Questions, answered

Anyone responsible for someone else’s learning: teachers, instructional designers, trainers, coaches, adult educators, prior-learning assessors, and program builders. Many will not call themselves designers. The early job of this writing is to show them they are.

Delivery is handing over content. Design is deciding the path a learner walks, what they practise, when they find out how they did, and how any of it survives contact with the following Monday. Delivery can be automated. Design is a set of judgement calls about a specific group of people in a specific situation.

The Good Learner Project is written from the learner’s chair, on how to learn well in the age of AI. Good Learning by Design is written from the other chair, on how to design learning well. Same worldview, different seat. Both are by Tika Thapa.

No. This is written work: a twelve-part series, standalone posts, two books, and a page of free resources. If that changes it will be announced here first.

If you have twenty minutes, read Content Is Not Design and then The Unclear Path. If you have a course going wrong right now, go to the resources page, run the design check, and start with whichever section fails hardest.

Yes. The Good Learner and Good Learning by Design, both by Tika Thapa, together making The Good Learner Series. The first is the argument and the method: path, practice, feedback, transfer, and how assessment survives AI. The second is the companion, written from the seat of the person who has to do the work inside real constraints. Full detail on the books page.

Either. They are a numbered series, book one and book two. Read The Good Learner first if you are the one learning. Read Good Learning by Design first if you are responsible for somebody else learning it.

They overlap on purpose but they do not duplicate. The twelve-part series is the short public version of the first book’s spine. The book has more room for the reasoning, the sources, and the awkward cases. The second book is not on the site at all.

Not yet anywhere. Both are coming to Amazon and neither is listed at the time of writing, so there is no buy link on this site. When there is a real link it will appear on the books page. The email list is the least noisy way to find out.

Mostly yes. The four pieces apply anywhere somebody is trying to get somebody else from not-able to able. That includes onboarding, clinical education, apprenticeship, coaching, volunteer training, and the parts of management that are really teaching. The examples lean adult and post-secondary, so a primary-school reader will need to translate a little.

It replaces the part of the job that was assembly. Drafting, formatting, restructuring, first-pass summarising: those got fast and cheap. What did not get automated is deciding what a specific group of people should be able to do, in what order, with what practice, judged how. That was always the work. It is now the visible work.

Stop assessing the artefact alone and start assessing the process that produced it. Ask for the drafts, the decisions, the things they rejected and why, and a revision made in response to feedback. A polished output proves very little now. A defensible trail of choices still proves a great deal.

There is a planning sheet for exactly this on the resources page, and a longer argument in Assessment That Survives AI.

Detection is a losing game, and it is a game with real casualties: false accusations land hardest on second-language writers and on anyone whose writing is already unusual. Design is the winning game. If the task is built so that the thinking has to show, you do not need to prove what a tool did.

That is a decision about the outcome, not a moral position. If the capability you are building includes using the tool well, let them use it and assess the use. If the capability is the underlying judgement the tool would short-circuit, design a task where the tool cannot stand in. Either way, say which one it is, in writing, before the work starts. Most conflict comes from unstated expectations.

The writing here is Tika Thapa’s, and the arguments and examples are his. Tools get used the way any writer uses tools, for tidying and checking. Nothing on this site is a machine-generated article passed off as a considered one.

Really free, and no wall. Everything on the resources page is on the page itself: readable, printable from your browser, and copyable as plain text. There is nothing to download, nothing to sign up for, and no PDF held hostage behind a form.

Yes. Print them, paste them into your own working documents, run a workshop off them, adapt the wording to your context. Keep a line of attribution and a link back so people can find the source. If you want to publish an adapted version, or put it in a paid product, please ask first.

Yes, with attribution and a link. For reprints, talks, or licensing, please get in touch.

Run the design check on the resources page and look for the first section where you cannot honestly tick the boxes. In practice it is nearly always path before content: learners are lost about what to do next rather than confused about the subject. Fix the next visible step first, then look at practice, then at the feedback loop.

Sometimes, depending on the fit and the calendar. The contact page is the right door, and the portfolio shows the kind of work involved.

Share a post with somebody who is stuck. That helps most. If you would rather do it in coffee, there is a Buy me a coffee link in the footer of every page. Nothing here goes behind a paywall either way.