My letter “Dear L&D: Your Learning Platform Has a Point of View” is now up on Training Industry as part of their Dear L&D series, where people in the field write directly to the profession.
The letter argues that a learning platform is not a neutral container. Its required fields, defaults, and reporting views add up to a working theory of what learning is and what counts as evidence of it, and most of us don’t hear that argument until we’re already working inside it. I wrote it from an engagement where the platform did exactly what it promised and still had no way to represent the in-person learning the organization actually did, so a fair amount of every week went to translating that work into completions. From there, the letter covers how to read a platform’s argument before you’re committed to it (sandbox time, required fields, the first report that loads) and why selection isn’t the only room where that conversation can happen.
This one sits close to my doctoral research on platform dependency, and it pairs well with the vibe coding in EdTech thread here on the site. If you’ve run into your own version of this mismatch, I’d like to hear about it at licht.education@gmail.com.
