How Haifa Audrey Azzahra turns storytelling into learning that engages and sticks

When you talk to Haifa Audrey Azzahra, it quickly becomes clear that she looks at learning from a practical angle.

For Haifa, instructional design isn’t about adding more interactive activities or creating content simply because there’s a training need. It starts with a more fundamental question: What needs to change, and how will learners demonstrate that change?

Haifa currently works on a project basis, developing childminder training in Indonesia, while also teaching IELTS preparation to adult learners. Previously, she spent three and a half years at The KPI Institute, most recently as an instructional design Project Manager.

Her experience spans soft skills training, learning program development, instructional design, and process improvement. She also brings a data-informed mindset to her current IELTS teaching, adapting activities, pacing, and feedback based on learners’ demonstrated progress.

That practical approach — combined with her ability to turn learning concepts into engaging experiences — earned Haifa the Best Gamification & Storytelling in the Scrollable Category award in the iSpring Course Creation Contest 2026.

We spoke with Haifa about turning abstract concepts into concrete behaviors, getting stakeholders involved early, using AI as a thinking partner, and designing learning experiences that stay meaningful beyond the course itself.

“Learning isn’t just about building interactive activities.”

Haifa Audrey Azzahra,
Virtual IELTS Instructor

For Haifa, one of the biggest misconceptions about instructional design is that good learning automatically means engaging activities.

Interactivity matters, but it isn’t where the work begins.

“One challenge is helping stakeholders understand that learning isn’t just about building interactive activities.”

The real challenge is identifying what learners actually need to know or do.

“It’s easy to jump into creating training, but the real work is finding out the knowledge gaps, unclear expectations, and workplace processes.”

That requires instructional designers to resist the temptation to start building too soon.

Instead, Haifa focuses on asking better questions about the problem, the audience, the expected behavior, and the conditions in which learning needs to be applied.

“As instructional designers, we need to ask better questions rather than building more content.”

It’s a principle that has shaped her work across different types of learning, from professional development to language training. 

“Soft skills can become very concrete.”

Soft skills are often treated as difficult to measure.

Well-being, emotional intelligence, communication, and similar topics can sound abstract, particularly when compared with technical knowledge that can be tested with a straightforward quiz.

Haifa sees it differently.

People often think that soft skills are difficult to measure because they’re abstract. But with the right instructional design approach, they become very concrete.

The key is translation.

Instead of teaching emotional intelligence as a broad concept, for example, a learning experience can focus on specific behaviors, decision points, and everyday practices.

That changes the question from:

Do learners understand emotional intelligence?

to:

What will they do differently in a real situation?

Much of Haifa’s work has involved making that connection explicit by turning concepts into behaviors learners can recognize, practice, and apply beyond the training session.

For her, meaningful learning doesn’t end when learners understand a concept.

It starts when they can use it.

“People are more likely to support something if they feel involved.”

That practical mindset also shapes how Haifa works with stakeholders.

Rather than developing a solution in isolation and asking for approval at the end, she brings stakeholders into the process early.

She asks about their:

• goals
• pain points
• expectations
• success measures

Then she provides options and stays open to feedback before committing to a particular solution.

For learners, she follows a similar principle: Make the value visible as early as possible.

If learners can immediately understand what they will gain from changing a behavior or using a particular tool, the learning becomes more relevant.

And relevance makes adoption easier.

For Haifa, buy-in isn’t something that happens after a course is built. It’s created by helping people understand why the learning matters before they are asked to participate in it.

“Consistency and openness to feedback matter more than launching something perfectly.”

A perfect launch doesn’t guarantee lasting engagement.

Haifa prefers a more iterative approach: establish milestones, collect feedback, identify quick improvements, and make those improvements visible.

I identify the milestones, collect learner feedback, and look for quick improvements that learners can notice right away.

That creates momentum through action rather than expectation.

When learners see that their feedback leads to changes, they become more invested in the learning experience. And when stakeholders can see the outcomes, the results can help keep everyone focused.

Sharing outcomes with stakeholders is also important; it can refuel us and help us stay focused.

It’s a relatively simple approach, but it reflects a broader principle in Haifa’s work:

Learning programs don’t need to be perfect from day one. They need to keep getting better.

“You’ll always have something new to anticipate and discover.”

Instructional design is a field where the tools, technologies, audiences, and expectations keep changing.

Haifa’s advice to her younger self reflects that reality.

You’ll feel unsure, and things will change a lot.

Rather than seeing uncertainty as something to eliminate, she sees it as part of developing as a learning professional.

The more you explore, the more you’ll realize there are many ways to create meaningful learning experiences.

