and is the catalyst, like you're talking about to like, okay, let me try it out. But it's still intimidating because you're still working with web files. So what I try to do is I approach it in any of my videos, YouTube videos or courses or anything like that. And as I approach it as like, okay, let's talk about the terms, let's talk about what these are. But you don't have to memorize or know the syntax or code or other things like that. You do have to at least know the components. Like what is an accordion? What is a modal? What is, what are those different things? Because you become the director in AI and you're directing almost like you're, you have a team of developers and you're directing people of like, okay, I want this, I want that. And when you're asking for the right thing, then you get more efficient outputs, you get more, you get the, without having to use all of your credits, you get the better responses back. So that's, that's the way that I approach it. And I think once somebody kind of sees that and understands, like, it's not as intimidating or I can just go play around with it and break some things, then I think it, um, opens up a lot more possibilities for the person.

Casey Trujillo: Well, you know. Todd, you got a question?

Todd Kirk: Yeah, well, I'll say, I'll say that has, that's been my experience as well. In fact, as, as a, you know, citizen vibe coder too. I think I've, I've played around a little bit in this space and one of the things that's been really interesting to me has even been just the fact that as I've been able to, to create various experiences, it, it, it's caused me to think a little bit differently about how we often author content. So a lot of times when I see, especially learning professionals, they'll go out and they'll say, well, I'm going to get into Articulate Rise or I'm gonna go build some scorm course that's like two hours long and it's very, uh, large and, and cumbersome for a user to go through that experience for Me. What I like about Vibe coding is it allows me to actually think much more modularly around the type of learning that I'm going to go and create an author. Because you know what, I could make a very short interactive game and make that a Scorm asset and host that inside of my LMS if I needed to. And I don't have to go create some big long three hour like course and I can reimagine what, what, how I would even use these tools. So like, I love that you mentioned this idea of a game. Are there other use cases and scenarios that maybe we could be thinking about, about how we even design learning experiences instead of having them be these like these big long linear tech text heavy behemoths that nobody can really get through. How would you tackle or cause us to start thinking differently about how we might approach authoring in the future?

Jeff Batt: Yeah, I, a lot of it kind of depends on the delivery of the content. So how your lms, uh, if you have a learning management system or something like that, how it delivers, does it make it so it's searchable? Is it something that I can just go find a quick piece of content? If it does and learners are your, your learners are used to searching for that type of content, I think it makes more sense to create those individual smaller types of pieces of learning. And so I could create just a game for like a quick review, um, and then put that up and just, you know, if your LMS does like the feature, you know, feature, just do a quick review of Excel or something like that and then you can just launch a game and you can go through and play the game and track that. But even with like uh, with a game I think people think, oh, I have to have a quiz question because I want to know what the learner responded. But with Vibe coding especially I've taken games and I've liked the questions during the games. Those can be passed over as scorm, like scorm tracking. So it could be tracked like as a quiz question. And then the overall score at the end of the game could also be sent over as like the final score of that. And so I think, I think it's approach of like how the content is delivered. Do I, does my LMS make it easy for me to just find small pieces of content or do I have other platforms where I can just go in and like on my website I created, I have a blog post, but I wanted to on my own Vibe coded website, make it so anyone who is part of my community can also bookmark so they can join the community for free, but they can bookmark and go back to the videos that I found important or I found useful. On top of that, what I want to do is actually build a little AI chat that allows you to find the content. And so if I'm looking for something, you know, I'm, I'm presented with a problem at work. I want to go in and see how do I actually create a flipkart interaction. Well then I can just go in and just ask the chatbot how do I create a flipkart interaction? And it can either summarize using my videos, my transcript, here's how you do it, or do you want to watch a video on it kind of thing. So I think uh, having that as almost like a content repository where you have all of the different content and pieces of content inside of your, your database could help you with that kind of quick delivery just in time type of learning as well. Mhm.

Casey Trujillo: Jeff, I'm going to go into this. Let's pretend that I'm, I, I've um, listened to this podcast. I'm like uh, okay, I'm gonna go try it. Walk me through the first three steps. What should I be considering as I'm thinking about what tools to use, what I should look like, I'm imagining there's just way too many options for me to consider. So what would you suggest of maybe three best practices if I was going to get started, Go test this out. It help me understand any recommendations you'd have to give to the audience.

