The Intentional Learning FrameworkTM
Mapping the whole journey an adult learner takes, from finding your course to finishing it, and shows what good design looks like at every step.
Get those steps right, and learners stay, engage, and actually finish.
Intentional design triggers intentional learning, at every stage
Most learning isn't lost to bad intentions. It's lost to design that happens by accident. We teach the way we were taught, we fill the gaps with guesswork, and good practice quietly fails to make it into the room.
My own doctoral research found that 100% of educators experience a gap between the practice they believe in and the practice they actually deliver.
The Intentional Learning Framework closes that gap by making design deliberate at every stage. Intentional design leads to intentional engagement, intentional learning, and intentional outcomes.
When every step is designed on purpose, engagement stops being a matter of luck.
More than just teaching and content
Most professional development, and most learning design, fixes its gaze on Stage 4, the teaching and content, and Stage 5, the assessment, as though those were the only steps that count.
But by the time a learner reaches active learning, you have often already lost the ones who couldn't find your course, never quite started, or drifted off in the first week. Our Framework covers all six stages, because a learner can slip away at any of them, and most slip away long before the teaching begins.
1. Explore + Enrol
They find you, weigh it up, and decide it's worth their time. This is the decision phase, before any content is delivered, and it is where motivated applicants quietly fall away, often blocked by digital-skill barriers nobody designed for. We've observed sites that embrace intentional design at this stage see enrolments rise by 20 to 70%.
2. Welcome + Orient
They arrive, feel genuinely welcomed, and find their feet. The first messages after enrolment matter more than almost anything. It takes intentional design to orient a new learner to the space, the way things are done, and the support on offer, so they start ready rather than lost.
3. Roadmap + Expectations
They know where they're going, what's expected, and why it matters. A clear map of the content and expectations matters at the start of every unit, not just the course. Educator introductions that build trust, study guides that add value, and far less skipped content. Just one of our strategies here was observed to lift online content engagement from 33% to 77%.
4. Active Learning
They do the work, build the skills, and stay engaged. The stage most people picture as teaching. Here we unpack intentional active-learning design, why a mix of approaches beats any single one, why interaction is not the same as engagement, and how to build slides, videos and discussions that actually hold attention, while hosting classes where learners show up ready to participate. One of our strategies was observed to raise attendance from 29% to 87%, with 74% of learners having actively prepared for the session and 93% then actively participating.
5. Assessment + Feedback
They show what they can do, and learn from how they went. What assessment is for, and what makes it good. Writing questions worth answering - one authentic rewrite lifted correct responses from 17% to 88%, same learners, same day. Feedback that moves learning forward, with one of our strategies driving resubmissions down an average of 72% across nine sites. Plus of course addressing assessment in the era of generative AI.
6. Closure + Next Steps
They finish well, and know what comes next. The ending of a unit or a whole qualification, and the real work that belongs there: completion that lands, feedback worth capturing, transferring training into practice, and staying connected after the course ends.
I do the hands-on research, so you don't have to
This is not a model I sketched on a whiteboard over coffee one morning.The Framework is built from hundreds of hours of empirical trials with educators and adult learners navigating real content over several years. This work goes through control groups and qualitative validation before anything every becomes a strategy.
Just one of our strategies raised first-unit completion from 53% to 84%. Another saw online lecture attendance triple, from 29% to 87%. And one of our simplest strategies consistently sees engagement with online content shift from 33% to 77%.
See my peer-reviewed publications here.
A PD provider who is also an award-winning researcher?
Now that's a combination you won't get anywhere else.
I hold a PhD in online education and a Masters in L&D (online), and have taught online pedagogy at Bachelors level, and learning design at Masters level
In addition to working as a university lecturer, I also have first-hand experience of being a VET trainer, and an L&D educator. This means that I know what it's like to juggle the competing demands of these roles, and I know what it's like to fight for the best outcomes for your learners.
Top rated presenter at NVC
Independently verified presenter rating of 4.8 / 5 across hundreds of participant reviews
For tech providers and system-level teams
The same research that powers my professional development enables the AI and learning systems being built across the sector to be truly expert-grounded. Through the Intentional Learning Framework Specification Documents, each stage of the Framework becomes something your build team and your AI can reason from directly. Not a stack of academic reading to interpret, but the research and the why behind it, the common pitfalls including the ones AI systems reliably fall into, a clear picture of what good looks like, exemplars and templates, and rules your system can be built on and evaluated against.
The point is to reason from good practice, not imitate it. These documents are designed to inform the humans on your team and power the AI you use.