166: The Future Isn’t Flashier—It’s Smarter: Christy Tucker on Building Learning That Sticks

Holly Owens (00:00.77)
Hello, everyone, and welcome to another amazing episode of EdUp L &D. I'm super pumped today because we have a returning guest and you're going to love her. If you don't already love her, follow her on LinkedIn and all of her great resources and tips. Christy Tucker is here. Welcome to the show, Christy. Welcome back to the show, Christy.

Christy Tucker (00:22.213)
It's so good to have a chance to chat with you again Holly. We had so much fun last time

Holly Owens (00:25.07)
We did. And I'm looking forward to asking that question we were talking about earlier, because it's we kind of had it was a timely episode the last episode. But but before we dive into all that, for those who don't know you and they should know you out on the LinkedIn space, especially tell us about your journey and tell me what you do, like which your area of expertise, all the different things you've been up to and how you've grown into this area that you're in now.

Christy Tucker (00:30.831)
Mm-hmm.

Christy Tucker (00:34.871)
It was.

Christy Tucker (00:55.205)
Yeah. So my career has always been about helping people learn in one way or another. So I've been helping people learn for over 20 years. I started as a K-12 music and band teacher. I write like many of us started as a K-12 teacher. That's where I started too. And then I switched to corporate software training back when lots of businesses had

Holly Owens (01:08.108)
Like most of us, not a band teacher, but...

Christy Tucker (01:22.639)
computer labs where you would go in person and sit in a computer room and have a person stand up in the front of the room and teach you how to use Microsoft Office. I did that job. It is why I know all sorts of obscure, you know, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Excel shortcuts and things. I know, I know. I know we did. So I did all of that, like the train people how to use.

Holly Owens (01:31.384)
Yeah.

Holly Owens (01:40.93)
We're gonna have to get like a random fact in the episode about Microsoft something.

Christy Tucker (01:50.449)
train people how to use Office and Microsoft Project and Access and a little bit of relational, relational database design. and that was fun, but I missed the creating the curriculum side of things from teaching. I had been like teaching out of books that other people were writing it. And I, that was fine, but, I liked working with adult learners, but I missed the writing side of things. And so I did the research of like, well, what's, what's job where I do that?

and found instructional design and then spent a long time applying for jobs before I got the first instructional design job. But I have now been working in instructional design for over 20 years. so, yeah, I've done, I did started out as a work for an online university initially, but I've done kind of both higher ed and

Holly Owens (02:33.934)
It goes by fast, doesn't it?

Christy Tucker (02:46.257)
workplace training things, I've worked with nonprofits and government agencies, everything from cities up to federal government agencies. I've done lots of things with associations and professional development for people through associations. And I started my own business in 2011. So I've been now working for myself for more than 10 years.

I am a terrible yes man, and so I'm not actually very good working for a boss. It's much better when I'm the external consultant and then I get to tell people like, yeah, this is a dumb way to do things. I mean, I'm usually better, more diplomatic than that. But

Holly Owens (03:29.358)
You're like, we have a much better way that you can increase workflow.

Christy Tucker (03:33.451)
Right, right, right. It's always, it's always, it's always on the like, well, you know, I can see where you're going with this. But given the goal that you've said that you had, do you think that would you be open to considering another approach? Yeah. So like the diplomatic way to say like, the way that you did it is dumb. and

Holly Owens (03:46.39)
Yes, there you go.

Yeah, but it is sometimes it is like you have to be pretty blunt like this is not gonna work. It is really not gonna work.

Christy Tucker (03:56.901)
Great, great. And also sometimes it is the, I've made my recommendation, but ultimately you're the customer. And if you choose to go ahead with this, understand that, you you're taking responsibility for the outcomes.

Holly Owens (04:14.082)
That's gonna be the cons, you're responsible for the consequences of what happens.

Christy Tucker (04:18.309)
And it is the sometimes you let clients have the natural consequences of their decisions. And sometimes that also is your job as a consultant. So I've been doing that these days I specialize, particularly in scenario based learning and branching scenarios. I've been blogging, I'll hit. Let's see, I'm not at the 20 years on blogging, but it's been a long time. And I do.

Holly Owens (04:23.256)
Yep.

Christy Tucker (04:47.737)
write on my blog about scenario-based learning and a lot about AI images and using AI these days too. So those are sort of the things that I'm known for.

