What a James Morrison Gig Taught Me About Designing Better eLearning
A lesson from mixing live sound for James Morrison — and why Designing Better eLearning experiences comes from breaking the platform’s default rules, not following them.
Meet the people who never got in the box vs designing better eLearning
I love it when you meet people who think outside the box and do things completely differently to everyone else. You know the type. Everyone else zigs, they zag, and somehow it works better than anything you’ve seen before. You watch them work and think, why didn’t anyone else do it like that?
You probably don’t know this about me, but my first year out of school wasn’t spent in a classroom or an office. It was spent touring Australia full time as a sound engineer. Fourteen performers, a new town every weekend, setting up and packing down five days a week. It was relentless. I don’t think I sat still for more than a day at a time that whole year.
Looking back, it was one of the best educations I ever got, and I never once sat an exam for it. I learned how a PA behaves in a tin shed hall in a country town, how it behaves in a packed pub, how it behaves outdoors with the wind trying to steal every high frequency you’ve got. Nobody taught me any of that from a manual. You just learn it by turning up, again and again, in a different room every weekend, and paying attention to what actually works instead of what’s supposed to work.
After that tour finished, I kept mixing live sound for various bands and performers over the years. Some of those gigs were forgettable. Some of them I’d rather forget on purpose. But one of the performers I was genuinely privileged to work with was James Morrison.
The gig that changed how I thought about monitors
Every other band I’d mixed for wanted the same thing on stage. A monitor mix — that’s the speakers pointed back at the musicians so they can hear themselves, these days often replaced with inner ear monitors — packed with everything, and loud. Everyone wants a mic of everything, and everyone wants their own bit louder than the last guy’s. It’s not really anyone’s fault. It’s just what everyone has always done, so it’s what everyone keeps doing.
The end result of that approach is a stage absolutely swimming in sound. Every monitor blasting a slightly different mix, all of it bouncing around and fighting for the same space, and a front-of-house engineer somewhere out in the crowd trying to fight against all that stage noise just to get a clean sound out to the audience. It’s a bit like everyone in a room trying to talk over each other because they’re all worried no one can hear them. The result is that no one can hear anyone.
Not James Morrison.
His setup put each musician’s own sound in their own monitor, and basically nothing else. Then, instead of blasting that sound straight up into their own face and letting it spill everywhere, the monitors were angled so that everyone could still hear each other naturally, carrying across the stage from where they were actually standing. Clean. Low volume. Nothing competing with anything else for attention.
I’d never experienced anything like it. Here was one of the most talented bands I’d ever mixed for, and I had total control over the live sound with barely any volume happening on stage at all. It felt like magic. It wasn’t magic. It was just someone who’d looked at how everybody else does monitors and quietly decided that wasn’t how he wanted to do it.
What struck me most wasn’t even the sound quality, although that was incredible. It was how much easier my job became. Less stage volume leaking into every microphone meant a cleaner signal for me to work with out front. Less noise meant I could actually hear what each instrument was doing instead of guessing through a wall of spill. One decision, made well before I even touched a fader, made every single thing downstream of it better.
But what’s that got to do with eLearning?
Fair question. Bear with me.
We get taught how to use the current eLearning platforms. What they provide out of the box, how to integrate them into a course, which buttons do what and where the settings menu hides the thing you actually needed. And that kind of training is useful. It gets you moving. But it has a sneaky side effect. Somewhere in all that “here’s how this platform works” training, we quietly stop asking how else it could work.
Once you know “how it’s done,” it becomes very easy to stop asking how else it could be done. And how can we Designing Better eLearning experiences?
I don’t see eLearning platforms as a fixed experience, the same way I don’t think there’s only one correct way to set up a monitor wedge. I love looking at how we can go beyond the default settings and build our own custom plugins, instead of settling for exactly what’s in the box, the same way every other course out there settles for exactly what’s in the box.
Take H5P as an example. If you haven’t come across it, H5P is a free, open framework for building interactive content — quizzes, branching scenarios, drag and drop tasks, interactive video, that sort of thing — and it’s used inside all sorts of learning platforms. The important part is this: H5P wasn’t built to be a locked set of templates. It was built, from the ground up, to be extended.
