We’ve all been there, building courses where we don’t have much say in the content. You know the ones I’m talking about – those compliance courses or those annual refreshers that are driven by content more so than performance. Truth be told, the organization isn’t really expecting miraculous performance improvements from these courses. They simply want to ensure that everyone reviews the content, passes an assessment, and tracks completion for their records. Permanent records. You know, all that stuff that gets brought up at the pearly gates on judgment day.

But fear not! Here are seven quick thoughts that might just help you create courses that are a little less snooze-inducing:

• Content is just content. Context is king. Content alone may not be the most exciting thing in the world. But when you add the right context, it can really be a game-changer. Imagine taking those boring courses and making them interesting just by giving them the right context. So, let’s think about it: when and why do people actually use the content? By framing it in a way that’s relevant to the learners, we can make it way more engaging and meaningful. Sure, it may still require some clicking and reading, but hey, at least it’ll be worth it!
• Create a case study around the content. Case studies can be memorable and powerful – they’re like captivating stories that stay with you long after you’ve read them. Unlike your typical bullet-point overload, they are way more engaging. And guess what? You have the power to make your case study even more interesting by giving it a cool structure. How, you ask? Follow some classic hero archetypes to create a memorable case study.
• Switch the perspective. We have this shoplifting prevention document that we often use during our workshops on creating interactive e-learning. Most participants design their training for individuals on spotting shoplifters and reducing risks. But you know what’s really cool? Some people like to mix things up and approach it from a different angle by training potential shoplifters themselves! It’s the same content but with a twist, and trust me, it adds a whole new level of fascination to the content.
• Build a bunch of mini scenarios around the content. Don’t overbuild them. I recommend the 3C model: create a situation that challenges their understanding, give them some choices, and then feedback as the consequence. Instead of next buttons to advance, they problem-solve via scenarios.
• Have you ever wondered what would happen if the essential knowledge you’re about to learn was unknown? Let’s imagine a scenario together. Picture this: there’s a crucial safety process that everyone needs to be aware of to ensure their well-being. Now, let’s suppose this life-saving process isn’t followed. Unfortunately, accidents would occur, and people might end up injured. Start the training with someone hurt. Do a CSI type investigation and lead them to the types of prevention that makes up the safety process.
• Don’t give them information. Ready for an interactive learning experience? Let them dive into this content by getting them involved. Ask some thought-provoking questions. They need to make decisions. If they don’t know the answers, they can guess or do some research (which you can provide as helpful tips, call-a-friend, etc.). Use that for them to move forward step by step.
• Let them test out. Not everyone needs to go through the entire course. If they’re already familiar with the content, provide a means for them to prove it. And for those who might be new or need a refresher, they get to go through the course at their own pace. This post shows a few ideas on testing out.

Obviously, the ideal is that we don’t build boring courses. But that’s not always the case. Hopefully, these tips give you some ideas. What would you add to the list?

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There’s a lot of promise to artificial intelligence (AI) for image generation. However, as it currently works it’s not as simple as prompting an image and getting something perfect to download and use. AI can generate a lot of nice results quickly. However, using the images for production work can be a challenge.

My key objective is to create viable (not necessarily perfect) characters that I can use in online training programs or PowerPoint presentations. I am not a professional illustrator or Photoshop pro, so I want some steps that are simple and not too time consuming.

Here are some previous posts where we looked at some ideas:

• What I Learned Creating AI Images for E-Learning
• Simple Tips on Creating Your Own Illustrations with AI
• How to Quickly Create Illustrated Characters with AI

I’ve been playing around with some AI image generators to get a better feel for how they work and how I can use them when I create e-learning courses. I narrowed it down to a few basic steps that seem to work for me:

• Create the character(s) using prompts in AI
• Edit it to fix artefacts
• Crop to isolate the character
• Upscale for better quality
• Remove background
• Convert to vector

The Reality of Working with AI Illustrated Characters

AI generates a lot of weirdness with illustrated characters between the twisted hands, distorted faces, missing eyes, odd poses, and missing limbs and fingers. I don’t always find the same issue with photographic characters probably because there are more models from which to learn.

Consistency is the other issue. Getting one good character isn’t too hard but getting that same character in multiple poses is a challenge. Or getting different characters with the same style. It takes a little practice and willingness to settle for close enough.