Holly Owens (04:59.82)
Yeah, so for the audience that doesn't know, you're definitely an expert in the scenario-based learning, as you're saying. So tell them what that actually is. We definitely have a majority of our audience is transitioning teachers like ourselves. So they might not understand the IDs that are listening. They definitely have an idea. But what is scenario-based learning?

Christy Tucker (05:22.149)
And you know, I think I actually wouldn't necessarily assume that everybody who's an instruction designer does know because I think because we are so terrible in this field about having consistent terminology. Scenario based learning is not maybe quite as bad as like micro learning in terms of David Kelly once said that there are no definitions of micro learning. There are just opinions, some of which are labeled as definitions. And scenario based learning has there is some of that too of the

Holly Owens (05:26.505)
Yeah, that's true.

Holly Owens (05:46.422)
Is that the same person area based?

Christy Tucker (05:51.846)
I will say I tend, I personally tend to be pretty broad in my definition of scenario based learning that I do tend to think that any sort of learning that is using scenarios as part of the training as part of the learning experience can go under that broad umbrella of scenario based learning. Branching scenarios are one form of that and they tend to be the one that people think of.

but I would actually put that as a smaller subset within a broader umbrella of scenario-based learning, right? So branching scenarios are essentially like the choose your own adventure story for training. So it is that you have a situation, you have a couple of choices, you make a choice, and then what happens next is different depending on what your choice is. And so it branches out.

Holly Owens (06:20.994)
That's the one I think of. Yeah.

Christy Tucker (06:45.303)
into multiple different paths. So there are multiple different endings, positive and negative, and you get different results. You see the consequences of your decisions. And I love branching scenarios. Right, before you're actually doing it. Right, right. And so it's a key thing for when you've got things like the soft skills, when you've got communication skills, when you've got strategic skills, when you've got things where there's gray area.

Holly Owens (06:56.716)
before you're actually doing it in real life, which is important.

Christy Tucker (07:14.141)
And where you're working on practicing decision making, branching scenarios are one of the most effective ways to train that. One thing that we fail a lot in in workplace training in particular, and also in education, is giving people enough practice with feedback, doing the actual thing. And the closer you can get the practice to look like the real skill that people need to do.

the better off it is. And so even though in a branching scenario, you might have just text or maybe you have text and static images, you can still make it cognitively more similar to the kinds of skills that people need to practice. You can have them practice decision making, which is key for a whole lot of different things. So, you know, if it's something procedural where...

You just follow the same steps every time and it's exactly the same every time you do it. And if you give five different people the thing, you're going to get the same results all five times as long as they follow the procedure. Don't use a branching scenario for that. It's overkill. It's dumb. You'll waste your time.

But, right, like now maybe you need a little, maybe you do need some sort of simulation of the process. there's, there's.

Holly Owens (08:23.65)
Well said.

Holly Owens (08:30.124)
Yeah, I was gonna ask, cause that's one of the things we use a lot at Amazon is simulations and pharmacy.

Christy Tucker (08:34.615)
And in a simulation that walks you through, but if it is if it is just if it is something where there's a checklist, and you really are doing it the same way every time, this is the difference in procedural skills and strategic skills. Ruth Clark talks about this in her book on scenario based e learning, where she talks about like, when do you use scenarios? And when do you should you use when is some other approach probably better? procedural is

You give five people the task and you get, as long as everybody does it right, you get the same result five times. Strategic tasks are the ones where if you give five people the brief and you're going to get five different results, all of which may be successful, although in different ways. So if it is building a website for your business, you give that brief to five different web developers, you are going to get very different results.

Holly Owens (09:27.011)
Yeah.

Christy Tucker (09:32.641)
And they all could be successful depending on, but they're probably going to weigh certain factors higher or lower. Visual design is not, there's not one way to solve that. Writing things, writing copy, writing, learning, there's not one right answer that is automatically better than everything else. Those are strategic skills.

Holly Owens (09:58.626)
Yeah.

Christy Tucker (10:01.475)
And those in particular are really hard to practice in a lot of the traditional ways that we do assessment and practice where we have forced choice. Branching scenarios do still have a forced choice in the typical way that we're doing things. But it is a forced choice within a realistic context. And you're choosing to do something, not just to talk about, you know, categorizing, well, what type of question?

would you do? It's the difference between, you're a manager and you're trying to resolve a conflict between two of your employees. Asking the question, what type of, you know, what type of, know, what, what type of deescalation strategy should you use in order to make sure that both participants, you know, both employees feel, feel heard, right? That's, that's a categorization question. It's abstract. And it's, and it's not that that's necessarily a terrible thing.

