Teach the way you teach, every time: a blueprint for Learning Design

You are the person a company calls when an expert knows something and nobody else can learn it from them. You turn that knowledge into a course. You have done it often enough to have a method. It lives in your head, in old decks and in a folder of templates you copy and rename.

This page is a blueprint for a Flow Playbook that carries that method. It is not built. AI Consulting is a Playbook that exists today, and its launch story is the walkthrough for every step below. This blueprint is yours to take. Build it from your own know-how, put your name on it, and launch it as your Playbook. If you do, I would like to hear about it.

The opportunity

Companies spend a lot on learning, and more of it is going outside. US organizations spent about $103 billion on training in 2025. The part that went to outside products and services grew fastest, up 29 percent in a year, according to Training magazine’s 2025 Training Industry Report. At the same time, the money spent per employee fell while the hours per employee rose. ATD’s 2026 State of the Industry puts it at 16.7 hours and $846 per employee, down from $1,254 the year before. More learning, less money, and more of it bought from people like you.

AI is already in your field. LinkedIn Learning found that 71 percent of L&D professionals are exploring, experimenting with or using AI in their work. The share of organizations that count AI among their learning tools jumped from 25 to 37 percent in one year, in the same Training magazine report. Yet the leaders who buy learning are not sure their teams can deliver AI skills. In a 2026 survey by 2U, 83 percent called AI capabilities an active priority, and only 26 percent were highly confident their own L&D team could deliver them.

The demand has a deadline. The World Economic Forum expects 59 of every 100 workers to need upskilling or reskilling by 2030. In the EU, Article 4 of the AI Act has asked every company that uses AI to build its staff’s AI literacy since February 2025. And the tool many trainers used to package a course method, the custom GPT, retires on December 11, 2026. A Playbook is plain files in your own GitHub. Nobody can retire it.

The signals

Each figure measures something narrower than it sounds. Surveys count who answered. Vendor research counts a vendor’s view. The job count leaves out independents like you. Read them as a direction, not a forecast.

What your Playbook holds

The figure at the top of this page is the folder as it could sit on GitHub. Six Markdown files. Here is what each one does.

The README is the front page. It says who the Playbook is for, what a reader will have at the end, and the order to read the documents in. A stepped figure shows your method building up one step at a time. An isometric figure maps the path.

Learning Design Method is the heart of it. It is your model, from the first conversation with a client to the last assessment. Each step has the questions you ask, the output you expect, and a checklist a reader ticks before moving on. The checklist is an Approval Card, so a reader can sign it and keep the record.

How People Learn is the evidence you lean on. Spacing, retrieval practice, worked examples, feedback. Each finding links to its source. What you have stopped believing goes in too, with the reason. Claims you have not checked are marked, and Flow counts the marks until you answer them.

Expert Interview Guide holds the questions that pull a method out of a subject matter expert who cannot explain what they do. It has a form a reader fills in during the call. A Guided Exercise lets a new designer practice the interview on a sample transcript before a real one.

Course Blueprint Template is the one-page map a reader fills in for each course. Modules, objectives, practice, assessment. It includes your module on working with AI, because every client now asks for one.

Worked Example is one blueprint filled in end to end, with your choices explained. Readers learn more from one finished example than from ten rules.

What Flow does for this work

Chat answers from your Method, not from memory. With the Playbook’s folder chosen, Chat searches your documents before it replies and links each fact to the file it came from. Your README can carry up to six questions, such as How do I run a needs analysis? or What goes in a module brief? A reader sees four of them as buttons the moment they open Chat. When your documents do not say, Chat says so instead of inventing an answer.

A Form logs each expert interview. The Expert Interview Guide ends in a Form with the questions you always ask, a day field, and a checklist of what you must have before the call ends. Its button is Submit, so every entry is recorded beside the document with the reader’s name. The next interview starts from the same form, and the record of the last one is still there.

A Guided Exercise trains a new designer. Select the section of the Guide that explains how to probe for what an expert skips, and run the Guided Exercise Skill. It draws a practice exercise a reader works through as a form, on a sample transcript you include. A junior designer can run it on their first day, before they sit with a real expert.

A Job keeps How People Learn current. Bring in the research digest page you trust with New from Web Page and choose Follow the source. Each Jobs run reads the page again and brings its changes in where you have not edited. Where you have, the change is listed for you with both texts. Your evidence document stops going stale between projects.