Jeff Batt: Yeah, you can use any AI tool. So chat, uh, chatgpt, Claude Chat or Copilot, any of those tools you can go in. And what I would recommend is just create or think of like some type of game that you want to create or some type of just like simple flipkart interaction. In fact my vibe coding fundamentals course, that's the first thing we do is just take a flip card interaction which most people, if you're in learning and development, you realize that it's just click and there's like a little flashcard basically. So if you take something as simple as that and then you go try it in ChatGPT and you, you don't have to use uh, there's different parts of ChatGPT, you just use the chat, you don't have to go into Codex, you don't have to go into anything like that. You just go into the chat and you specifically say in, in each of these I want to create an HTML file That has a flip card and when you click uh, on it, it flips over and it shows some other content. So has uh, some text on the front of the card and it has text on the back. As simple as that. IT ChatGPT code, uh, Claude and Copilot will all create a single HTML file and then it will preview it, right? And if it doesn't preview it, you just say preview this inside of the tool. It'll preview. Except for Copilot. Copilot like downloads an HTML file and you have to preview it yourself, which is weird. But with Claude and Copilot. Sorry, Claude and there's too many of them. But Cloud and ChatGPT, it just previews it right there and you can test it out. So then you can go back and you can iterate it. And one thing I always talk about is when you're going back and forth, just start small, just start with a little prompt and then you start to, you start to interact with that. And so you go in and you click on the flip cards. And then this is where the instructional design mindset will come into play. Because then you're, you're kind of that uh, like testing it out and you're like, I, I think it'd be nice if there was a check mark after I've, after the card flips to the back. And so then you just go back to ChatGPT and Cloud and say add a check mark when the card flips over. And then after all cards have flipped over, then your instructional mind starts to go like we should prompt the user to do something. So okay, after all the four cards have been flipped over, this would be the next prompt. Then show a little alert that says you have completed it. So it's things like that where initially when I was building my website, which is a full website and blog posts and different things like that is I just started out with a few things. I'm like, I just want to do this, I just want to do that. So focus on one feature at a time and just chat about or uh, just specifically iterate on that until it becomes exactly how you want and then you can move on to the next feature and you can say, okay, now I want to have this, now I want to have that. So if you take it just step, you know, one step at a time, I think that is, makes it less intimidating than trying to like design a complete doc of everything that needs to happen with that uh, application. I would do that and just uh, learn, just chat back and forth with it. Learn what it can do before I would also start out with just a single HTML before I would dive into other tools like cloud code, codecs, lovable, different things like that.

Todd Kirk: Okay, so I really like that a lot. And I think that hopefully helps people start thinking about how they can approach using AI a little bit differently. I would guess a lot of the, A lot of the people who are in education and are creating content and designing learning for their customers today are maybe, uh, struggling a little bit to understand what their place is. Meaning, does AI just replace me? Does it just do my job for me? And if it does, what is my role now? And how is that shifting? How is that changing? Have you noticed anybody who feels fearful and what do you do to reassure them or help them to think differently about how a lot of this is starting to change? Because you're right, AI can do some really powerful things and it's not even that hard to get started. But how, how do you, how do you feel comfortable in this new world where you're like, not really sure what your role is or what you're supposed to do in the future?

