The Future of eLearning Authoring
Why We're All Going to Be Vibecoding Soon
I've spent the last few months doing something that would have seemed absurd to me a year ago: teaching myself to build software by having conversations with AI. Not learning to code in the traditional sense, but what the tech world calls "vibecoding", describing what you want and watching it materialise into working applications.
After attending a few industry events and having conversations about the current state of eLearning authoring tools, I started wondering: if we can now create entire web applications, mobile apps, and complex software through natural language prompts, why are we still dragging and dropping elements in what amounts to glorified PowerPoint for the web?
The timing feels significant. We're at a moment where a month of development time can take an idea from conception to production-ready software that's seeking venture capital investment. Meanwhile, our industry still tries to justify why a single e-learning module should take weeks to develop. Everyone laughs and shakes it off at the moment, but the contrast is becoming harder to ignore.
The Vibecoding Revolution
I've been experimenting with several platforms that represent this shift. Loveable offers perhaps the gentlest introduction; you get five free prompts a day, so you could literally ask it to build GDPR training right now. Tell it your brand guidelines, specify a style, and watch it create something functional. It's not perfect, but it's remarkably capable for something that requires no technical knowledge.
Check out these single-prompt creations:
GDPR Mastery (with good vs bad design toggle)
Claude Code has become my preferred tool for more sophisticated work. It integrates with development environments like Visual Studio Code, allowing for more complex conversations about functionality and design. Cursor and Windsurf offer similar capabilities with their own strengths, while Kiro has impressed me as being particularly good at handling diverse development tasks and spec-based development. This, I suspect, will be the future of all these tools.
The experience is shockingly different from traditional authoring. Instead of wrestling with interface limitations or hunting through menus for the right interaction type, you describe what you want the user to experience, and the tools handle the technical implementation.
The E-Learning Reality Check
To be fair, eLearning development operates under constraints that pure software development often doesn't face. Subject matter experts need sign-off on every line of text. Senior leadership insists on multiple review rounds, seemingly to feel important and involved in projects they don't understand. These prescriptive processes haven't evolved much since we were burning content onto CDs.
But these constraints aren't technical limitations. They're organisational choices. When development time drops from weeks to hours, when iterations become trivial rather than expensive, when you can test five different approaches in the time it used to take to get approval for one, the conversation changes or rather, it will need to change.
The question isn't whether this technology will reach eLearning, it's whether our industry will adapt quickly enough to take advantage of it, or whether we'll cling to processes designed for a world where change was expensive and slow.
Getting Started Today
My advice is straightforward: start experimenting now. Pick one of these platforms and try building something simple. Create a basic compliance module, design an interactive scenario, or build a knowledge check. See what works, what doesn't, and where the current limitations lie.
You don't need to become a programmer, but you do need to understand what's possible. The skills that matter are the same ones we've always needed: understanding learning objectives, designing effective experiences, and thinking about user needs. The tools are just becoming more responsive to natural language rather than requiring technical translation.
I'm still evolving my thinking on this. The technology is moving quickly, the capabilities are expanding rapidly, and I'm certain I'm missing important considerations. But I can't shake the feeling that we're looking at a fundamental shift in how digital training gets created.
The alternative is continuing to justify why our development processes take longer than launching a startup. That conversation is getting harder to have with a straight face.
What's your experience with these tools? Are you seeing similar possibilities, or am I getting carried away with technological optimism?
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I run a range of company and individual courses on key L&D skills and processes, from UX to experiment design, instructional design, learning science, and facilitation practices.