Yet most of the time, that’s not what happens. People don’t build new activities with it. They reach for the same handful of default activity types every other course on the internet is using, drop their content in, hit publish, and then wonder why the finished course doesn’t add much to the student’s experience. It’s the eLearning equivalent of every band wanting the same loud, everything-in-every-monitor mix. It’s not wrong exactly. It’s just what everyone does, so nobody stops to ask if there’s a better way.
Same tools, different decision
Here’s the thing that I think gets missed. James Morrison didn’t need a different PA system, a bigger budget or some secret piece of gear nobody else had access to. He had the exact same tools as every other band on that circuit. What he had was a different decision about how to use them.
That’s really the whole point.
You can have access to the same eLearning platform as everyone else in your organisation, the same H5P library, the same learning management system, and still produce something completely different, just by making different decisions about how you put it together. The tech was never the limiting factor. The assumption that there’s only one “correct” way to use it, that’s the limiting factor.
I think a lot of instructional designers, myself included at various points, get comfortable inside the walls of what the platform documentation tells them is possible. And to be fair, the documentation exists for a reason — you need to know the rules before you can decide which ones are worth breaking. But there’s a difference between learning the rules and being ruled by them.
Making the whole thing an experience
Taking the eLearning tech and processes we already have, and turning them into a genuine experience instead of a checklist of modules to click through, is by far the most interesting work you can do in this space. It’s also, honestly, the most fun. It’s the difference between a course that technically covers the content and a course that a learner actually remembers a month later.
That’s what separates a “real” learning experience from a course that exists purely because that’s just how it’s always been done. Nobody finishes a course like that and tells their mates about it. Nobody sits there afterwards thinking about what they learned. They just tick the box, get their certificate, and move on with their day, and the organisation that built it wonders why engagement scores are so average.
None of this is a knock on the tools themselves. H5P is genuinely excellent, and most eLearning platforms have far more flexibility built into them than people ever end up using. This is a nudge about how we choose to use what’s already sitting right there in front of us. The plumbing already exists. Most of the time we just haven’t gone looking for the tap.
The default settings trap
I’ve seen this play out with instructional designers plenty of times, and honestly, I’ve been guilty of it myself. You get handed a new platform, you go through the onboarding, you learn where the buttons are, and within a week you’re building courses. Fast, competent, professional-looking courses. And they all look exactly like every other course built by everyone else who went through the same onboarding.
It’s a bit like learning to drive. First you learn where the pedals are, how to indicate, how to reverse park without taking out a bin. Necessary stuff. But if you never go further than that, you’ll drive the same conservative route to work for the rest of your life and never once consider that there might be a faster way, a more scenic way, or a way that gets you there and lets you enjoy the trip instead of just enduring it.
Most eLearning platforms are the same. The onboarding teaches you the pedals. It rarely teaches you that you’re allowed to take the car off-road.
I remember sitting through a product demo for a fairly well-known learning platform a few years back. The salesperson kept saying, “and you can do this too,” while clicking through a fixed list of templates. Every one of those templates was, technically, extendable. Every platform like this usually has an API, a plugin architecture, some way to hook custom code into it. But in the entire demo, not once did anyone mention that side of it. Why would they? Most customers never ask, so most salespeople never bring it up, and the cycle just keeps going.
That’s exactly the same energy as every band wanting the loud, everything-in-every-monitor stage mix. Nobody’s being lazy. It’s just nobody’s stopped to ask if there’s a different way to do it, because the default way works well enough to get by.
“Well enough to get by” is a pretty low bar for something a learner is going to spend hours of their life sitting through.
Go find the people who never got in the box
So back to where I started. I love meeting people who think outside the box and do things differently to everyone else, because they remind me that the box was only ever a suggestion in the first place. James Morrison didn’t set out to revolutionise stage monitoring. He just quietly refused to accept that everyone’s way was the only way, and it made every single person’s job on that stage, mine included, better.
Let’s get creative. Not just thinking outside the box ourselves, although that’s a good start, but actively going out and meeting the people who never got in the box to begin with, the ones who think outside the normal process and concepts entirely. They’re the ones genuinely worth learning from, far more than another article telling you the ten best practices for using a platform exactly the way everyone else already is.
The best experiences never come from doing it the way everyone else does it. They come from someone deciding to point the monitor somewhere else.
Designing Better eLearning experiences.