Holly Owens (10:51.168)
Everybody's happy. Yeah. Yeah.

Christy Tucker (10:59.909)
But it's not the same as deciding, know, Rita and Oliver are arguing. Here's what they said. What do you do next?

It is fundamentally a different thing, even if it is ultimately a, then a branching or that that branching question is a multiple choice question, right? You've given them the scenario and you give them three choices. They do something. And then whatever happens next in the conversation, if you immediately take one employee side and say, okay, you know, Oliver's Oliver, I think you've got a good point here, Rita. I think we should just go with Oliver's plan. And you cut that off without listening.

Holly Owens (11:33.135)
boy.

Christy Tucker (11:40.857)
you're going to get a different result than if you say, OK, let's sit down and have a conversation about this. Or if you go talk to each one of them privately first, and then you try to get them together, maybe you get some other background information. So you come in more prepared for that conversation with the two of them.

Holly Owens (12:00.14)
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, that's common. That happens across industries. Those sorts of conversations or the sorts of conflicts that you have to resolve is not just strictly related to anything that we're in. you're already mentioning this, but what are some of the most common mistakes instructional designers make when they create these branching scenarios you're talking about? Like, if it's just one workflow, you don't need a branching scenario or a simulation necessary for that.

Christy Tucker (12:29.007)
Mm-hmm.

Holly Owens (12:29.25)
And like, how can we fix them? I know one of the things when I worked at pharmacy, we had so many e-learnings that we had from onboarding to like retraining, that kind of stuff. But we had to go back and redo everything. So how, when they get to this point where they're taking a different approach, maybe they're updating, how can they fix that stuff? What can they do?

Christy Tucker (12:58.149)
So I think there's two things in terms of getting started. One option is, I talked about how I do tend to take the broader view on scenario-based learning. Besides the branching scenarios, I also use a lot of one question mini scenarios. Set it up, ask one question, and then give some feedback. Because even if I cannot convince an organization that they want to invest in a branching scenario, and also sometimes it's overkill,

Holly Owens (13:14.04)
Okay.

Christy Tucker (13:27.939)
The one question scenario does not take too much longer to write than a traditional multiple choice question, but it's more application, it's higher level thinking, it's a better practice activity. It's a really good way to get started and to start building your skills, writing these little scenarios and writing tight and writing choices that are actions rather than.

the abstract or categorization kinds of questions that we tend to do. So yeah, the recall because so much of the time, right? We do an e-learning, we give them content and then we say, so, you know, can you remember the thing we told you five minutes ago?

Holly Owens (14:00.418)
Yeah, like the recall stuff, yeah.

Holly Owens (14:13.41)
Like the definition of something. that, yeah.

Christy Tucker (14:15.427)
Right? The def, yeah, which is the definition of these things? Or, I mean, okay, you know, sometimes the like, and which order do these steps go in? Okay, like that is important. But also, would you, is it a more effective practice to have them recognize the order in a multiple choice question where you've just moved, shuffled the things around for three or four choices? Or is it a more effective

Holly Owens (14:19.138)
Right.

Holly Owens (14:39.894)
Yeah, and then when they retake it, it's reshuffled again.

Christy Tucker (14:42.819)
right and it's reshuffled? Or is it more effective to give them a scenario in which case they have to do the steps in order? And I love as a plausible distractor for scenarios to have the right decision at the wrong time in the process. Because that's a really easy mistake. Anytime you have something where there's a step of things, it's the, yeah, I need to use, know, thinking about

Motivational interviewing, which is a technique in healthcare and other things. It's having conversations with people to encourage behavior change. There's a whole bunch of information about it. There's all these skills of, you know, open-ended questions, affirmations, reflections, and summaries. But you don't want to do the summary too early in the process because it's the thing that you do at the closing. But if you jump into it too fast, or if you, you know, you should ask a question about

You should be making a suggestion to have a small behavior change, just some small measurable behavior change. But you can make that suggestion too early in the process before you've done enough of the sort of behavior change work beforehand.

