What a James Morrison Gig Taught Me About Designing Better eLearning
A lesson from mixing live sound for James Morrison — and why the best eLearning experiences come from breaking the platform’s default rules, not following them.
Meet the people who never got in the box
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 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.
After that tour, I kept mixing live sound for various bands and performers over the years. One of those performers I was lucky enough 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 — packed with everything, and loud. Everyone wants a mic of everything, and everyone wants their own bit louder than the last. The end result is a stage absolutely swimming in sound, all of it fighting for the same space.
Not James Morrison.
His setup put each musician’s own sound in their own monitor, and nothing else. Then the monitors were angled so that everyone could still hear each other, naturally, from where they were standing on stage. 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 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 decided that wasn’t how he wanted to do it.
But what’s that got to do with eLearning?
Fair question.
We get taught how to use the current eLearning platforms. What they provide, how to integrate them into a course, which buttons do what. And that training is useful — until it quietly becomes the ceiling instead of the floor.
Once you know “how it’s done,” it’s very easy to stop asking how else it could be done.
I don’t see eLearning platforms as a fixed experience. I love looking at how we can go beyond the default and build our own custom plugins instead of settling for what’s in the box.
Take H5P as an example. It’s built, from the ground up, to be extended. Yet most of the time, people don’t build new activities with it. They just reach for the default activity types and then wonder why the finished course doesn’t add much to the student’s experience.
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, is by far the most interesting work you can do in this space. It’s what separates a “real” learning experience from a course that exists purely because that’s just how it’s always been done.
That’s not a knock on the tools. It’s a nudge about how we use them.
James Morrison didn’t need a different PA system to change his sound on stage. He just needed to stop assuming the standard monitor setup was the only setup. Same tech, completely different result, because someone was willing to ask “does it have to be this way?”
Let’s get creative. Not just thinking outside the box ourselves, but actively going out and meeting the people who think outside the normal process altogether. They’re the ones worth learning from.
The best experiences never come from doing it the way everyone else does it.