Marketing Techniques for L&D and One Question Scenario Design

In this episode, Tom McDowall is joined by Bianca Bowman, Mike Taylor, and Christy Tucker for a practical preview of their upcoming sessions at IDTX Online 2026.

Bianca and Mike share how to borrow useful marketing principles without turning your job into “content marketer plus everything else”, starting with content strategy, then moving into SURE content principles: Simple, Useful, Resonant, and Easy to skim.

Christy breaks down a simple way to improve assessment quality quickly: one question mini scenarios that help people practise real decisions, even if your reality is still “slides plus a knowledge check”.

To book tickets and see upcoming events, head over to the IDTX website.

What this episode is about

Making L&D content more compelling and more useful, and making assessments better at testing judgment, not just recall.

What you’ll take away

• A simple way to think about content strategy before you build anything new
• How the SURE approach helps you create content people will actually read and use
• Why “easy to skim” is not dumbing down, it’s designing for real humans
• How mini scenarios can upgrade assessments without needing new tools or approvals

Sessions mentioned (IDTX Online 2026)

• Mini is More: Create One Question Scenarios for Better Assessment (Christy Tucker)
  19 February, 2:45pm UK time
• From Zero to Hero: Marketing Techniques for Captivating L&D Content (Bianca Bowman and Mike Taylor)
  19 February, 4:35pm UK time

One thing to try after listening
Pick one existing learning asset or module and do just one upgrade:

• Run it through SURE (Simple, Useful, Resonant, Easy to skim), or
• Turn one knowledge check into a mini scenario that asks for a decision, then give feedback that teaches

Tickets

IDTX Online runs 18–19 February and is free to attend.
For tickets and event details, head over to the IDTX website.

• (00:00) - Intro and what the podcast is about
• (00:34) - Episode overview and IDTX Online reminder
• (01:10) - Bianca and Mike, content strategy and SURE
• (11:56) - Christy Tucker, mini scenarios for assessment

Creators and Guests

Host

Tom McDowall

IDTX Founder and Conference Chair

Guest

Bianca Baumann

VP, Learning Solutions & Innovation

Guest

Christy Tucker

Learning Experience Design Consultant

Guest

Mike Taylor

Learning Consultant

What is IDTX Podcast?

Hosted by Tom McDowall, The IDTX Podcast explores what’s really happening in the L&D world right now. From evidence-informed practice and instructional design decisions to the realities of using learning technology inside complex organisations, this is a space for honest conversations rather than polished sales narratives.
You'll hear from all the IDTX speakers ahead of their conference appearances throughout the year, allowing you to learn from their years of collective expertise and get a taste of what it's like to attend an IDTX event.

Unknown Speaker 0:00
Learning and Development is a noisy space. There is no shortage of big claims, shiny tools or confident answers, but if you actually do this work, you know that improving practice is usually slower, Messier and far more interesting than any headline would suggest. This is what this podcast is all about. I'm Tom McDowall, and this is the idtx podcast.

Unknown Speaker 0:34
Welcome to this episode of the idtx podcast. In this episode, I'll be interviewing Mike Taylor, Bianca Bowman and Christy Tucker about their sessions at the upcoming idtx Online Conference. Before we get started, remember that you still have time to book your tickets for idtx Online. The event is set for February 18 and 19th, and is completely free to attend. You can find all the [e-mail]

Unknown Speaker 1:04
Now let's jump into the interview with Mike and Bianca.

Unknown Speaker 1:10
Let's start as we always do, with Who are you and what do you do? Bianca, can I come to you first Absolutely. Well, first off, thanks for having us. Tom really exciting.

Unknown Speaker 1:20
My name is Bianca. I am the VP of learning solutions and Innovation at art and learning. And I'm one of those people. I actually live and breathe learning and development from, you know, a very early age on. So I actually decided for that this is going to be my career, so I didn't accidentally fall into it, which obviously nothing wrong with that. And early on in my career, I was an education specialist at Eloqua, which is a marketing or marketing software, and that's why I fell in love with marketing and learning and development and seeing how you know things kind of cross, and that there's a lot that we can learn from marketing. And that's why Mike and I wrote a book together about marketing and learning. So, yeah, that's just a little bit about me amazing and leads us very easy to Mike,

Unknown Speaker 2:14
yeah. So my name is Mike Taylor. My day job currently is

Unknown Speaker 2:19
working in a cyber security group at Nationwide Insurance here in Columbus, Ohio. And I also spent some time, about five years in a digital marketing agency, so that's sort of where my marketing L and D Crossroads sort of started to happen. And I also teach in Franklin University's Graduate Program for Instructional Design and Technology.

