With today's business demands set sky-high on innovation and iteration, staying ahead requires more than just traditional training techniques—it's about mastering skills through practice
The Importance of Skills Practice in Modern Learning
Despite the promise of digital learning, eLearning still struggles to engage learners well enough to deliver results. Why? Because many programs are designed to check a box, not motivate, or change, behavior.
eLearning isn’t totally broken, but most of it is built wrong for today's needs. Businesses require learning that both develops and validates real skills, not just learning that focuses on completion rates as indicators of success.
In the race to upskill and reskill rapidly, too many organizations sacrifice quality for speed. This results in learners who click through content without truly learning anything (bummer). In fact, according to Fosway, in 2024 only 17% of L&D teams believed their learning strategy was effective.
But, it doesn’t have to be this way.
Learning should ignite confidence and drive measurable impact. Let’s dive into fixing the most common eLearning design challenges and how to overcome them with smarter, more engaging, and more human-centered solutions.
The Biggest eLearning Design Challenges (And Why They Hinder Learning)
Let’s be honest—too many learning experiences look like digitized presentations. They’re content-heavy, cognitively overwhelming, and often inaccessible for diverse learners. As a result, learners are overloaded with content, and the experience is passive. Further, there’s little opportunity to experiment, fail safely, or apply knowledge.
This kind of design may check boxes for the boss in the short term, but it rarely builds long-term capabilities for an organization's talented workforce. These issues don’t just frustrate learners—they diminish ROI and overall impact.
What’s needed instead is a shift toward experiential, adaptive learning—where learners interact with content, make decisions, see consequences, and adjust in real time. Skills practice learning design gives learners a safe space to stretch, without the stakes of a real-world misstep.
From Passive to Powerful: Why Interactive Learning Design Matters
Engagement is the catalyst for great learning.
While the status-quo shows us that learners might “finish” a course, it's often the case they don’t feel anything. Unfortunately, that means they also don’t do anything differently. Further, adding gamification or animations doesn’t fix an already disengaging course—it just decorates it. Real engagement comes from cognitive challenge, relevance, and agency.
Here's a quick download of what high-impact learning includes:
- Scenarios with meaningful branching based on decisions
- Dynamic feedback loops that teach the learner about his or her gaps
- Role-specific perspectives and scenarios that tie back to a business strategy
- Opportunities to pause, reflect, and try again
High-Quality Course Design Starts With Clear Objectives & Better Assessments
Most eLearning assessments only test recall and do not assess skill application. These designs fail to recognize that memorization doesn’t equate to mastery. Real skill development requires more. High-quality design reflects the complexity of real roles. That means learning should:
- Mirror real workplace decisions
- Reward critical thinking over rote knowledge
- Provide meaningful feedback, beyond just a score
When designers have access to tools that make skills-based learning scalable, they’re able to align the learning experience with real business impact. Learners aren’t just answering questions; they’re making choices, navigating consequences, and getting real-time feedback on their decisions.
This approach to L&D unlocks business acumen, leadership, and other hard-to-teach skills—through meaningful practice, not passive consumption.
One Modality Doesn’t Fit All, but Adaptive Learning Paths Get Pretty Close
A well-designed course is born from one question: “What’s the best way to learn this?”
Not every topic should be a self-paced module. Some content is best explored through facilitated discussion, others through decision-making simulations, and some through live team-based collaboration. Yet many organizations default to a one-size-fits-all solution—because it’s what their tools allow.
This is where the limitations of traditional platforms become a bottleneck. So, what should a modern learning platform offer? The best learning platforms are evolving to accommodate this nuance, allowing designers to mix modalities, personalize experiences, and support different learning paths based on context and learner role.
These capabilities unlock better alignment between the how and the why of learning. So, how do you find the right tools?
Look for technology that enables:
- Multi-modality design – so it becomes easy to switch between self-paced, facilitated, and cohort-based learning
- Adaptive learning paths – where content responds to learner input and skill level in real time
- Scenario and decision-based practice – Skills practice that mirrors the complexity of real-world challenges
- AI-assisted authoring tools – Modern learning demands 10x the output, increased quality, and less reliance on specialized resources.
- Data-rich feedback and scoring – Insights must go beyond completion rates and actually identify what learners can and cannot do.
With these capabilities, learning teams can design experiences that are fit for purpose, scalable across roles, and built for performance, instead of only for participation.
When technology supports this level of flexibility, teams are enabled to execute smarter learning strategies. Platforms that meet these standards remove the friction between vision and execution, and let learning teams focus on what actually moves the needle: practice, insight, and transformation.
It’s Time to Raise the Bar on eLearning
The truth is, the way people build skills is changing. So, then, must the tools we use to support them.
As learning teams aim to design experiences that are more adaptive, experiential, and performance-driven, they need platforms that keep up with that ambition. Ones that don’t force trade-offs between scale and personalization, or speed and quality.
It’s why we’ve put so much focus into building a platform that reflects these priorities. One that makes it possible to design with nuance, deliver with flexibility, and measure what matters because that’s what modern learning demands.
If any part of this vision resonates, you’re not alone, and you don’t have to start from scratch.
At The Regis Company, we believe real learning comes from practice, not passive content. The SimGate™ Skills Practice Platform was built to bring that vision to life—helping teams deliver personalized, high-impact learning that builds skills at scale.
It’s Time to Raise the Bar on eLearning
Great learning isn’t built by accident. It’s designed with care, creativity, and the right tools.
The next generation of learning platforms is already making this possible, helping teams build faster, smarter, and more effectively than ever before.
Let’s build learning that actually works.