Quick Microlearning Course for Creating AI Illustrated Characters

I used Rise 360 to put together a simple course that shows the process I go through to create the free illustrated characters I’ve been sharing. You’ll notice that my editing skills in Photoshop are basic, so hopefully you’ll be inspired to try creating characters yourself.

Click here to view the course.

I also added a quick survey if you want to share character ideas with me. I’ll use the results to test things out.

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Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.	Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs	Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills
Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.	Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.	Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.

I see the promise of AI generated assets for e-learning. I’m not an illustrator. I have limited Photoshop skills. Because of this, my options for custom illustrations are slim. However, with AI I can find a balance of creating viable illustrated characters with minimal skills.

In previous posts we looked at:

• What I Learned Creating AI Images for E-Learning
• Simple Tips on Creating Your Own Illustrations with AI

Today, I’ll show some of the basic steps I use to create the illustrated characters I’ve shared in LinkedIn recently. In these three tutorials, I’ll give an overview on how to create simple, viable illustrated characters using AI. I am working with a few objectives: quick, simple, and minimal editing. I am willing to live with some imperfections.

Getting Started with AI Tip

I am using Midjourney to create my AI illustrations. You can use whatever you want. The process is very similar regardless of application. I will add that not all tools offer the same quality. For example, here are two images using the same text prompt. The good example on the right comes from Midjourney. The other from one of the many of the tools that are out there trying to make money quickly from the AI gold rush. Buyer beware!

Step 1: How to Create a Character

I only cover the basics in the tutorials below and show some differences when you change the settings, but the secret with AI prompting is knowing how to adjust parameters such as style, seeding, and quality. The more you use those parameters the better control you have over your results. I will add that I find using fewer words is better.

There are a lot of videos on YouTube and elsewhere on getting consistent characters. I’m not going to get into the weeds on this. Here is a useful source for Midjourney users: John Walter: he has a good series on creating a consistent character.

• Set up your prompt. I use character, action, style, and white background (so I can clean the image up after I download it).
• Make parameter selections for style, etc.
• Once you have a character style you like, change the character descriptions. This is where you can mitigate the bias that is built-into the AI model.

The video below walks through some of these tips, and we look at options in terms of unique styles and characters.

Click here to view the video tutorial on YouTube.

Step 2: Create a Quick Character Set from a Single Panel

This is easy and will give you five characters that are similar.

• Generate a character.
• Select a character to upscale.
• Do another version (minimal variance) which will provide four more similar characters.
• Download the characters and clean them up.

Click here to view the video tutorial on YouTube.

Step 3: Create a Character with Multiple Poses

A prompt with multiple poses will give you the same character but slightly different. You can play around with the number of poses, but three poses are a sweet spot. At a minimum you get three similar characters. Assuming the iterative characters are similar enough, you end up with fifteen similar characters.

• Generate a character and include the number of poses.
• Select a character panel to upscale.
• Do another version (minimal variance) which will provide four more similar characters.
• Download the characters and clean them up.

Click here to view the video tutorial on YouTube.

Step 4: Don’t Expect Perfection

This approach isn’t a perfect way to create characters. It’s a quick way to create good enough characters. My goal is to create viable characters quickly. So, I am willing to live with some imperfections.

• The hands and faces are problematic. That’s OK. With multiple characters you’ll get enough parts you can mix and match to get some good characters.
• You don’t need to use every character you get.
• Once you edit the characters, you will fix some of the issues that AI instigates. I’ll cover that in the next post.

Hopefully, these tips help and be sure to download the free characters in the community.

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Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.	Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs	Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills
Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.	Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.	Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.

I’ve been messing around with different generative AI apps, just like many of you. I’m trying to figure out how I can use them in my job and also get really good at using the various AI tools. Because I create online courses, I’ve been working on making my own illustrations that work well.

In a previous post, I shared some tips based on things I’ve learning using AI. I am using Midjourney for my examples, but there are a lot of tools out there for your initial experimentation.

Here are some tips I’ve picked up and how I make those free illustrated characters that I share on LinkedIn.

It Starts with Prompts

The secret to getting the right images is based on the prompting. The challenge with AI is that you never know what you’ll get and when you get something that you really like, you may not get it again.