Holly Owens (15:55.916)
Yes, I understand what you're saying. That is a big mistake. You're kind of giving them the answer without making them go through, like, I kind of related to like long division and short division. Like you have, learn the full process first and then you can learn the shorter ways.

Christy Tucker (15:59.159)
Right? And so it's, it's yeah, it's the wrong process.

Christy Tucker (16:21.817)
Yeah, I mean, there is some of that. there's also things of like, branching scenarios are great if you're doing sort of troubleshooting or diagnosis kinds of things. Because sometimes what you show in a scenario then is, did you ask the right questions or do the right tests or look in the right places to find all the information? So that then when you're figuring out your solution later, because maybe it looks like, know, have the question, you you have your conversation with somebody and you ask a couple of questions.

But if you miss one of the questions, you miss some path and some key piece of information, maybe you can be successful anyway, but it's harder. Or maybe because you missed some piece of information, you can only get to an okay result and there's no way for you to get to the best result because you missed some piece of information right at the beginning.

Holly Owens (17:11.47)
Yeah. that's so packed.

Christy Tucker (17:13.219)
That kind of complexity, if the skill you need to train has that kind of complexity in it, then it's really hard to train it if all you're doing is single multiple choice questions.

Holly Owens (17:26.772)
Exactly. Say it louder for the people in the back.

Christy Tucker (17:31.056)
So, I mean, you know, this is part of the trick with it too. You know, there was just a conversation on the instructional design subreddit about, you know, when do you use branching scenarios and how do you get the ideas for when you should do it or not? And so this is part of it. And somebody said, okay, but, you know, in the real world, if I can get 80 % there with the one question mini scenarios and I don't really have the time to do these other things, you know,

Should I be doing this? And I had listed off some criteria for figuring out when it's branching scenarios and that discussion was like, well, you if it only meets one of these and I can kind of do it with a one question mini scenario, should you? Well, part of the answer is you do branching scenarios when the problem you're trying to solve is worth the cost and effort of building a branching scenario. How painful is the problem that you're trying to solve?

Holly Owens (18:23.671)
Right.

Christy Tucker (18:28.739)
How complex is the skill that you're trying to train?

Holly Owens (18:32.174)
All right. And of course data will influence some of that conversation as well, bringing in some of the data.

Christy Tucker (18:36.385)
Right? yep, and so if you've got data, and some of the how painful it is, is also the, if you're training 50 people in a small organization, the solution has to be faster to build than if you are training 10,000 people. Because something that is a small problem, but magnified by 10,000 people, is much more likely to be expensive enough to be worth

Holly Owens (19:01.249)
Yeah.

Christy Tucker (19:05.312)
building a more complex scenario. And that's part of the real world of figuring out what approaches you use, too. Because, you know, I think that there is the, like, as much as I'd love to say, like, every project I do is a, cool branching scenario and interactive video, right? Like, it's not. And I do lots of one-question-mini scenarios, because sometimes that's what it is. You know, I'm gonna, you know, if it's, like, city government stuff and

Holly Owens (19:21.646)
Like it's changing the world.

Right.

Christy Tucker (19:34.667)
And honestly, like a lot of it's, you know, I've done some things where it's city government and it's, okay, for one thing, I've done interactive video scenarios, like actually, like hire actors, have a half day shoot, go do the things. It's totally overkill for this, for some of these other things that I've done. We do, now I do for that one, I've done some things with like stormwater protection.

Holly Owens (19:53.88)
Yeah.

Christy Tucker (20:02.349)
And I worked with this great Smee, who has this vast collection of photos of real problems in the environment. And so I love her so much because she's gone through and like labeled them. She'll sort them into folders of like which problem it is, and then she'll have bad and good and has them labeled in the photos. And I'm like, like, this is great. And so we did a lot of things. So frankly, for that one, the scenarios were

Holly Owens (20:10.958)
Ooh.

Holly Owens (20:22.222)
So simple. I love that.

Christy Tucker (20:30.435)
Here's a photo, you're inspecting this site. Here's what you see. Here's the checklist that you're using for your inspection. What problems do you check off? Which things meet it? Which things don't based on the photos? Or here's the different things. Let's figure out which ones require a correction and which ones don't. Those are much smaller, lightweight scenarios, but the skill I need people to do in that case,

is to visually look at something and recognize whether it's a problem that needs to be addressed or not. And so I'm getting the practice exercise to look as much like the real skill that they need to do as I can do in a self-paced e-learning.

