An illustration of the people, technologies and processes involved in a learning design system
Setting up an in-house learning design system today requires a clear focus on aligning your team, processes, and tools to the changing landscape of education and training. It starts with defining the purpose of your system, assembling the right people and roles, and selecting a flexible approach that allows for agile, collaborative design. Emphasising technology, AI, and innovative formats like microlearning and stackable credentials, this system should be built with scalability and sustainability in mind. To make a real impact, you must prioritise the learner, personalising their experiences and using feedback loops to continuously improve. Scaling your service means documenting successful patterns, ensuring shared ownership, and keeping space for experimentation and growth. By aligning your system with your organisation’s strategy and staying adaptable to new tools and formats, your team will be well-prepared for the future of learning and development.
Table of Contents
- Why rethink your learning design setup now?
- Defining the purpose of your in-house learning design system
- Assembling the right team, the people and their roles
- Setting your approach and shared methodologies
- Building your tech stack and choosing platforms
- Integrating AI into your design workflow
- Designing for new formats: microlearning, badges, stackable credentials
- Keeping the learner at the centre
- Measuring success and learning from data
- Scaling and sustaining your service
- Challenges and opportunities ahead
- Thing to try today
- Summary
- Related Topics
Why rethink your learning design setup now?
We’re in the middle of a big shift in how learning is designed, delivered, and experienced. AI is reshaping what’s possible. Learners expect flexible, modular learning that fits their lives. Budgets are tight, teams are lean, and the pressure to demonstrate value is real.
Whether you're in a Higher Education or Learning & Development team, the challenge is the same: If you were to build an in-house learning design system from scratch today, and knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?
This blog post explores what that might look like.
Defining the purpose of your in-house learning design system
Before anything else, get clear on your “why.”
Are you aiming to scale expert knowledge across your organisation? Improve course quality? Support compliance? Upskill your workforce? Reach new audiences?
Who are your learners? Are they internal employees, students, partners, or customers? Do you know what do they need to succeed?
An in-house learning design system gives you greater control, flexibility, and institutional knowledge than outsourcing ever could. But to succeed, it must be clearly aligned with your organisation’s strategy and deliver visible, measurable value. This system should advance your broader goals around digital transformation, access, innovation, and capability-building.
Assembling the right team, the people and their roles
A great system needs great people. You’ll want a core team of Learning Designers, Technologists, Media Producers, and Project Managers. Around them, you’ll collaborate regularly with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), Educators, Trainers, Librarians, and Accessibility Leads.
There are also emerging roles to consider due to AI as their functions become strategically essential.
You don’t need to hire everyone at once. Upskill existing staff, draw on internal talent, and bring in external expertise where needed. Most importantly, create a team culture that values cross-functional collaboration, continuous learning, and empathy for both educators and learners.
Setting your approach and shared methodologies
Without a shared approach, even the best teams can lose coherence.
Define how you scope, design, develop, roll out, and evaluate learning experiences. Make it consistent and flexible enough to evolve.
Embrace agile workflows that allow for iteration and input from others. Ground your work in pedagogical or andragogical models, but choose ones that are adaptable to your learners, context, and tools.
Co-design and collaborative design should be a default, not an afterthought. Make space for educators, SMEs, and learners to shape the learning experience together.
Building your tech stack and choosing platforms
Most learning design teams still rely heavily on documents, slides, and spreadsheets. This slows collaboration, hides best practice, and makes reuse difficult.
Modern teams should consider platforms purpose-built for collaborative learning design, like Coursensu, that support planning, alignment, content design, and delivery readiness. Combine these with authoring tools, media production platforms, and robust LMS integration (like Moodle, Brightspace or Absorb).
It's also time to ask: Is your LMS still providing value?
In some contexts, it is essential. In others, it may be better supplemented with more flexible platforms. Either way, you'll want to know the erequirments before jumping to a default solution. Consider interoperability, accessibility, and future-proofing as guiding principles.
Finally, balance your tech stack across in-person, blended, and fully online delivery needs. The right mix depends on your learners, your educators, and your organisational goals.