• I start simple and don’t try to overstate or be too descriptive initially. And then I work from there.
• I also look at what images people share in the AI community and when I find something I like, I try their prompts to see what I get.
• For prompts, I mostly use a character, an action, and then the style. Depending on what I need, I may add a location or something to provide more visual context.

The Character

There is a lot of bias built into the AI language models. For example, if I type in businessman, 99% of the time it will be a white businessman in a suit. Why white? Why a suit? That’s something you need to account for as you create characters.

Regardless of the bias, I start with something generic like businessman. That usually gives me a white guy in a suit. But that’s OK to start. Once I get the right look, I modify the descriptor. Some tips to get better initial characters:

• Instead of just “businessman,” use an age to see what you get. I find 40-year-old is a good addition.
• It doesn’t matter what you get, the main point is to see if you can come up with something consistent.
• There are a lot of good videos now on how to write prompts. The more you practice and play around, the better you get.
• At some point, I call it good and move on. My goal is to find a simple way to get a good enough image. Playing around in AI for hours (or days…which will happen) is fun, but not something I can afford to do for long.

As you can see in the images below, you get some pretty decent initial images to start. I can work with these.

The Action

Describing the action is where you get the pose you want and can use. I keep it simple.

• I like to insert “gesturing” as part of the prompt. It gives me more varied arm positions.
• Add an emotion or state-of-being such as “confused” or “angry.”
• I also change the pose and may use “arms crossed” or “hands on hips.”
• Play around and see what you get.

You’ll notice how the images change based on a few simple words.

As you review the images above, you’ll notice that the styles change quite a bit. You’ll also notice that you may not get the pose you expect. For example, “hands on hips” includes arms crossed. “Arms crossed” aren’t full body poses. That’s something you have to live with.

As you practice and get to know how to write prompts you will be able to design more consistent styles.

The Style

As mentioned above, getting a consistent style can be tough. A lot of it will come down to how you write prompts and the feel you get for them as you practice.

• For illustrated characters, I want a similar style and no background so it’s easy to clean up.
• My default prompt style is “flat vector illustration” because that works well for a lot of e-learning course design.
• It also works consistently most of the time. And even if the illustrated characters aren’t the same, they often are close enough to use together.
• I do play around with unique style descriptions. For example, I will state “in the style of [add descriptor].”

As you review the images above, you’ll notice that adding a style description to the “flat vector illustration” starts to provide a more specific style that gets closer to consistency.

Bonus Style Tip: Getting Rid of the Background

The AI image is just the starting point. Often you may have to do some edits to hands, faces, etc. One of the main things is getting a transparent background so that I can place the image where I want it.

To get as clean a background as possible, I add the prompt: “white background.” That works 90% of the time. The image below is the same “hands on hips” prompt as above with the addition of “white background” in the prompt.

Overcoming Bias with AI

As I noted above, there’s built-in bias which can include things like gender and race, but also style of clothes. You can mitigate some of that by changing the descriptor. Once I get an image style I like, I will start to add additional descriptions to get more diverse characters. In no time at all, I have a diverse set of characters from which to build.

One thing to consider is your own bias. For example, I may look for a specific image and then assume that it works because of how “I see” that character and what it should represent.

Those are some of the basic tips to get started creating your own characters with AI. In a follow up post, I’ll share my secret sauce and what I do to speed things up and how I edit the characters.

Don’t forget to download the characters I’ve already added. I’ll be adding more, so keep your eyes peeled.

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Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.	Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs	Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills
Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.	Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.	Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.

Like many of you, I’ve been playing around with AI to generate images. There is a certain magic to it all. Add a text prompt and in a few minutes you’re presented with mostly viable images. On the surface, it’s all really cool. Many of us use stock images. This works OK, but the problem with stock images is that they are stock and very generic. Trying to find specific images to meet the needs of our courses isn’t always easy.

And that’s where the promise of AI images comes in. Need a specific image? Type in a descriptive prompt and you’ll get exactly what you want, when you want it. However, it doesn’t really work that way.

For my experimentation, I’m using Midjourney.

This prompt: 40 year old person lifting a box in a warehouse, forklift in the background, in the style of Crewsdon, became the image below. Looks nice, but obviously it’s not very usable.