Jeff Batt: Yeah, that's a valid concern. That comes up a lot. And that's something that even comes up for me too, is like, is this going to replace my job down the road? And I, I don't know, I. We've had different moments of time, you know, at least even in my career of like, we're moving from Flash. I learned how to code and Flash. So we were moving from Flash to HTML. Flash was kind of going away. I'm like, what do I do now? And so it's, it's moments like that that I think if, if you just hold on to, like, I know it's Flash, I gotta learn Flash, you're eventually going to be kind of out of a job there. But if you are open to, okay, now maybe I need to shift a little bit. Maybe I need to try this out a little bit. I think that, to me, I've always been that way of like, okay, I'm, um. I've always just been curious, okay, what can this do? And if I'm the one with these new technologies coming out and testing things out, I think that's more probably for my anxiety, if it was more for my, like, uh, it also helps me be like, if I'm the one kind of helping push the change, I feel a little safer in my position. But I also think it opens up a lot of possibilities. And I was just thinking this, this morning is really, uh, I want to phrase it how I was thinking about it, but it was like, if a company. I also think companies are kind of jumping the gun and they're just, you know, making changes, probably not because of their AI strategy. They're making changes because of a different reason. But if a company was smart, to me is like, do we want to lay off people to then, you know, do the same amount of work with less people, or do we want to have the same amount of people and do more work? And to me, that is just like, I'd rather like, don't they want to become more efficient? Don't they want to just become more effective in what they're doing? And so to me, it's like, okay, we're going to lay people off so we can do the same amount of work. Doesn't make any sense. But it's like, okay, let's keep the people that we have and then we can, uh, become more efficient with what we're doing. But I also always share this on any Vibe coding session is, to me, Vibe coding doesn't replace designers, it empowers them. So I feel more empowered as the designer. And you, you do shift a little bit because you become this director. You're not the one. Maybe you're not the one actually inside a storyline developing anymore. Maybe you're not the one that's writing the entire storyboard, but you're still the one that's directing that. So to me, it's, um, if you're the one that's. Or you're the one in that role and you're the one using these tools, it becomes more of a power. And I'll just give one more example is like, I've always. I've loved Apple. I'm an Apple fan through and through. I've always wanted to develop, uh, iPhone apps. And there's times throughout my life where I've. I've learned Swift, I learned objective C, things like that, but I don't have a lot of free time because I do a lot of this on my. On the side anyways. So, uh, a lot of my YouTube channel. So I don't have a lot of time to go learn Swift. I don't have a lot of time to, to do that. But now with like, five coding, I'm able to. It empowers me to create these different apps to create, uh, anything, anything. Any idea that I have, I'm able to create it. I'm not restricted by my knowledge there. So now, like, just last night or this past couple nights, as I've been sitting, watching tv. I've been creating my finance. Like I've created a Mac OS application that was just how to track my finances. So I'm able, without having to know the specifics of code, I'm able to generate anything that I want. This any idea that I have just by prompting and just by going through and iterating and different things. So to me, I don't know, I think it empowers you more than it does it does scare me at least.

Casey Trujillo: Jeff, that's fantastic. I uh, love it. I just read that Mark Zuckerberg came out and just said, hey, our AI strategy we screwed up is wrong. We, we should have taken a different approach. As I think about this and, and considering vibe coding and doing things like that, what are again, one or two best practices? On the opposite side we've talked a lot about. Okay, you're going to be empowered. You're more of a director. What are some things. Let me go in eyes wide, full, uh, open, eyes wise, open of like, what should I consider as maybe some things I, I should be thinking about that could come up as a concern or could come up as, as an issue. What advice would you have on the other side of the house? I saw all the benefits. You got me sold. But I also like to know what are the risks that I might be going into. Could you name off a couple here for the audience?

Jeff Batt: Oh yeah, a hundred percent. Because the content that you're creating is not different than what developers, web developers have been creating for years. So it's using the same languages. It's not a new coding language or anything like that. It's using the same languages. So I think you do need to become familiar with these different concerns that these developers have. Number one, security. So if you're going to be using something like lovable, it uh, creates a database and if that data has personal identifiable information in there in your organization, you need to follow those best practices of security. Or you need to tie into like a, uh, authenticator like Azure or stuff like that, which can be very overwhelming. If you're creating just a small little code block. Let's say you're starting out really small and you're just creating a single HTML file. You're going to copy that code, paste it right into articulate rise. Does that code block attach other files? Because that when you're working with web development, sometimes they attach files to help with their development to like bootstrap. Bootstrap is uh, a framework that you can go in and so I don't have to design all of the buttons. I can just attach a file from Bootstrap. There may be a, uh, file that's out there that's corrupted or something. So it's more just whatever. Asking the AI to do a security check. Lovable, thankfully, has security checks included in it. That's just something that I think we have to become familiar with if we're going to be Vibe coding, because you don't want to be the one that leaks content or creates a security breach or different things like that. So I am constantly on my own website, I'm going in and doing security checks and security runs, uh, different things like that. Uh, and so I think that's the first thing, but also the second thing is sometimes you have to deal with like, integrations into other tools where you have to walk through and create what's called an API. And so, so you're going to get a little bit more complex depending on what you're doing. But what I found is, uh, I had a. I did. We did an interview on our Vibe dojo channel with someone that doesn't know any code whatsoever and he was able to just go into Lovable and say, hey, teach me this, how to do this. Give me step by step. So just going in and if there's some area that you're a little bit more hesitant on, have Lovable, have chatgpt, whatever tool that you're using, just say, walk me through this, help me understand this part. Because you still need to understand what it's doing, what connectors it's making in order for you to make sure that everything is good before you paste it into rise or you squirm, wrap it and put it into your LMS and different things like that.