Bring In All for a standard you teach against. When a competency framework or an accessibility standard lists its pages on one contents page, Flow offers to bring them all in as a folder with a README in the author’s order. You cite the right clause from your own copy, and the import checklist beside it reminds you to credit the source and note what was left out.

A client’s deck comes in with a checklist. Drop in the PowerPoint from the last course they ran and Flow turns it into a document. The Sources tab lists what to confirm before you rely on it. Pictures without a description, tables to compare with the slide, links that leave the folder. Walk Through with Chat takes the open items one at a time.

Your agents can use the Playbook too. With Flow Pro, Settings ▸ General ▸ Your agents opens the folder to the Claude Code or Codex you run in Terminal. It can read the Method’s reading order, search your evidence and draft a module map. What it proposes arrives in Review Changes under its name, and you keep or revert it.

How you build it in Flow

The AI Consulting story walks every one of these steps on a real screen. Follow it with your own material.

1. Add an empty folder and choose it. Chat answers from the folder before any document exists. The walkthrough shows it at an empty folder, and Chat already in it.
2. Ask Chat for the README. Describe who the Playbook is for and what you want a reader to have at the end. Chat writes it in your voice and marks every claim it cannot stand behind. See a front page, in the author’s voice.
3. Bring in what you already have. Your old decks, a shared AI chat where you once listed the learning science you trust, a web page you always cite. New from Web Page turns each into a document with its links kept. See an old AI chat became a reference.
4. Let Ideas pick a Skill. Press Suggest on your Method document. Ideas reads the sections and names a Skill for each, a Workflow Path for the steps, a Guided Exercise for the interview practice. A figure or a form waits in Review Changes until you keep it.

5. Ask Chat for the next document with your own pages as sources. The Interview Guide can be written from your Method and your evidence. Repeat until the path is done. See the next document, from his own pages.
6. Review every change. When you cut a step or rename a document, every page that pointed at it follows. See Review changed the plan, and the source followed.

Apply it to a client job

A Playbook is for using, not only reading. On a new course project, open the Playbook, start a folder for the client and ask Chat to draft the course blueprint from the Template, using the expert interview notes as the source. The Method’s checklist tells you what to confirm before the draft goes to the client. When the client corrects something, write the lesson back into the Method. The next project starts from what you learned.

With the Expert Interview Guide open, a client’s subject matter expert can read the questions before the call. With the Worked Example beside it, they see what the end looks like. That is a better first meeting than a blank chat.

Needs Analysis.mdInterview Plan.mdCourse Blueprint.mdCourse Blueprint.mdCourse Blueprint.mdLearning Design Method.md Imported · 3 to check1 change to review2 claims to check1 change to reviewSigned off2 documents changed

Harbor Lane Clinic

Needs Analysis

Proposed

Table

Imported · 3 to check

Harbor Lane Clinic

Interview Plan

Proposed

Form · Submit

Submit

1 change to review

Harbor Lane Clinic

Course Blueprint

Proposed

Diagram · Mindmap

2 claims to check

Harbor Lane Clinic

Course Blueprint

Proposed

Workflow Path

1 change to review

Harbor Lane Clinic

Course Blueprint

Proposed

Approval Card · Sign off

Sign off

Signed off

Harbor Lane Clinic

Learning Design Method

Proposed

Change Summary

2 documents changed

01Start the client folder02Plan the expert interview03Map the course04Draw the journey05Sign the review06Write the lesson back

Publish it, and keep it current

When the folder is ready, choose Publish and then GitHub Repository. Flow sends the files and nothing else. A reader brings the Playbook in with File, then New from GitHub, and the folder’s address.

When you learn something and publish again, every reader’s copy shows the update as a change they review. They keep their own edits. Nothing is replaced behind their back.

The same source can also become a GitHub Pages site, a PDF, an EPUB, or Word and PowerPoint files for the client’s team. Chat on the Playbook, and the figures a reader steps through, stay in Flow.

What it costs

Bringing any Playbook into Flow is free on Base. Writing with Chat, and Chat on a Playbook, need Flow Pro at $10 a month. Publishing to GitHub needs the Publish add-on too, another $10 a month. There is no fee per Playbook, so publish one or twenty for the same price. Any AI you connect follows the terms of that service. Publishing does not bring clients on its own. It gives the clients you earn a living copy of your method.

Start here

Read the walkthrough once, end to end. Then add an empty folder in Flow, name it, and describe your method to Chat in three sentences. The README it writes is the first document of your Playbook. If you want to talk it through first, the Playbooks page has one email address and four questions.