Holly Owens (21:03.436)
Yes.

Holly Owens (21:15.532)
Yeah. my gosh. I love this episode. And now I'm going to shift the conversation because last time that we talked, were kind of, AI was coming out, like chat GPT and all the different things. That is that, that, that first segment of this episode, that is so much valuable information for instructional designers. So they need to go re-listen to that part. But let's, let's shift into AI. So.

Christy Tucker (21:38.563)
Hahaha

Holly Owens (21:42.26)
I remember we were talking before we started recording about like, we were nervous about what was AI going to do to the industry, instructional designers, L &D as a whole. So how, I mean, my perspective has definitely changed. How's your perspective? What do you think about AI and how it fits in the workflows and things today for us?

Christy Tucker (22:03.279)
So I will say that I think fundamentally, I haven't re-listened to the episode that we did.

Holly Owens (22:08.566)
I haven't either, but I do remember like the trauma of us talking about AI taking our jobs.

Christy Tucker (22:13.165)
Right. yeah, was gonna say, yes, I was gonna say, like, it definitely was that there, we were, we were at that point where there was a lot of people talking about like, well, is AI going to take, you know, like, is the instructional design field going to exist five years from now? Right. And that was, there was a real discussion about it. So I've looked back at some of my other kind of predictions that I did from, you know, a year and a half or two years ago. I will say that I think overall, I don't think that the field of instructional design is

is going to disappear. I do think that roles are going to change and I think we don't know what all of those changes will be.

Holly Owens (22:51.256)
Yes.

Christy Tucker (22:52.581)
I think that...

There is, I can't remember the name of the law right now, but there's this idea that we tend to overestimate the impact of new technology in the short term and underestimate the impact of it in the long term.

Holly Owens (23:11.758)
That is very true.

Christy Tucker (23:13.381)
And so when we see the arguments of like, oh, you know, like your whole job is going to change in the next two to three years. And if you aren't on board with AI right now, using it every single day, you're behind and somebody else is going to take your job. And I get really uncomfortable with that level of hype and fear mongering. it, and I don't, I,

Holly Owens (23:37.794)
Yeah, and just unnecessary competition instead of helping each other.

Christy Tucker (23:43.78)
And the reality is big organizations do not move that fast. Generally, right? And I don't think you should, on the other hand, I don't think you should put your head in sand and ignore it and assume that five years from now you can just like jump back in and catch up. I think if you're, I don't agree with the ones, you know, I've certainly also seen the arguments of

Holly Owens (23:49.14)
No, especially higher education and academia.

Christy Tucker (24:12.743)
you know, a few years ago at conferences, people were talking about how we were going to do all of our e-learning on smartwatches. Ha ha, isn't that so funny that like we talked about this and all this AI stuff is hype and it's going to go away. It's not going away. And you do need to be paying attention. And I think that this is a great opportunity. think one of the assets that we have in the L &D field is that we do tend to be curious people. We like learning new stuff. Otherwise,

Holly Owens (24:25.635)
now.

Holly Owens (24:40.066)
We are super nerdy, Christy. We already established this. We will go explore super nerdy things.

Christy Tucker (24:42.009)
Yeah. Yes. As established, like, we're super nerdy and enjoy learning for the sake of learning in ways that, like, other people maybe don't enjoy learning for the sake of learning quite as much as we all do.

Holly Owens (24:58.616)
I'm always like, why? Why don't you? This is so much.

Christy Tucker (25:01.207)
I'm like, all the things are good! Yeah, mean, like, heck, this is part, this is half the fun of, I get to talk with all these experts who are passionate about all their different fields, like, boulders are safety cool, stormwater protection, I'm going to do, you know, universal waste, and how do you dispose of batteries and light bulbs? Okay, cool, I'm going to learn something new about that. Is that a topic I would have?

Holly Owens (25:09.646)
Why don't you film this?

Holly Owens (25:17.998)
Yeah.

Most people are like, nope, that's where I draw the line.

Christy Tucker (25:24.205)
Now, don't know, safety training things I've done. I mean, okay, like, yes, I like the soft skills stuff of, you know, my branching scenarios on what I'm doing right now on a project with a series of scenarios on mentoring and networking. And like, that's really cool. That's all fun. But I like learning all the things. We should, I do think in this field that you should be looking at things. And you should be getting some of that hands on practice, you should be trying and experimenting with it.

