What a global course creation contest revealed about eLearning in 2026
The iSpring Course Creation Contest drew more than 1,500 participants from 103 countries this year. The 145 courses they submitted offer a snapshot of where instructional design is heading, from storytelling and gamification to the practical use of AI.
A large, open course design contest produces something more useful than a ranking. It produces a working sample of the field. When instructional designers around the world build courses across a wide range of topics and submit them for the same expert review, the entries add up to a rare cross-section of how the discipline is thinking right now.
The 2026 contest ran from March to June. Entrants could work in two formats, slide-based and scrollable, and submit one course in each track. Twenty of the submitted courses won across the award categories, which recognized strengths such as storytelling, gamification, visual design, business learning cases, and the use of AI in course building.
Entries were accepted in English, German, French, and Italian, with a dedicated Spanish-language contest running in parallel. Creators who work across languages could take part in both.
More than an award
The prize list was only part of the design. Once registered, participants received a package built around professional development rather than the competition alone:
- A structured learning path on course methodology, delivered through iSpring LMS
- Access to iSpring Suite AI for three and a half months
- Open sessions with working practitioners, with recordings for anyone who missed them
- A peer community and a shared Miro board for feedback on drafts
For someone early in an instructional design career, that combination turns a competition into a portfolio project with a deadline and a review panel attached. For experienced designers, it offered a reason to test an approach they had not tried in client work.
Submissions were reviewed by a panel of 12 eLearning specialists, including Cara North, Heidi Kirby, Robin Sargent, David Kelly, Julie Dirksen, Tim Slade, Luke Hobson, and Christy Tucker. Alongside them, 10 mentors returned to answer questions and guide new entrants, each of them a winner of an earlier iSpring contest. Several of this year's mentors, among them Julian Brunke, Diana Păun, and Foteini Sofouri, first took part as competitors before coming back to coach.
What the entries showed
The courses themselves pointed to a clear direction of travel. The entries that scored highest shared one trait above the rest. They started from a real learner need or a specific workplace problem, then built toward a measurable outcome rather than a completion tick. How designers got there, and where AI earned its place in the build, is where the more interesting patterns sat.
iSpring's reviewers grouped those patterns into nine instructional design trends drawn from this year's submissions. The full list, with the thinking behind each one, is set out in the contest recap.
For a field that often debates its direction in the abstract, a stack of 145 finished courses is a rare piece of evidence. The full write-up of the 2026 contest, including the winning courses and the nine trends identified from this year's entries, sits on the iSpring blog.
Read the recap: Inside the iSpring Course Creation Contest 2026