Todd Kirk: So, yeah, which you know, and I think one of the things that's a good call out here to remember too, is that there's. There's a lot of things that you have to consider if you're going to do this in a work context at all. And a lot of people don't realize that. Like, we've been talking a lot about it from the perspective of instructional design and creating learning experiences that you can deliver and build everything from the ground up. Right. Go and author, author a new experience. Even Scorm Rapid if you need to. Uh, and there's all these really cool things that you can do with AI in that world. There's also some things you need to understand about how that all works. That applies for so many people in their jobs. It's not just even around instructional design. A lot of our audiences in the CS world and now all of a sudd thinking about how you can do research to better support your customers and understand kind of their progress. Maybe you have ideas for how you're tracking projects of things that you need a customer to accomplish. Maybe you need to be able to create a new QBR document and you want to be able to generate that really quickly. AI can open up so many of these different things, but you know, great example, are you going to put all of your customer sensitive data into your personal ChatGPT account? Probably shouldn't be doing that. Right. So there's a lot of really important things that you have to consider around security and where that data should live and which models should have access to it to make sure that it's managed in a secure and appropriate way. So love that, love that. Call out Jeff. So I am curious, uh, I don't always ask our guests to try to play the role of Nostradamus, but if you were to look and think about uh, you know, predictions for the future and how a lot of these things are going to change. I mean there's new models and new capabilities and new uh, tools that are dropping all the time. Does it like right now what we're using, Like I think what you mentioned is this is the one thing that I think is hard is like change with AI is accelerating, right? So that the ramp up from moving from Flash to HTML might have taken a decade, uh, or five years or something, but now we're looking at that in a much more compressed timeline of how quickly people need to adapt and adjust. If you could read the tea leaves and look up forward, what would you say are some of the things that maybe we should be thinking about, about how AI might disrupt and change what we're doing even further than what it already is. And if you, and by the way, like I said, I'm asking you to be Nostradamus. If, if you don't want to be a, uh, play the role of profit here, you don't have to. But, but I'd be curious what your, if you, if you have any thoughts, I'd love to hear them.

Jeff Batt: Yeah, no, nobody obviously knows exactly what's going to happen but, but it is, is something where I think, and there's been a lot of chatter on this online of like maybe storyline, maybe your traditional authoring tools. I don't want to say they go away, but I want to say that they adapt. I want to say that they Change. And so I uh, can see Storyline becoming more of like a chat base. So very similar to lovable, very similar to uh, cursor, different things like that where instead of you creating the slides and laying out the slides, you're basically saying I want a tab interaction. Uh, and have four tabs and have like an image here and pull that image there. Um, and I see authoring tools specifically going that route. And so but I also see more and more people using stuff like okay, I'm just going to build the entire learning experience inside of Cloud. I'm going to build the entire learning experience inside of ChatGPT or whatever tool that it's actually using. And so what I would recommend, I always recommend this to people is because even like back in the day, like elearning tools, because I'm in the elearning tool area, elearning tools come and go. So they, you'll see a tool get really popular and then all of a sudden it kind of fizzles out, you know, because I started before Articulate was even a company inside of the elearning world. And so Captivate, uh, was big at that time. There's author ware, there's other things like that, that author where's no longer even around. Um, and so it's, it's things where it's like don't. And I tell my students this at the uh, class that I teach is like don't tie yourself to one tool. Just be open to these, these other tools and always constantly be learning of like okay, what other tool? How can I do that more efficiently? And that's where it's like okay, what is the need for this project? Is the need to create a slide by slide interaction? Great, let's use Storyline. Or is the need that I want to create like a custom really interactive game with full of animations. Maybe AI is better for that. But I see like tools going more, all tools going to more chat based type of stuff. But I also see more of like, okay, I have like documentation. Let's put this inside of one AI agent and it will run and suggest like a layout and an outline for me. And then maybe I can just click another button that says okay, develop the course. I can also see like you can say, you can chat say, or we're seeing this change in our uh, organization. How can I better develop that and then have it create courses on the fly for you automatically? One thing that I've always, I would love to see this is more personalized learning. And this is why I really got into XAPI is because X API allows you to track more than what SCORM ever could. And you can track, you know, what buttons they clicked on if they watch the entire video, different things like that. So that's one side of it where you can track more, but the other side is now you can use that data to personalize content. And so the more we get down AI, that's where I see like, as far as the learning experience go of like, it adapts to what I already know, experiences that I've already had. Uh, and it adapts the contents based on this learning experience, based on X API or whatever methodology we, you know, comes out next, that allows us to be able to pick up on the history of the learner and uh, deliver the right content. So I don't know, that's, that's kind of where I see both the learning and the authoring side of things. Go to mark that down.

