Example · Instructional Designer
Course building is becoming a feature of the LMS (learning management system). Your standing with faculty stays with you.
27 of your 40 hours still need you
- 12 stay yours
- 15 faster with AI
- 13 tools could take
A typical week at the middle pace. Your plan uses your own tasks.
Is instructional design dying because of AI?
By our task-by-task count, 27 of a typical 40-hour week as an instructional designer still need a person. Tools could already take about 13 hours. Production is 32% of your week: the LMS shell, the module text, the video edit, the captions, the first draft of the quiz. A model now makes all of it from a syllabus and a slide deck.
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LMS vendors sell this as a feature, and faculty may prefer the machine's version of their own course because it sounds like them. Under the moderate scenario, an online division of modest size stops paying four people to do that within three years, mostly by not refilling the next seat that empties.
What makes you hard to replace is the meeting where a professor who has taught the same lecture for twenty years decides, with you in the room, to change it. Federal rules require a named instructor in regular, substantive contact with students, and a federal accessibility deadline now sits on public universities with a date attached and the Justice Department's own finding that AI cannot do the remediation. Nobody can build a course for a faculty member who has not agreed to it, and nobody can sign the university's name to a course a screen reader cannot use. The plan moves your week toward those two rooms, and it makes the hard conversations easier by giving you authority you don't have today. Note that the biggest threat to your seat is the enrollment numbers, scored separately below.
The hard truth
The experts you serve can now build their own materials.
Faculty and subject experts used to need you to turn their knowledge into a course. More of them now draft materials with AI.
Sources (1)
- Claude.ai conversations to develop instructional materials rose from 0.2% to 1.5% within about eight months. Anthropic Economic Index, 2025-09
What stays yours
You sit with faculty and turn "put my course online" into a design
This rests on context and relationships. Faculty own the curriculum under shared governance, and the accreditor holds the institution to that. A model given the syllabus builds the course, but it cannot get the professor to agree that his week-9 lecture should be two weeks, or notice that he is frightened of the discussion board. Persuading a tenured faculty member takes standing, and you earn standing in meetings.
You are the reason a course launch is defensible on accessibility
The accountability here is borrowed from the university's duty under ADA Title II, the disability law for public bodies. The 2024 DOJ (Justice Department) rule requires WCAG 2.1 AA, the web accessibility standard, for public entities, public universities included, with a compliance date now of April 26, 2027 for larger entities and April 26, 2028 for smaller ones. DOJ's April 2026 extension states that generative AI "does not yet reliably automate the remediation of inaccessible content at scale." Someone must decide what gets fixed, what gets replaced, and what the professor is told.
You check that a course has a real instructor in it
The accountability here is borrowed from Title IV, the federal student aid law. 34 CFR 600.2 defines distance education as requiring "regular and substantive interaction" with an instructor "responsible for delivering course content." A course without that is correspondence education and loses federal aid eligibility. The check is a per-course design judgment a program director wants a human to have made.
You fix the assessment when faculty say students are using ChatGPT
This depends on context. Only 24% of faculty have redesigned assessments around AI (Tyton Partners, 2026), and grading is where faculty rate AI least effective (Anthropic's education report). The redesign needs the discipline, the professor's tolerance for change, the accreditation constraints, and the trust to say "your essay prompt is the problem."
You catch the wrong quiz items and the wrong textbook edition in AI drafts
What protects this is verification, and nobody else in the chain will do it. The professor may like the draft, but the model cannot know which edition the bookstore stocks. When drafting costs little, the person who knows what to check becomes more valuable.
What can an instructional designer move into?
Plan A is your best move inside the work you do now. Most sessions in the 13-week plan build toward it.
- A
Own the accessibility deadline for the online division
Why it fits
Why you. You likely already do the remediation and already have the hard conversation, and often nobody else in the division owns it. The date moved once and DOJ plans further rulemaking, so the institution needs someone who tracks the rule and does more than tag PDFs. DOJ's reasoning for the extension matches your job description. It says staff lack technical expertise, and AI "does not yet reliably automate the remediation of inaccessible content at scale."
The gap. You have no inventory by conformance, no triage rule, no signed escalation path and no accessibility credential yet.
The trade-off. This is the hardest part of the work, and the plan asks for more of it. Borrowed accountability is the weakest kind. The university can hand remediation to a vendor and reporting to IT, and your program becomes theirs. If DOJ softens the standard, the duty stays but the urgency goes. Your name on the report also means your name on the finding when the number is bad.
Other moves that fit
These are also good bets in this field. Read them if Plan A doesn't suit you.
Be the assessment-redesign consultant faculty ask for
Why it fits
Why you. Faculty already come to designers when they think students are cheating. Three quarters of faculty have not redesigned assessments around AI, grading is where they trust AI least, and no vendor will sit with a history professor and rebuild her essay sequence.