Holly Owens (25:43.117)
Yeah.

Christy Tucker (25:53.421)
you should be figuring out where it's helpful to you and where the limits of the tools are. And sometimes it is also that you try the tools for something and say, I don't think this is quite working yet. And then you tried in, but as fast as the technology is changing in six months or a year, it may be able to do the thing that you want to do. For my own work,

well, I do use chat GPT and Claude for writing and I definitely do use to help me get unstuck and I suck at writing titles for presentations. So if you see, if you see a fun title on a presentation, you know that I used AI to write it or somebody else helped me. Like those are the two options. never.

Holly Owens (26:27.778)
Me too! my god.

Holly Owens (26:35.382)
Yeah, I'm gonna say the same. We're twinning there because I used to spend hours trying to think of creative titles. my gosh, it was torture.

Christy Tucker (26:43.245)
Yes, yes. Or the other thing that it's really good at of the like, I have an acronym. We've actually kind of decided on an acronym for this thing. And we've got these concepts. Help me come up with things that will go for each letter in this. Like give me three options for each letter in this acronym. Or here's the topic and like help me come up with mnemonics to come up with to do this. Because like how long does it take to come up with a really good mnemonic? But brainstorming that with AI is great.

Holly Owens (27:00.502)
Yeah.

Holly Owens (27:12.61)
Yep, 100%.

Christy Tucker (27:13.893)
I use it a lot for image generation, again, because my work does tend to be a lot of scenarios. So I have this really specific need for image generation that I need to have images of characters with a consistent character in different poses and with different expressions. And so the solution for that for years has been that you do cut out character images.

Holly Owens (27:33.998)
Personas. Yeah, the people. Yeah, love it.

Christy Tucker (27:43.639)
on transparent backgrounds and then you put them in a background and put them in a scene. And there are libraries of those, either photo characters or illustrated characters, you know, the e-learning art designer realistic illustrated set with vectors that you could like edit and like I've used those things a bunch and they're great. But the cutout characters, you know, especially the ones that are, say, built into storyline,

We see them a bunch. And especially if you're in an organization, you get fatigued from those same characters. And I know, I think instructional designers get more tired of them faster than most of our audience because we spend so many hours looking at those same faces. But I have heard from organizations where, you you use one character

Holly Owens (28:16.308)
You get fatigued from those same characters.

Christy Tucker (28:41.335)
And you do it and they're the manager in, your training. But when I do it, I have them and they're the, the external customer in my training and it's the same person. And then it's, it gets confusing that the learners actually get those mixed up if they've seen too many trainings with the same characters, but not used consistently.

Holly Owens (28:53.293)
Yeah.

Christy Tucker (29:06.181)
And that's, you know, that's something too. But now with AI, I can go in with mid-journey and I can generate unique characters for every single project. I can do different poses for them. I can change their outfit and their setting. And so I've done a lot of my blog posts in the last year and a lot of the things that get a lot of traffic on my blog is

Holly Owens (29:26.094)
Love that.

Christy Tucker (29:36.461)
my experiments with trying to figure out how to do consistent characters and how to do that or or if you've so when you're doing a training trying to get the images that all look in a consistent style.

Holly Owens (29:47.181)
Yeah.

Holly Owens (29:52.148)
You have to spend so much time in Adobe for that pre-AI. Yes.

Christy Tucker (29:55.363)
Right? Right? And so it's frankly, I almost always went with photographs rather than illustrated stock images because it's so hard to find one set of illustrated images all in the same style that actually go with and that actually has all of the specific things that I need. And so it's easier to come up with photos and at least then you get a consistent look and feel.

Holly Owens (30:24.771)
Yeah.

Christy Tucker (30:25.023)
Or if you're trying to do illustrated things, even for sort of simple things like icons or whatever, and trying to find icons all in the same style, when you're looking for really specific things, so you either like spend a ton of time on the stock photo image sites, or you spend a bunch of time in PowerPoint or in your, you know, for me, it's, it's affinity designer.

Holly Owens (30:45.954)
Yeah, all instructional designers have probably done this.

Christy Tucker (30:50.477)
Right? Everybody's done this. But now it's very easy. Again, like in Mid Journey or in Recraft or Brushless where I could go in and...