Integrating AI into your design workflow
AI is no longer a novelty, it’s a collaborator.
Used well, AI can:
- Review learning outcomes and check for alignment
- Summarise complex or technical SME input
- Suggest formative feedback and instructional improvements
- Spot inconsistencies or gaps in content
- Recommend existing content or reuse opportunities
Embedded into platforms like Coursensu and your LMS, AI agents can also work inside your systems to read content, suggest edits, and help educators meet learning outcomes more efficiently.
Treat AI as a critical friend, not a shortcut. Its value lies in augmenting human judgment, not replacing it.
Designing for new formats: microlearning, badges, stackable credentials
Traditional, semester-long, linear courses are giving way to more modular formats. Microlearning offers focused, bite-sized lessons that learners can apply immediately. Badges and stackable credentials allow for visible progress and recognised achievement along the way.
Designing for these new formats means personalising learning to individual needs and goals. It also means aligning your content with in-demand skills and competencies.
Your learning design system should enable this flexibility, both in terms of tools and team mindset. The ability to adapt quickly to new formats is fast becoming a differentiator and part of your team's value proposition.
Keeping the learner at the centre
It’s easy to get caught up in tools, templates, and timelines — but lasting impact begins with the learner.
Start by mapping learner journeys to understand their needs, goals, and pain points. Test usability early and often, and make accessibility a built-in expectation, not an afterthought.
Where possible, personalise the learning experience. This might mean offering flexible pathways, self-paced progression, or targeted support based on individual needs. Establish strong feedback loops and use what you learn to continuously improve your content and approach.
Keeping learners at the centre isn’t just good instructional design. When learners succeed, so does your organisation.
Measuring success and learning from data
If you want to scale quality, you need visibility. Learning analytics, used ethically, can surface insights about learner engagement, performance, and satisfaction.
AI-powered dashboards can help your team move from descriptive data (“what happened”) to diagnostic and predictive data (“why it happened” and “what might happen next”).
Make sure data isn’t locked away in another team. Build it into your design and review process. Share wins. Learn from outliers. Align metrics with broader organisational KPIs - for example; retention, revenue, inclusion, upskilling.
Scaling and sustaining your service
A strong learning design system doesn’t just deliver great courses — it makes great courses repeatable. Document what works. Capture templates, toolkits, and design patterns that others can reuse and adapt. Make onboarding fast and frictionless. Help new educators and SMEs understand your workflows, expectations, and support systems from day one.
Foster shared ownership across teams. When multiple roles contribute to design and delivery, the system becomes more resilient. And crucially, protect space, and budget, for experimentation. Innovation needs room to try, fail, and learn.
Long-term sustainability doesn’t rely on a few heroic individuals. It comes from robust systems that empower everyone to do their best work.
Challenges and opportunities ahead
You’ll face resistance to AI, to change, to new ways of working. That’s natural. What matters is aligning your learning design efforts with organisational strategy and clearly showing the value: for learners, for staff, and for long-term goals. Remember that during change one of the most valuable things is clear communication.
The field is evolving quickly. Roles, tools, and expectations will shift. But with strong foundations and a mindset open to new formats and collaborations, your team can stay ready for whatever comes next.
Thing to try today
Audit your current learning design approach — team, tools, and tech.
Ask:
- What’s working?
- What’s missing?
- Where is there friction?
Then choose one area (e.g. collaborative design or microlearning) to prototype - using your existing resources. Start small, but with intent.
Summary
If you were setting up an in-house learning design system from scratch today, you’d build something more agile, AI-assisted, and learner-focused than ever before. You might notchange delivery format, or you may be planning for microlearning, modular credentials, and blended delivery. You’d invest in your people, your processes, and your platforms, a lot more than your content.
Lastly, you’d create a system that doesn’t just produce learning but one that helps your organisation grow, adapt, and lead.
Related Topics
- Building a high-performing learning design team
- Using AI as a design assistant, not a generator
- Designing effective microcredentials
- Embedding learning analytics into your workflow
- Why your learning design platform matters
