Instructional design services turn the expertise locked inside your organization – processes, policies, know-how – into training that measurably changes what people do on the job. Artha Learning provides instructional design and consulting end to end: needs analysis, learning strategy, storyboarding, scripting, and assessment design. We are an award-winning learning design firm headquartered in Toronto, founded in 2017, and our senior designers have been doing this work for up to 30 years.
Whether you need a full design-and-development partner or an experienced consultant to strengthen your in-house team, this page explains what our instructional design services cover, how we work, and what an engagement looks like.
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We start by finding the real performance problem. Interviews with stakeholders and learners, task analysis, and a review of existing material – so we design for the gap that exists, not the one assumed.
The blueprint: what should be a course, what should be a job aid, what should be practice, and in what order. This is where budgets are saved or wasted.
Screen-by-screen storyboards and early interactive prototypes, so you see and react to the learning experience before full development begins.
Clear, human writing for narration, on-screen text, video, and scenario dialogue – built with your subject-matter experts, not around them.
Scenario-based assessments that test judgment rather than recall, plus an evaluation plan that tells you whether the training worked.
Bring us in as consultants when you have an in-house team or authoring capacity but need senior design horsepower: a curriculum re-architecture, a design system for your courses, storyboards your builders can run with, or a rescue on a project that has drifted.
Bring us in for full design and development when you want one accountable partner from analysis to launch. Our eLearning development services team takes the designs on this page through build, media, QA, and LMS publishing.
Not sure which you need? That is exactly what a discovery call is for – we will tell you honestly if a smaller engagement will do.
Stakeholder and learner interviews, content audit, success measures. Output: a design brief we both sign off on.
Learning strategy, course architecture, storyboards, and a prototype. Output: a blueprint you can see and click, not a document you have to imagine.
Development, media production, and accessibility engineering (WCAG/AODA) with structured review cycles.
Launch support, learner feedback, and the metrics agreed in Discover – completion, performance, and behaviour change where we can measure it.
Instructional design is a craft, and credentials matter here. Artha’s design team includes CTDP-certified professionals (Certified Training and Development Professional, the Institute for Performance and Learning designation) and specialists with up to 30 years in learning design across corporate, higher education, association, and regulatory settings. The people in your discovery call are the people who do the work – we do not hand projects to a bench you never meet.
Consulting engagements produce working documents your team can execute against, not slideware. Depending on scope: a design brief (the problem, audience, constraints, and success measures on a few honest pages); a curriculum map showing every course, resource, and practice activity and why each exists; storyboards detailed enough that any competent developer – yours or ours – can build from them without guessing; scripts ready for narration or video production; and an assessment blueprint mapping every question to an objective that matters. Everything is yours, in editable formats, with no licensing strings.
A good freelance instructional designer is a fine choice for a single small course. A firm earns its fee when the work needs range: a designer who has done regulatory training, a writer who can make a policy sound human, a media team, an accessibility specialist, and a second senior brain checking the design logic. You also get continuity – freelancers get booked, firms absorb it – and a portfolio of patterns from dozens of organizations that have already made the mistake you are about to make. Our job is to spend that experience on your behalf.
We work with a variety of industries – chief among them are higher education, professional and legal regulators, associations, healthcare, financial services, insurance, energy, and the public sector. The common thread: complex subject matter, real subject-matter experts, and audiences who cannot afford training that wastes their time.
The most common fear we hear from L&D leaders: “our SMEs have no time.” Our process is built around that reality. SMEs give us focused interviews (60–90 minutes each), review at two structured checkpoints, and answer targeted questions asynchronously – typically 6–10 hours of total SME time for a full course, spread over the project. We come to every SME conversation having already read everything they have written, so their time goes to judgment calls only they can make, never to explaining what a document already says. SMEs regularly tell clients this was the least painful training project they have been part of; we consider that a core deliverable.
An instructional designer analyzes what people need to learn, decides the most effective way to teach it, and designs the materials and experiences – courses, scenarios, assessments, job aids – that get them there. Good instructional designers are equal parts analyst, writer, and learning scientist.
Consulting engagements are typically scoped by phase (analysis, strategy, storyboarding) with fixed fees per deliverable. Full design-and-development projects are usually priced per finished hour of learning – see our guide to custom eLearning costs for honest market ranges.
Yes – that is the default. Your SMEs hold the expertise; we hold the design craft. We run structured, respectful SME interviews and reviews that take hours of their time, not weeks.
A focused consulting engagement (strategy or storyboards) typically runs 3–6 weeks. Full design and development of a custom course typically runs 8–16 weeks depending on scope, media, and review cycles.
Yes. We design for whatever will deliver the learning – your LMS, your authoring tools, or ours – and we publish standards-compliant packages (SCORM, xAPI) that behave in the real world.
Where it serves the learner, yes: AI-assisted analysis, drafting, and AI-powered practice like roleplay simulations. Design judgment, SME accuracy, and final quality are always human. See our AI training programs for how we teach these skills, too. As a client you can always dictate this and ask us to use or not use AI to the degree you are comfortable with, and we will follow this to the T.
Design decides what the learning should be and why; development builds it. This page covers design and consulting. The build story – tools, media, QA, publishing – lives on our eLearning development services page.
Book a discovery call and bring us your messiest learning problem. We will tell you what we would do, what it would cost, and whether you actually need us – in that order.
Book a discovery callArtha Learning is an award-winning learning design firm in Toronto, founded in 2017. Learn more about our approach on our custom learning design and development page.