Holly Owens (30:59.374)
I'm writing that down and everything's gonna be in the show notes too.

Christy Tucker (31:03.301)
Yeah, so the tools that I'll talk about this. Yeah, so specific tools I use. Mid-Journey is my primary tool for images. You can, since we were talking about experimenting, you can get a, I don't think there's a free trial anymore, but if you spend $10 to get it for one month, you can try it out and then you can actually cancel it. It's an actual monthly thing, not an Adobe Pretend monthly subscription.

Holly Owens (31:32.328)
good. Yeah.

Christy Tucker (31:34.329)
Yeah, because people who get burned on Captivate with dementia, right? Yes. So it's a good one to experiment with. Obviously, these days, lots of people have chat GPT. And so if you already have chat GPT, there's image generation in chat GPT. I don't love chat GPT's image generation overall. I think it ends up, frankly, looking a lot like the stock photos that I'm trying to get away from.

Holly Owens (31:37.602)
Yes, 100%. Thank you for mentioning that.

Holly Owens (31:51.916)
Yep, I've been using that.

Holly Owens (31:57.795)
Me either.

Holly Owens (32:04.098)
Yes, it should be getting better soon, I hope.

Christy Tucker (32:07.397)
But I'm sure it'll also get better. And there are some specific things that Chat GPT can do, like giving it one image and then saying, OK, now rotate this 90 degrees so you can have the background behind another character. And it does some of those sorts of things. Or the like, here's the person standing at the hotel desk. Now show the view of the lobby of what they would see from that desk. Chat GPT does those things where most of the other image tools don't understand language enough to do that.

Holly Owens (32:10.475)
Yeah.

Holly Owens (32:36.204)
Right. Right.

Christy Tucker (32:38.241)
But Mid Journey does stylistic, does consistent characters. You can do consistent styles. So if you give it one reference image of an illustration, I can come up with 20 images that all have the same visual style and colors that look like a whole set for a training. And it makes it all consistent. Or you can generate icons for consistent, you know, really, your really specific things.

Holly Owens (32:56.718)
but you don't have to do all the work, yeah.

Christy Tucker (33:07.407)
There are also some tools like Recraft and Brushless, which both do illustrations or do vectors. And so if you want to have editable vectors, and if you're trying to match company branding and you need more precise color control, either getting it generated in vector so you can tweak it if necessary, or the tools.

in theory should be able to follow your branding in practice, I found that they're a little loose in the colors. But it depends on how tight you need to be to it. Sometimes it's close enough that it's, it's, you know, tints and shades of your colors, so it at least looks all unified. And that's sometimes good enough, but it depends on depends on how tightly the marketing department is reviewing your work. And

Holly Owens (33:49.762)
Right?

Holly Owens (33:57.327)
Yeah, that's true. That's true.

Christy Tucker (34:01.945)
For some clients, I have to go, it's really strict and you really do have to have like that hex code. so, but a vector is really easy, a vector image, an SVG, which you can edit even in PowerPoint and you can recolor the shapes to make sure that they're the right things to match those exact hex codes. And those just, this is, I know, but.

Holly Owens (34:04.812)
It's really strict to the code, yeah.

Holly Owens (34:24.814)
We have nerded out so much. We have nerd.

Christy Tucker (34:28.697)
But like, okay, fine. we're going to talk, you know, SVGs and Hexagos, but like that's, that's like very much practical. Like what is it, what's the problem that you're trying to solve as an instruction designer, not spending too long looking for stock images, needing to have character images, needing to have the branding pass the marketing review. And these are things, right. And for all that there is the talk about how revolutionary AI can be. I,

Holly Owens (34:48.332)
Right. There you go.

Christy Tucker (34:58.115)
I think long term, we're going to see bigger changes. But if you're looking for the ways to get started right now, I think image generation is one of the places that you can go and do things right now and learn how to do it and solve actual problems for yourself. If you have the Adobe subscription, Adobe Firefly is the AI. They're also the one tool that is

Holly Owens (35:10.402)
Yeah, and learn how to talk to it, like prompts, yep.

