What a Barista Taught Me About Instructional Design

Content creators are onto something….

Last month, I learned how to make a proper cortado from a 47-second TikTok video. The creator wasn't a certified barista trainer. She didn't have a teaching degree. She just knew espresso, knew her audience, and knew exactly how to hold my attention long enough to change my morning routine.

I've spent over fourteen years designing corporate training for Fortune 500 companies. I've studied ADDIE, Bloom's Taxonomy, Gagné's Nine Events. And yet, this woman teaching latte art in her kitchen was doing something I needed to pay closer attention to.

The Accidental Pedagogues

Here's the thing: content creators are teaching complex skills every day. Car repairs, knitting techniques, gaming strategies, makeup application. And they're doing it in 60 seconds or less. They're not formally trained in instructional design. Most wouldn't call themselves educators. But they're using sophisticated pedagogical strategies, whether they realize it or not.

They hook attention in the first two seconds. They chunk information into digestible pieces. They use visual scaffolding that would make Mayer proud. They build participatory communities that drive practice and feedback. They create series that scaffold skills over time.

Meanwhile, in corporate L&D, we're still defaulting to 20-minute eLearning modules and wondering why completion rates are dismal.

Introducing "The People's Professors"

This disconnect became the foundation for my master's capstone project at Full Sail University. I wanted to bridge the gap between what creators do intuitively and what instructional designers do intentionally. My goal was to translate creator-native strategies into actionable practices we can apply to workplace learning.

The result is "The People's Professors," an interactive game-based learning experience where instructional designers analyze real creator content across genres: baristas, mechanics, knitters, gamers. Learners discover five "Pedagogical Artifacts" along the way: hook techniques, cognitive chunking, visual scaffolding, participatory prompts, and series-based learning paths. By the end, they design their own 60-second microlearning video script applying at least three of these strategies to a real workplace performance gap.

How the Planning Came Together

What I love about instructional design is that the process itself is instructive. Each planning document I created built on the last, forming a coherent through-line from problem to solution.

My Training Needs Analysis helped me articulate the performance gap and identify subject matter experts, including researchers like Khlaif and Salha on TikTok as nano-learning, Greenhow and Lewin on social media pedagogy, and Jenkins on participatory culture. Merrill's First Principles of Instruction gave me a framework to structure the learner journey from activation through integration. My Hierarchical Task Analysis forced me to sequence tasks in a way that reduces cognitive load and builds confidence progressively. And my IDD Blueprint synthesized everything into a cohesive design plan.

I recorded a short video walking through this planning process, showing how each document informed the next and how I made key design decisions along the way.

The Takeaway

The biggest lesson from this project isn't about TikTok or microlearning. It's about paying attention to where learning actually happens. The most effective teaching often shows up in unexpected places—your social media feed, a YouTube rabbit hole, a Reddit thread. Our job as instructional designers isn't to dismiss these spaces as entertainment. It's to understand why they work and bring that understanding back to the experiences we create.

Good instructional design isn't about following a formula. It's about understanding your learners, grounding your approach in research, and building experiences that actually change behavior.

Your Turn

I'd love to hear from you: Who's taught you something without trying to? What creator content has stuck with you in ways that formal training hasn't? Drop a comment below or connect with me on LinkedIn. Let's talk about the people's professors in your feed.

— Emily Green