14 May 2026 · 1 min read
The quiet work of learning designers
The people rebuilding subjects around new tools are rarely the people quoted in the strategy documents. A short argument for changing that.
By Dale Leszczynski
Every institutional AI plan we have read describes capability uplift. Almost none of them name the group actually doing the uplifting.
Learning designers sit at the exact join between a teaching intention and a delivery constraint. They are the ones who discover that the new assessment design does not fit the timetable, that the tool is not accessible, that the rubric cannot be marked at scale. That knowledge is operational and it is almost never fed back into strategy.
A modest proposal
Put the people who rebuild the subjects in the room where the plan is written. Not for consultation at the end — at the start, when the assumptions are still soft.