Unknown Speaker 2:46
Fantastic, and again, thank you because you are some of our returning idtx presenters having joined us before. So it's wonderful to have you back this time your session from zero to hero, marketing techniques for captivating L and D content is scheduled for 4:30pm GMT on the second day, February, the 19th of the event. Tell us a little bit about what this session is and what we can expect to walk away from it with absolutely so I'll get started, because the first part will be me. I'm going to talk a little bit about content strategy. So what that means is, how can we as learning and development professionals be better at organizing our content, knowing what content we have, organizing our content, and obviously it also goes into the creation part. But often what we do is we jump right into that third point, the Creation versus, you know, taking a step back is like, hey, what do we even have, and what do we actually need, right? And so I want to talk at a high level about how marketers approach a content strategy, and how we can potentially do that in learning and development at a much, much lower or smaller scale, because obviously we have full time day jobs already, so we can't be content marketers on top of what we're doing, but there's some really low hanging fruit that can help us get started. And we'll share some templates as well. So hopefully it'll be super actionable. And then, yeah, once you know we have that base, that strategy base, we get to that creation piece where it becomes a little bit more tactical, and that's where Mike will jump in,

Unknown Speaker 4:23
yeah. And so once you have that strategy piece in place, obviously we still need some content to put out there. And in the book, we have a model or a set of principles that we call Sure, so s, u, r, e,

Unknown Speaker 4:38
the first one is simple, and that's something like making things readable, easy to understand, kind of cognitive fluency, type stuff,

Unknown Speaker 4:48
the U is for useful or personally relevant. So that means we need to understand our audience pretty well so we can kind of unlearn that and understand, you know, how to speak to them, what's relevant to

Unknown Speaker 4:59
them. The.

Unknown Speaker 5:00
R is for resonant, and that's emotionally resonant. So what do they care about? Again, kind of requires knowing your audiences as well as possible. And then the last one is kind of easy to skim, easy to kind of, again, that cognitive fluency stuff,

Unknown Speaker 5:17
we all know that people don't read every word, and we skim, and we use things like visual hierarchy and headings and white space and all that good stuff to help people direct their attention

Unknown Speaker 5:31
in the emotionally relevant piece, one of the one of the big, kind of foundational things in chapter one is kind of how our brains process information, and there's six big attention triggers that we talk about. So again, personally relevant is one of those big ones kind of, like, if you're at a cocktail party and it's really loud, but you can hear your name all across the room because somebody said your name. And so there's six kind of big attention triggers that you can apply to your content as well. And the and the great thing about both, you know, all of this and what Bianca was talking about is it's super practical. You could walk out of there and start applying all of this immediately. You know, for free, it's really just a mindset. There's no expensive software or certifications or anything like that. So it's really super practical. I

Unknown Speaker 6:19
think it's one thing that's always really struck me about these sessions is that we talk a lot about kind of evidence, informed practice and the science of learning. And I think sometimes we forget that this, what we call like the science of learning, or learning science is the same thing that marketers call the science of marketing and that product managers call the manager the kind of science of product.

Unknown Speaker 6:41
And it's really interesting to see how the same principles have been applied in these other spaces often, dare I say it, a little more successfully and deliberately than we have historically done in l&d.

Unknown Speaker 6:52
But I think Alongside this, because it's the same for sort of product, for l&d, there is the criticism of, look, I'm already an instructional designer and a graphic designer and an SME whisperer. Do I now have to be a marketer as well? And I'm just wondering, like, when you have those conversations, where do you see this? Is this like yet another hat that we need to wear? Or is this something else

Unknown Speaker 7:18
to me? It's, it's it's the same hat. Maybe we spin it around a little bit or something, but it's generally the same hat because it's, you know, having going through the research to write this book, and even, even since then, you know, it's one of the really cool things is how well the marketing and learning research aligns. So a lot of the psychology you're, we're talking about humans, and it's the same human on the end of a learning lesson or end of a marketing message. And so there's really a great deal of things that are relevant in both cases.

