Prompting as Pedagogical Thinking in Action
How dialogue with AI sharpens design and strengthens outcomes
Making pedagogy explicit through prompting
Working with AI has taught us something surprising: prompting isn’t just about getting the machine to produce text. It’s about making our own pedagogy explicit. Every time we frame a prompt, test an output, and ask for refinement, we’re articulating the design decisions that usually stay implicit in a learning designer’s head. And the dialogue itself makes us better designers.
What we’ve learned is that there’s no single prompt — however long or carefully worded — that can create a high-quality online course. What works is an iterative process: draft, critique, refine, and push the AI to analyse its own work. That’s where our expertise as learning designers comes in. Without that pedagogical lens, neither AI nor the SME could deliver the kind of engaging, authentic courses we’re producing today.
Prompting across the design process
At Learning Design Solutions, prompting runs through the whole of our design process. Like most learning designers, we move from planning (sometimes called blueprinting or module mapping) into storyboarding (the creation of detailed on-screen content).
But the key difference is that with AI as a design partner, the two stages are seamlessly connected. The artefacts created in planning — module learning outcomes, weekly learning outcomes, activity maps, workload models, assessment briefs — become the raw materials we feed back into prompts during storyboarding.
This ensures that the alignment and decisions made early on don’t get lost. Instead, they are reinforced at every stage, helping the AI generate outputs that are consistent, purposeful, and pedagogically sound.
Dialogue, not shortcuts
Prompts aren’t magic tricks. They’re starting points for dialogue. A generic request like “write a scenario task” won’t get us where we need to go. But when a prompt references the planning work already done, the outputs are both richer and more relevant.
For example, a storyboard prompt might read:
“Let’s draft the Week 6 scenario task. It needs to address the weekly learning outcomes we mapped earlier, drawing directly on the ethical frameworks from the micro-lectures and core reading. The task should ask students to evaluate and apply those frameworks to a business facing a supplier labour issue.”
The first draft is never the end. We’ll then ask for refinement: make it clearer, raise or lower the cognitive demand, suggest an alternative format, or critique its own work. Each iteration brings us closer to a high-quality activity that we can take back to the SME for review.
Why this approach works
Using prompting in this way has given us clear advantages:
Consistency across stages – because prompts always reference artefacts from the planning phase, there’s a strong throughline from outcomes to activities to assessment.
Productive SME collaboration – SMEs respond more easily to draft outputs than to a blank page, making co-design smoother and faster.
Sharper pedagogy – the act of crafting prompts forces us to state intent clearly, strengthening alignment and design quality.
Scalability without loss of quality – AI speeds up drafting, but the iteration process ensures outputs stay aligned to higher education standards.
Prompting as a design discipline
Prompting, in our practice, isn’t about “hacking” AI or finding the right formula of words. It’s a design discipline in its own right — one that makes learning design more explicit, transparent, and collaborative.
It keeps pedagogy at the centre of AI-assisted design, and it helps us deliver courses that are not only efficient to build, but also engaging, authentic, and academically rigorous.
Final thoughts
AI hasn’t replaced learning design. But it has changed the way we design. Prompting as dialogue — grounded in artefacts, guided by outcomes, and refined through iteration — has become one of the most valuable tools in our practice.
And while anyone can write a prompt, it’s the expertise of the learning designer that turns those prompts into high-quality online learning experiences.
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