Casey Trujillo: Todd June 17, we'll see, we'll see what happens. We'll, we'll measure it from a year today on June 17, 2027, see if he was right.

Todd Kirk: It's okay if it doesn't come true, we won't bring, come out with the pitchforks. That's all right. But I actually, I agree with you and I think that's one of the things that's really exciting to see is that like, the more data becomes available, the smarter the model models get, the better the tools will be at being able to personalize and provide relevant resources to me so I can be successful in my role. And I'm really excited about that too. I mean, that's something that we've been working on for years here of how do we, how do we think about what a user needs and create the shortest path for them to be successful to with the thing that they're trying to accomplish. And a lot of times we can lose that, we can lose the thread and focus on learning from the perspective of how do I make learning as fun, as exciting and cool or something that I'm proud of. Right? Just like if I were a landscaper. I want you to see my beautiful lawn that I, that I, that I made, that everybody can look at. But the goal here is like not just to make something beautiful, but also make something that is highly impactful and highly efficient in helping you get the goal that you need done. That's exciting to see that AI, uh, may help us get that, get there much, even much faster than we are even today.

Casey Trujillo: Jeff is a similar question, but different you described where you think these tool sets might be if you were to write a job description for somebody in customer education today. I think in the past it would just say, hey, do you have an instructional designer degree? And you know, boom, let's hire you. And we like your personality. Right. What do you think the skill set is for someone that's in. That's creating courses today that's going to be in customer education, whether it be internal, external. What do you think's gonna be the new skill set that people have to have?

Jeff Batt: Yeah, so I came into this industry a little bit different. So I actually, I studied as a web developer, graduated, uh, as a web developer in, in during the flash days. But I kind of fell into the elearning industry and as a salesperson, so I started selling. But I, I fell in love with teaching how to use the software. So I've always come from the development side. And I felt kind of when I started speaking at conferences, which was years ago, I felt like a fish out of water because it was almost like it was all about instructional design. It's all about the theory, different things like that. But I always leaned more towards the tools. Okay. And this is kind of like my entire career has been working with instructional designers to go in and create the content. And so I was handed storyboards and different things like that. And so I think it shifted more already to be like, okay, now instructional designers are more expected to be coming out of school, uh, to have a little bit more of development knowledge at the university that I teach at, that's the reason why they brought me on was because they didn't have a lot of instructors that did teach the development side. So they wanted to have somebody come in and teach the development because they saw that need of, like, we need to have, you know, we need to prepare our students more to be able to create the content, not only have sound instruction, but to create the content itself. So I think that's even like that. Uh, so I don't feel as much of a fish out of water now. And so I think this, it's already shifting that way where you need to understand the development side a little bit more. Uh, and now, especially with AI, I think it's even more where you do need to understand how to use AI to be able to more efficiently do your job, to create content, to update courses and to go in and to publish out these new learning interactions and stuff like that. So it helps you, if you do understand development, it helps you understand, okay, how do games work, how Do I even, you know, keep track of a score? What is that? What is a variable? How do I store this information and pass it over? Uh, you're, you're having to understand that a little bit more than I would say, you know, you had to do five years ago. So if I was gonna, if uh, I was to create a new job description, it would be lean more heavily, not more than instructional design, but it would be almost equivalent of having instructional theory and instructional development kind of combined. And I think that's gonna just increase more and more with all of these different tools that are coming out.