Unknown Speaker 7:51
Yeah, what Mike said, and I think we're the first ones to also admit that just like in learning, there's good and not so good marketers, right? So obviously there's marketing out there that's like hitting you over the head kind of thing, right? That's, you know, probably the same as in learning and development. If someone just, you know, sends out the same content to everyone, right? There's just those parallels. So I agree. It's, it's the same hat, you just approach it slightly differently and get inspired from, you know, marketing, or you even mentioned product management, product marketing, right? There's, like, so many other areas that we can get inspired by, and I think that's really what it is we take inspiration from marketing. But, you know, the good learning principles are still really, really important. Like, you need that, right? I love that. I think that's so much what we need as well is this, we don't have to become other things to learn from them and be inspired by them, which I think is really positive. So

Unknown Speaker 8:53
amazingly, we've already nearly spent our time today together. So I want to finish up with the same question that I'm asking everyone in this podcast series, which is for anyone listening to this, if they were thinking about any one thing or planning to do any one thing right now, what do you think it should be? Bianca, can I come to you first on that one? Yeah, I'll keep it in the professional realm based on the topic here as well. But definitely start small. But you know, if you decide to come to our session and want to be prepared, I think one thing is to just start looking at content you have right now and start thinking about, hey, how do we currently organize this? Are we organized right? Just kind of like taking a quick inventory of what you have. And I think, yeah, that would be a great first thing to do without any action after this. Just like, where am I at, right? Just doing that amazing. Yeah, for me, I think I would sort of boil a lot of this down into the idea that sort of less is more. I.

Unknown Speaker 10:00
Know, we often want to be super complete and handle every possible potentiality, but that comes, oftentimes with a cost. And so if we're overwhelming people with too much information, all things being equal, I would go with less is more.

Unknown Speaker 10:17
You can catch zero to hero. Marketing techniques for captivating led content on the 19th of February, that's day two of idtx online 2026 at 4:35pm,

Unknown Speaker 10:32
UK time. Idtx is all about bringing together amazing practitioners from around the globe to share what they know for the last five years, we've been hosting virtual conferences, and year six will be amazing with two virtual conferences, but we are also bringing idtx into the real world. On May 29 we'll be hosting the evidence informed practice conference in the heart of Birmingham, this one day event will bring together scientists, researchers, L and D, practitioners, HR, professionals and people from across the performance enablement landscape, all focused on figuring out how we can harness the scientific understanding of how people work to improve our ability to facilitate performance in the workplace with a roster of fantastic speakers and ample opportunity to network, it's an event you do not want to miss out on. Tickets are just 100 pounds, but strictly limited to 100 attendees. Head over to idtx.co.uk,

Unknown Speaker 11:42
today to make sure you've got your ticket. Next up, we hear from Christy Tucker about her session. Mini is more create one question scenarios for better assessment.

Unknown Speaker 11:56
Well, my name is Christy Tucker. I'm a learning experience design consultant. I've been working for myself for over a decade and working in instructional design for and online learning for 20 years,

Unknown Speaker 12:11
and these days, I focus a lot on scenario based learning and using storytelling and technology to make learning engaging and make people think and practice decision making and get better results.

Unknown Speaker 12:30
Okay? And that kind of leads us into your session at idtx, pretty, pretty well. So many is more. Create one question scenarios for better assessments. It's scheduled for the second day of the event, the 19th of February, at 2:45pm

Unknown Speaker 12:45
UK time. If you're listening to this, you can figure out when that is for you. Could you tell us a little bit more about what the session is, what we can expect to happen, and what we can expect to walk away being able to do

Unknown Speaker 13:00
Yeah. So people who have maybe followed my blog or have seen my work on LinkedIn or elsewhere know that the thing I'm often known for is branching scenarios, big, complex simulations, multi step and those are awesome. I love building those. But

Unknown Speaker 13:21
that's should never. You should never have one thing in your in your toolbox, right? You should have lots of other things. And in practice, a lot of what I actually build for clients is one question many scenarios. I just find that they are so useful in all sorts of different situations, and there's such an easy thing to start with, I don't think if you're just getting started doing scenarios, that you should jump right into a super complex, 15 ending branching scenario like that's that's not where to start. Where you should start is one question. Mini scenarios. Almost everybody, even if you are in an organization where you're entry level and you're not doing too much. You don't have much power to change the strategy organization, and there's a lot of slides plus a knowledge check. Even then, if you can put scenario based questions in that knowledge check, you are already pushing towards better quality learning, and that is something that is in your power in just about every instructional design position. So this is one of those places where you can break in and nudge towards something better without overhauling everything. So I love these sorts of short scenarios, couple of sentences, maybe one question. Ask what you would do, so that it's a decision like people would make in their work

Unknown Speaker 14:44
and then give them feedback.

