Dr Philippa Hardman's The AI & Learning Design Bootcamp Course Review

An extremely hands-on course that strikes a rare balance between being exhaustive and crisp at the same time. Phil explains complex topics with clarity and structure, using an efficient hybrid and AI-enhanced approach (what is preached is truly taught!), making the content easy to follow without ever feeling superficial. Additional value: • Live class: not just a lecture, but a truly interactive session with practical, hands-on exercises that reinforced the concepts immediately. Highly effective and very well delivered. • Transposable learnings: I was immediately able to apply several prompting tips to a completely different field (Operations), and they worked beautifully.

I treated myself to this course at the end of a busy year, and it was the best professional investment I made in 2025. What sets this bootcamp apart is that it doesn't push an AI-first strategy at all costs on you. Phil encourages you to think critically and question whether, how and in what form AI could and should be incorporated into your learning design practice. Pedagogical value comes first, tool hype second. The results were tangible. I completely restructured my learning design process, adopted the FRAME™ methodology (experiencing several genuine "aha" moments in the process) and built practical tools that I am already using with clients. The international cohort brought diverse perspectives and creative approaches that inspired me. And what about Phil? She was down-to-earth, warm, deeply evidence-based, and always at eye level. Every Friday session felt like a conversation among colleagues. If you're looking for a mature, reflective approach to AI in learning design, this is the course for you. Highly recommended!

My biggest take-away is that we can expedite the creation of content, resources, and learning materials, which provides an over-abundance of materials. We have learned to summarize and simplify this abundance of outputs from the perspective of content creators. A next step would be to take the learner's perspective. I would like to use AI not as an 'expert creator', rather as an 'expert learner'. I need to take the course content being presented to me and develop personalized scaffolding to break it down into manageable chunks. This would help me to build my knowledge progressively.

I found this course very self-guided and easily tailored to my current needs, workflows and priorities. Scaffolded and repeated practice with the FRAME methodology across multiple personalised projects helped really clarify how to effectively place pedagogical constraints and guard rails on the common LLMs of the day.

I've been in instructional design for over 20 years, and this is the best professional development experience I've ever had. Dr. Hardman's boot camp is structured around weekly classes, challenge activities, and readings, and each week builds on the previous one. She doesn't just talk about AI. She uses it in how she delivers the class, which gave me a chance to see what thoughtful, research-first AI integration actually looks like when someone does it well. The FRAME method is what really set this apart for me. It's a structured way to approach AI that starts with finding the evidence before you ever touch a prompt. I've already been using FRAME in my day-to-day work, and it has changed how I think about AI entirely. I went from experimenting casually to working strategically and with intention. By the end of the boot camp, I had built a Custom GPT with pedagogical guardrails, developed a working evaluation app in v0 by Vercel, created reusable prompt templates, written multiple research summaries grounded in the methodology, and learned how to decide when a process should be scaled into a template, a GPT, or an agent workflow. None of this was hypothetical. I applied all of it to real projects. The weekly tips and tricks alone were worth the investment. Dr. Hardman meets you where you are and pushes you further than you think you can go. If you're an instructional designer who wants to use AI responsibly and effectively, take this boot camp. It will change how you work.

Although I have been using AI for learning and development-related tasks for quite some time, this course was an eye-opener for me how one can use it in a quite reliable manner ably for all phases of the design and development cycle. The approach of the course is highly task-based, which gives the opportunity to all to stretch and significantly develop in just four weeks.

A well-organized course that helps with building skills to more effectively use AI. Helpful for beginner and advance level learners with hands-on activities and individual feedback.

Such a deep and reflective course if you are already using AI in course design. The quality of the tools I have created are incredible. Philipa is a wonderful teacher and the community sharing was lovely.

The FRAME model stands out as one of the most impactful in my entire instructional design career. I truly couldn’t have built our Learning Coach without it—my approach to designing learning experiences has fundamentally changed thanks to this framework. I’m deeply grateful to Dr. Phil for the insight and support throughout the process. I highly recommend this experience to anyone committed to elevating their practice.

It’s genuinely valuable and has changed how I use AI. That said, it’s time-intensive, so to get the most from it, you need protected time to complete the assignments; otherwise, you’re likely to benefit less.