There isn’t one universal formula for good instructional design.

Different learners, subjects, environments, and performance problems call for different solutions. And that means there is always something new to explore.

You’ll always have something new to anticipate and discover.

“I use AI as a thinking partner.”

Haifa has incorporated AI into her workflow, but not as a substitute for instructional design expertise.

She uses it to generate alternatives for learning activities and assessments — essentially expanding the range of possibilities she can consider during the design process.

I use AI as a thinking partner.

That distinction matters. AI can suggest an activity. It can generate multiple assessment ideas. It can offer alternative approaches.

But it doesn’t automatically know which option will work best for a particular audience, context, or learning objective.

Ultimately, it is the instructional design expertise that makes a learning experience land.

For Haifa, that means human review remains essential.

AI can increase the number of possibilities. The instructional designer still needs to decide which possibilities are worth pursuing.

“AI can actually make things more overwhelming.”

There’s another side to AI that Haifa has noticed: More output doesn’t necessarily mean less work.

AI can generate huge amounts of content quickly. Without a clear purpose, that abundance can make the design process even more overwhelming.

Sometimes, the volume of content that AI can produce makes us feel more overwhelmed.

That’s why Haifa starts with the question of impact.

We first need to know why we want to create something and what kind of impact we want to achieve.

Only then does it make sense to decide what should be automated or accelerated.

The lesson applies beyond AI.

Templates, automation, project management tools, and reusable processes can all reduce workload, but only when they are solving a real problem.

Efficiency without direction simply produces more work, faster.

“Standardizing the process helped us manage complexity.”

Haifa has worked on learning projects with many moving parts, and she has found that predictable processes can make a significant difference.

Her approach has included creating quality standards, reusable templates, and clearer workflows.

The goal wasn’t to make every project identical.

It was to reduce unnecessary uncertainty so the team could focus its energy on the parts of the project that actually required judgment.

Frequent communication with SMEs and project teams also helped identify potential issues early.

That matters because small problems are much easier to solve before they affect implementation.

For Haifa, process design is therefore part of learning design.

A well-designed workflow doesn’t just help a team work faster. It creates the conditions for producing more consistent learning experiences. And sometimes, the best way to improve your process is to see how someone else solved a similar problem. In the iSpring Learning Exchange, instructional designers from 100+ countries share real-world examples, exchange ideas, and help each other find better ways forward.

“My biggest success was improving the system behind the course.”

When asked about her biggest success in learning program development, Haifa didn’t point to one particular course. Instead, she pointed to the system that made better courses possible.

She redesigned workflows, aligned quality standards with client requirements, and introduced AI-assisted processes. The result was the ability to deliver a more comprehensive learning program.

That answer says a lot about how her role has evolved.

Instructional design isn’t always about the final learning product. Sometimes the highest-impact intervention is improving the system that produces the learning.

Better workflows can improve quality. Clearer standards can reduce inconsistency. AI-assisted processes can remove repetitive work.

Together, those improvements give learning teams more capacity to focus on what matters.

“The LMS gives us a centralized environment.”

An LMS can also become part of that system.

For Haifa, one of its main benefits is creating a centralized environment where learning can be delivered consistently and learner progress can be tracked.

That becomes particularly valuable when programs need to scale internationally.

An LMS provides a common infrastructure for managing learning delivery as a unified experience rather than a collection of disconnected activities.

And for a learning professional focused on consistency and continuous improvement, that visibility matters.

Designing for what happens after the training

Across her work, Haifa keeps returning to the same idea: Learning only matters if it changes what people can do.

That’s why she starts with knowledge gaps and workplace realities rather than jumping straight into activities.

It’s why she turns abstract soft skills into behaviors and decision points.

It’s why she involves stakeholders before building.

It’s why she uses learner feedback to make visible improvements.

And it’s why she treats AI as a source of possibilities rather than a replacement for instructional design expertise.

Her approach is ultimately about moving learning beyond the course itself.

A learner may complete an activity, pass an assessment, or finish a session. But the real test comes later — when they face a situation where they need to apply what they learned.

Her work, which won the Best Gamification & Storytelling in the Scrollable Category award, shows that practical learning doesn’t have to be dry or overly didactic.

For Haifa, storytelling and gamification are most effective when they serve a clear learning purpose: helping learners connect with the content, make decisions, practice new skills, and remember what they can apply in real situations.

That brings her approach back to where it starts: not with the activity, but with the learner and the change the learning needs to create.

The goal isn’t simply to make learning more interactive. It’s to make it meaningful, memorable, and usable.