Unknown Speaker 14:47
I think one of the things I always find most interesting whenever I go to more sessions is that

Unknown Speaker 14:53
a lot of this is, you know, not new, as it were, like when we talk about some learning transfer decision.

Unknown Speaker 15:00
Making this is all kind of centered around that, so it's really well backed by kind of our understanding of how people learn and think and work. But a lot of organizations I observe still don't do this. Now, a lot of people, as you said, do feel like they don't. They can't just make the choice to do that.

Unknown Speaker 15:18
So what do you think are some of the kind of blockers that people either feel or are actually in their way to getting started with this.

Unknown Speaker 15:26
So people do get scared. I will say, I think that the word stories and storytelling is sometimes the blocker interesting, and because I've heard people resist that word of stories that it doesn't seem serious enough, right? Oh, we're doing, you know, we're doing safety training or ethics, or you write like, it's got to be very serious. And I do get some, I have seen resistance to that. Sometimes I also think that people feel like, Oh, I'm not a good storyteller. Okay, first of all, you are, but you also don't. You are not trying to, like, rate an award winning novel, or, you know, screenplay here, like, that's not what this is. It is. Can you figure out a problem that people are having in work and figure out a way to describe it briefly?

Unknown Speaker 16:17
And for most people, that is, in fact, a skill that you can do. I also think that people don't necessarily feel empowered to do it, especially right, especially people who are earlier in their careers in instructional design, that that it's scary to push back. And it's scary because it's not the way that we've always done it.

Unknown Speaker 16:35
Sometimes you can put some scenario based questions in and then ask afterwards, hey, you know? Like, did you know? What do you think about this? I also find, I do find that these are the, one of the easier places to get organizations to dip their toe in the water of doing something better, because it doesn't cost anything extra. It doesn't take a lot of extra time. You can whatever tool you're using right now for multiple choice questions. You can do this and so it's not continued on a on a particular you don't have to go get purchasing to approve some other fancy tool.

Unknown Speaker 17:11
You can just write it. You can do these with pen and paper. I've done them with PowerPoints or and printouts for groups.

Unknown Speaker 17:20
So I think that that's I think people get worried about it, but I do think that it is the thing that you can start with, knowing that it is one small step towards doing something better.

Unknown Speaker 17:34
The other thing is that writing really good multiple choice questions is hard. Writing good scenarios and plausible distractors is hard, and it is a skill that you need practice in and I do think that that's the other thing that sometimes is a blocker for people, is getting that skill, which is why, in the session, we're going to do some practice exercises and practice writing it, because you need practice to build that skill. You You aren't going to get it on the first time you try. You try. You have to write it, and you have to revise it and tweak it and make the choices balanced and do those edits

Unknown Speaker 18:08
amazing. Well, I think that gives us a lot to look forward to in this session. I know I'm looking forward to it, but I'd like to finish these chats with with one question where people can answer it however they want, and that is to everyone listening right now. If they go away thinking or planning to do just one thing, what would you like it to be?

Unknown Speaker 18:29
I would like for people to look at the multiple choice questions they're using right now and think about if some of those could be replaced with scenarios that let people practice decision making.

Unknown Speaker 18:44
You can catch Christie's session. Mini is more create one question. Scenarios for better assessment at 2:45pm

Unknown Speaker 18:52
UK time on the 19th of February. This as well as from zero to hero marketing techniques for captivating L and D content are both part of our lineup for day two of this year's idtx Online Conference, the free to attend community first l&d conference focused on practical application, whether you're attending this event, our in person event in May or the virtual summit In October. I look forward to seeing you very soon. Remember you can learn more about idtx and all the events we have coming up this year at idtx.co.uk