Challenges with AI Imagery

Currently, there are a number of challenges leveraging AI to create the images you really need for your e-learning courses. Here are a few:

• It’s a time tiger. Playing around with image creation is undeniably fun. I mean, who wouldn’t get lost in the endless possibilities? But here’s the catch – it requires a lot of experimenting with prompts and tweaking the images until they meet our expectations.
• Consistency is key, but it’s not always easy to achieve. You might get a fantastic image, but getting multiple versions of it with the same style and character can be a real challenge. And that brings us back to the previous point about spending too much time tinkering with the image generators. Honestly, I have no clue how all the magic happens. I’ll get three similar images and then AI throws in some random, nonsensical creation. It’s like the AI took a swig of whiskey and got a bit too creative!
• Let’s talk about those weird artifacts. AI seems to struggle with hands and poses. Sometimes you’ll get a hand with the perfect perspective, other times you’ll get a hand on the wrong arm or with missing or extra fingers. Heck, sometimes you’ll even get extra arms or missing legs! It can definitely be a bit of a mixed bag.
• Another challenge lies in the built-in biases of AI. For example, female images often lean towards exaggerated sexuality. And there can also be biases related to race and gender. These things will be corrected over time as the technology evolves. When creating images, it’s important for us to be aware of these biases and use prompts to help mitigate them.

Tips Creating AI Images

With all that said, over time, as the technology evolves, many of these challenges will be resolved. In the meantime, here are some tips that have helped me as I try to get the right images:

• Find inspiration in the work of others. If you come across an image style that you love, try to find the prompt that was used to create it. Then, run your own tests with similar prompts and see what you get. If the results are pleasing to your creative eye, make note of that prompt for future reference.

• Keep things simple. I’ve found that using straightforward prompts yields better results. Start with stating the object you want, provide some context, add a description, and specify the style you’re aiming for. Once you find something you like, just change one variable. For instance, if you’ve got a fantastic illustrated character and your prompt was “Asian woman,” try using the exact same prompt but switch it up to “Asian man,” “black man,” “black woman,” “Hispanic man,” and so on. The image below shows the results. For the most part, all of these characters could work in the same course.

• Create a handy list of different industries, environments, characters, and situations that you frequently need imagery for. Then, when you get a good result, simply swap out those elements. You’ll be amazed at how quickly you can generate a wealth of viable assets. I tried this approach recently while working on warehouse characters, and in just an hour, I had created 24 folders with 15 unique characters in each. That’s a whopping 360 characters in no time at all!

• Familiarize yourself with the AI tool you choose to work with. Each tool has its own quirks and nuances. The more you experiment and play around with it, the better you’ll understand what to expect. Remember, the secret lies in the art of prompting. When you get a good grasp of how prompts work within your chosen tool, you’ll gain more control and achieve better results.
• The AI-generated image you receive is just the starting point. If you intend to use AI in this way for your e-learning image assets, consider it as a means to create a general style and character types. You can then take that AI image and collaborate with an illustrator to craft custom imagery that perfectly suits your needs. It’s a brilliant way to scope out exactly what you require before diving into the final artwork creation.
• There’s work involved when working with AI-generated images. It’s not a simple process of just creating something and downloading it. You’ll encounter various artifacts and oddities within the images you receive. At first glance, they might seem fantastic, but upon closer inspection, you might notice weird eyes, distorted faces, missing fingers, or even an excess of limbs. Sure, you can still use these images, but you’ll have to live with the artifacts, and they might not give off the most professional vibe.

With that said…

I am definitely not an AI wizard. But, I had this idea to explore how we can create awesome images in a jiffy, without having to do a bunch of editing. And guess what? I think I’ve found a happy medium! In my next post, I’ll share some tips that even non-AI gurus like us can use.

But hold on, before we dive into all that, let’s start with a bang!

Introducing Sarah, our superstar for today. You can download this illustrated character absolutely FREE. I’ve cleaned up these images, upscaled them, and even added transparent backgrounds. They are good to go and ready for action. So, what are you waiting for? Get your hands on this incredible character download and get creative.

Oh, and just a heads up, there’s more to come. Stay tuned for some fantastic characters that I’ve whipped up while practicing to use AI. They’re perfect for spicing up your e-learning courses.

Hope you enjoy.

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Free E-Learning Resources

Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.	Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs	Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills
Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.	Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.	Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.