Todd Kirk: Yeah, you know, uh, I've been watching all the Marvel movies with my kids, um, cause they're old enough to let em watch the Marvel movies. We just watched Spider Man Homecoming the other day. And the line that came to my mind from that movie is, you know, after Spider man screws up everything and everything's going wrong, Iron man threatens to take. Tony Stark threatens to take his suit away. And he says, I'm nothing without this suit. And then Tony Stark says, well, if you're nothing without the suit, then you don't deserve it. And so what I think is interesting in this whole process and what you're outlining here, Jeff, is that like, there are, there are things that make us great as humans, and we might have really, really awesome, powerful tools, but if we're nothing without the tools, then we don't deserve them. Um, so you kind of have to understand not only just how to use the tools, but then you also have to determine what you need to be successful. So I'm curious, right, if like the man behind the m. Behind the suit, the man behind the tools, the technology, what, what does the person need to have? What should we be developing? Not just a knowledge of these tools, because I love that you mentioned, like, it kind of needs to be both. Like, I don't know, what do you need in a, uh, in a, in a core, at your core to be successful in this upcoming world? What do you think?

Jeff Batt: Yeah, I think it comes down to ideation. It comes down to being able to come up with the different possibilities or to explore different possibilities. And so what I mean by that is essentially you now have kind of these barriers are gone. The barriers to be able to create content are now gone. So what do you want to create? That's the thing that I see still sometimes people struggle with is, oh, uh, I'm just going to create everything that I've already been creating. So it's just like, I'm not Creating anything new. But to me it's, I think you need to now in this industry to make yourself stand out a little bit more. You need to create something different, you know, or just think about something different or think about your approach differently or uh, and so you're now having to come up with ideas, you're having to do the ideation in. And it's not as much about like how to implement it. It's more of like, okay, what is really going to solve the need here? What type of interaction is going to be the best to really do the knowledge transfer. And so I think that's, if I were to emphasize the skill, it would be like coming up with the different ideas. And, and I think it comes through practice. Like sometimes instructional designers that I worked with where they're like, oh, we can't, they would tell me what they want. But it was, I would have to go back and say, okay, we can actually do more than this. And so I would help them kind of overcome some obstacles that they had in their thinking process of like, okay, we could actually do this, we can actually do that. And that to me helped kind of train my brain a little bit of thinking different possibilities, thinking through different possibilities. Um, and which has been very beneficial for me is just like, okay, let's, let's think about this different. Let's, let's try a different type of interaction here. Or let's, instead of trying to fit everything inside of one rectangle, maybe we have like a little pop up or something. So you're thinking about different ways to create this experience or to alter the learning interaction. Um, and that's really what it comes down to is now are you the one coming up with the ideas? Are you the one that's coming up with the ability to implement those ideas as well? So hopefully that makes sense.

Casey Trujillo: Jeff has been awesome. Uh, we always end every episode with one last question, which is if, if you've ever been to therapy, the therapist always says, hey, let's give you a homework something to work on for the week until we meet again. Jeff, if you could give uh, a homework assignment to our audience today, it could be anything you want. What would be the homework assignment you'd give to everyone?

Jeff Batt: I would say, go pull up ChatGPT, Claude or anything like that and just put in like a single learning interaction prompt. So just try it out. Just go in and say, I want to create a flip card interaction that has four cards, has some text on the front, and when you click on it, it flips around to the back and has some text on the back. Do that. And then if you have access to Rise, then it will generate the code for you. You just click copy up on top and then go into Rise and just add a code block and paste in the code. If you do that, you're going to see possibilities. You're going to say like, uh. Like, uh, really? Because it's so seamless inside of Rise. Like when you're scrolling down, you don't know that it was built in a different tool. And so then ideas start to generate from there. So I would say just start with one prompt. Go open ChatGPT, Cloud, Copilot, anything like that. And just go in and start with that one prompt.

Todd Kirk: Love it. Jeff. Well, thank you for joining us and everyone, thank you for being with us. As, as always, come back each Wednesday we do new episodes and we, uh, look forward to having you join us each week. Let us know what you think. Are we crazy or is Jeff. Is Jeff predicting a real future or not? Oh, I promised him no pitchforks though, so be kind in the comments, everybody. Thanks for joining with us. Thanks again, Jeff, for joining us.

Jeff Batt: Yeah, no problem. Thank you.

Todd Kirk: Sas therapy is brought to you by brainstorm, the SaaS platform for SaaS adoption. Learn more at brainstorminc.com

Jeff Batt: sam.