The gap. You have no protocol, no before-and-after evidence and no count of courses changed yet.
The trade-off. This is consulting work, and your courses-built number falls while you do it. A semester where nobody says yes leaves a protocol and no evidence. The outcomes belong to the faculty member, and you will be credited in the acknowledgments.
Lead one program from proposal to launch
Why it fits
Why you. You have touched every part of the pipeline and likely never owned one program whole: curriculum map, substantive-change documentation, the design for regular instructor contact, faculty cohort, launch. Under the new loan limits, programs must be priced for students who can borrow $20,500 a year, which few divisions have designed under.
The gap. You have no program-level ownership, no relationship with the accreditation liaison and no understanding of the new program-level earnings tests yet. Your financial aid office can confirm how they apply.
The trade-off. New programs are the first thing canceled when graduate enrollment falls, and this may be the year. A program that dies in committee leaves nothing on your résumé.
What's a plan B for instructional designers?
Plan B is a job AI is creating that these skills already fit. One session a week in the plan trains you for it, so it is ready if your job shrinks or you want a change.
BPlan B, picked for this role
AI tutoring and learning designer
Aligning assessments to outcomes with faculty is exactly what AI tutoring products need to teach accurately and fairly.
Other options
Conversation designer
You already sequence content and feedback for learners, which maps onto designing the turns and handoffs of an AI conversation.
AI enablement and adoption lead
Faculty already come to you when tools change. Adoption work lasts when it is tied to their teaching, such as assessment redesign.
In your own plan you can switch to any of the 47 roles.
The first two weeks
The first 2 of 13 weeks. Each week has three sessions of 45, 60 and 75 minutes, plus one 40-minute Plan B session. The plan follows the academic term, with your ask in weeks 11 and 12 before the term ends, and everything it requires costs $440 at Quality Matters (QM) subscriber rates or $715 without a subscription. By week 13 you'll have at least three assessment consultation cases, a memo asking for a new title, and a published AI tutor case study.
- Week 1: Measure your week
What you do
- ATrack your time for one week against the 13 tasks in this report.
- APull every AI-drafted piece you reviewed this term and count your corrections by type. Use these types: factual, edition or source, alignment, accessibility, tone and none.
- ARead the Justice Department's fact sheet on the ADA Title II accessibility rule and its April 2026 interim final rule, which moved the deadline. Write one page on what the university must do, by when, which exceptions apply to course content (none of the proposed ones survived) and who your ADA coordinator is.
- BRead the 4D framework sections of Anthropic's AI Fluency: Framework & Foundations, a free short course. Note one course design example for each D.
- Week 2: Build the accessibility inventory
What you do
- AExport the accessibility checker's report for the division's active courses. Rank the courses by enrollment times severity.
- AMeet your IT digital accessibility coordinator. Ask who owns the compliance report, what the division must deliver and whether a remediation vendor is being discussed.
- ARead 34 CFR 600.2, the federal definition of distance education, and your accreditor's distance-education policy. Write a one-page check of what a course must contain to show regular and substantive interaction (RSI) with an instructor.
- BFinish AI Fluency: Framework & Foundations. Ask Claude for three quiz items on an open textbook chapter and mark what you would fix.
Three courses from the plan
Checked 2026-09-22.
- ADA Title II web rule fact sheet and April 2026 Interim Final Rule (91 FR 20902)US Department of Justice, ada.gov / federalregister.gov · Free
Yes, Week 1.
- HHS Section 504 final rule (web and mobile accessibility)HHS, federalregister.gov · Free
Ask your ADA coordinator whether HHS dates moved in step with DOJ's.
- 34 CFR 600.2, definition of distance education (regular and substantive interaction)eCFR · Free
Yes, Week 2.
Risks beyond AI: highEnrollment risk
This one has nothing to do with AI and runs on a shorter clock. The high-school graduate peak has passed, graduate enrollment is flat, and new federal loan caps change what graduate students can borrow for the programs online divisions sell. A cut driven by enrollment arithmetic is one no design skill prevents.
Where this could be wrong
- The shares are guesses until Week 1. If your log shows far more build time and far less faculty consultation, the pressure on entry-level jobs is higher than 37, and the accessibility move becomes an application rather than an ask.
- We assumed a public institution. At a private university Title II does not apply; Section 504 does, through federal funding. The duty remains, but the calendar pressure softens.
- We assumed a consultative design model. Some divisions run a course factory: designers build master courses with a paid SME (subject expert) and adjuncts teach them. There, faculty consultation is transactional and the work that holds up shrinks to program paperwork. If that is your division, our numbers are too optimistic by 8–10 points.
- The federal rule may change substance, not just dates. DOJ said in April 2026 that it plans further rulemaking. The accessibility move rests on a date and a number, and both could move again.
Also matched: instructional designer, instructional design, learning designer. Research checked 2026-09-22. Page updated .