Christy Tucker (35:27.493)
trained on licensed content. so ethically, if you would like to avoid the thing that Mid Journey is currently getting sued for, which is having used a bunch of copyrighted content in their stuff. not only did they use it for training, they didn't set up enough guardrails to prevent people from generating images of Darth Vader and also from Frozen and

Homer Simpson. And they didn't set up. I will say, so I think the training data, you know, I think the fact that it scooped up all the training, all of the images everywhere for training data, it's like, okay, yeah, my my blog absolutely has been used to train AI. I personally as an author don't care. Because it's not costing me anything for my stuff to be out there, right? I'm not losing any business opportunities. Because yes, my writing is out there. And yet people can get

Like, if you go try and have chat GPT explain branding scenarios to you, you probably actually are getting content that is based on stuff from my blog. And it's fine because it's all out there freely and like, I don't care. But they should, all of these image generation tools should have better guardrails, I think, about not reproducing copyrighted content.

I think the problem is that the output. I also don't like using these to replicate the styles of living artists. That's one of my other ethical lines with AI image gen that

Holly Owens (36:52.726)
Agreed.

Holly Owens (37:07.842)
Yeah, we could definitely have a whole conversation about that for sure. Yeah.

Christy Tucker (37:11.733)
Yes. Yes. The ethics, the ethics of this, I personally... Now, you want to make a parody Starry Night? Great. No living artist is getting harmed by your like training customized Starry Night painting. But I don't use it to create, to recreate things of living artists who I hypothetically, anybody who I hypothetically could hire to do the work, I don't use AI to copy their style.

That for me is the ethical line. And those are gray area things too, because I certainly know people who are like, no, I'm not gonna use any of these tools, I'm only gonna use Firefly, because I think the training data should have all been licensed. And there's a strong argument in favor of that. So I think that ethics is-

Holly Owens (38:04.814)
I guess we'll definitely see what happens in the future with all those different things. As we're coming up on the end of the episode, where can people find you? What are some of your final thoughts? This has been jam-packed with tips, AI, things to do, you're freelancing, all those different things. So where can people find you? Where can they follow you? Of course, we're gonna include everything in the show notes, but I want you to tell them where to find you and connect.

Christy Tucker (38:28.823)
Yes, yes, absolutely. So I am on LinkedIn. And so you can definitely find me on LinkedIn. And I share my stuff about scenarios and my AI image. do I'm doing a lot of showing my work with AI images. And sometimes I fail and I post about those and sometimes I'm successful and I post about those. So those are on LinkedIn. My blog is christy tucker learning.com.

If you can't remember how to spell Christie, you can also do ctuckerlearning.com, which is fewer letters. It'll redirect. Right, exactly.

Holly Owens (39:01.23)
Yeah, because everybody spells it differently. Yeah. Hopefully you're watching the episode so you can see how to spell it.

Christy Tucker (39:09.293)
Right, if you're watching, it'll be clear, but if you are listening to this as the podcast in the car, then C Tucker Learning is lot easier to remember. And I'm on Blue Sky a little bit as well. Christy Tucker there as well. And so those are the big places to find me. Yeah, I have a YouTube channel. I'm just not really...

Holly Owens (39:31.79)
Those are the main, fantastic.

Christy Tucker (39:36.815)
doing anything with it. You can go see it.

Holly Owens (39:38.08)
Yeah, YouTube is a challenge for me. I'm trying to maybe we can motivate each other to get the YouTube going.

Christy Tucker (39:43.905)
I know it's just it's one more channel and when I do I yeah it's like you have the podcast and so that's your your regular thing I have I my blog and that's my regular thing so but those are the ways yeah

Holly Owens (39:47.224)
It's one more thing.

Holly Owens (39:54.198)
Right. Yeah. Well, Kristi, you're amazing and I love talking to you and you give so much great advice and just want to say thanks again for all you do for people in the L &D space. can't wait for people to hear this episode. Everything's going to be in the show notes that Kristi mentioned where to find her, where to connect, go to her blog, follow her out on LinkedIn. She's an influencer. So thank you so much for coming back on the show. We appreciate it.

Christy Tucker (40:19.737)
Yeah, thanks so much for giving me another opportunity to nerd out with you and go like deep into like, well, there are specific tools for like, here's my nuanced views on these little very...

Holly Owens (40:25.966)
Anytime. Anytime.

Holly Owens (40:34.446)
I love the insider perspective in that we can dive deeper into that. And of course, like that leaves it open for future episodes of different topics we can just talk about or LinkedIn live. So we'll probably do that one day.

Christy Tucker (40:39.119)
Yeah.

Christy Tucker (40:45.527)
All right.