From multiple-choice quizzes to real decisions: How Jinny Hyejin Hwang creates interactive learning experiences

For Jinny Hyejin Hwang, instructional design is about more than making learning interactive.

It’s about giving learners something meaningful to do.

As an instructional designer and interactive learning experience designer, Jinny partners with subject matter experts (SMEs) to create immersive learning experiences using tools such as Storyline, Rise, and H5P. Her work includes branching scenarios, interactive videos, scenario-based games, and AI-powered learning activities.

One of her recent projects transformed a traditional multiple-choice assessment into a branching scenario where learners step into a role, make decisions, and experience the consequences of those decisions.

The result wasn’t simply a more engaging assessment.

Learners remembered it.

That approach earned Jinny first place in the Scrollable Course category of the iSpring Course Creation Contest 2026, one of the contest’s two main categories.

We spoke with Jinny about designing meaningful interactions, managing the time demands of eLearning development, working with SMEs, using AI without giving up human judgment, and what happens when accessibility becomes a non-negotiable requirement.

“The building is one of many moving pieces.”

Jinny Hyejin Hwang,
Instructional Designer at Kansas State University

Ask someone outside learning and development what an instructional designer does, and they might picture someone sitting at a computer building an impressive course.

Jinny sees a much bigger picture.

“Someone from the outside might picture an instructional designer at a computer, building something fancy in an authoring tool. In reality, the building is one of many moving pieces.”

Her work involves managing several programs at different stages, coordinating reviews, working with SMEs, developing media, testing interactions, and keeping projects moving toward their launch dates.

That makes project management a core instructional design skill. And nowhere is that more obvious than in interactive learning.

“There’s a floor under how fast that kind of work can move.”

Interactive design takes time.

A branching scenario with multiple decision points requires a storyboard, scripts for different paths, media for different outcomes, and extensive testing to make sure every branch works as intended.

So the hours add up quickly, and there’s a floor under how fast that kind of work can move.

The challenge is that the deadline usually isn’t flexible.

Most requests arrive with a launch date already attached, so Jinny plans backward from that date. She identifies review windows first, then works out how much actual design time remains.

That gives her a basis for a realistic conversation about scope early in the project.

Instead of discovering too late that an ambitious interactive experience can’t be developed within the timeline, Jinny can discuss trade-offs with stakeholders while there is still time to make decisions.

Good interactive design, in other words, starts with good planning.

“Frame it around the outcome stakeholders care about.”

Getting stakeholders on board with a new learning component starts with speaking their language.

Jinny doesn’t lead with the interaction itself. She leads with the outcome.

This program lifts the performance of the people you’re responsible for.

Or:

This job aid helps your team cut down on the mistakes that keep coming back.

The point is to make the benefit concrete. When stakeholders can picture the outcome, the conversation can move from whether something should happen to when it should happen.

But there’s another part of her approach that’s just as practical: make participation easy for SMEs.

Rather than asking them to spend hours creating content or reviewing a huge document, Jinny comes prepared.

She may write a draft script, create a storyboard, or prepare a rough visual and then ask very specific questions.

People tend to say yes when the ask is small.

That approach respects the SME’s time while still allowing them to contribute meaningfully to the learning experience.

“People stay engaged with a project when they can watch it moving.”

Long projects can lose momentum when stakeholders don’t see progress.

Jinny solves that by breaking projects into pieces that finish.

Every few weeks, there’s something tangible to share: a screenshot, a short walkthrough video, or a link to a working draft.

People stay engaged with a project when they can watch it moving.

It also changes the emotional experience of the project.

Instead of waiting months for one big launch, the team gets regular opportunities to celebrate progress.

Progress becomes visible. And when everyone can see that the project is moving forward, the sense of momentum is shared across the team.

“Turn traditional assessments into branching scenarios.”

One of Jinny’s most successful learning interventions started with something extremely familiar: a multiple-choice quiz at the end of a reading.

She changed the experience completely.

Instead of asking learners to select the correct answer, she placed them inside a scenario. Learners stepped into a role, made a judgment at each decision point, and then saw the consequence of that decision play out.

The assessment became a decision-making experience. And the impact was noticeable.

Engagement went up.

But what mattered even more to Jinny was what learners remembered afterward.

The part I appreciated most was hearing learners describe specific moments from the scenario well after they finished it.

For her, that’s one of the clearest signs that an experience worked. The learner didn’t simply complete the assessment. The learning stayed with them.

“Keep expanding your toolkit.”

Interactive learning is constantly evolving.

New authoring capabilities, AI tools, interaction patterns, and approaches to learner experience create more possibilities, but they also mean instructional designers have to keep learning themselves.

Jinny’s advice to her younger self is therefore simple:

Keep being curious. Keep expanding your toolkit.

But she pairs that curiosity with another piece of advice: take every assignment seriously, including the small ones.

Do the best possible work on whatever lands in front of you, including the small requests.

You never know which project, interaction, or seemingly minor request will create the opportunity for something bigger.

You have no way of knowing which one opens the next door.

“AI is fast. And the outputs look polished.”

AI has become part of Jinny’s daily workflow.

She uses it throughout the design process and has also created advanced AI-powered learning activities that allow learners to ask questions about what they don’t understand and receive personalized responses.

She’s also exploring vibe coding, which involves using natural-language prompts to generate code with AI, as a way to create interactive, realistic experiences that may be difficult or impossible to build in some traditional authoring tools.

But Jinny is careful about where AI fits into the process.

It accelerates my work and makes me far more productive, and the final say stays with a person using the AI.

That distinction is critical in learning design.

AI-generated content can look polished while still containing subtle inaccuracies. In a learning environment, those inaccuracies can undermine both the content and the learner experience.

So Jinny treats AI output as a starting point, not a finished product.

I treat every AI output as a draft I verify with a critical lens before it goes anywhere near a learner.

The technology can accelerate production. The instructional designer remains responsible for the learning.

“A learner who is fully blind had enrolled.”

Accessibility is a core requirement in learning design. Sometimes, an existing accessibility barrier requires urgent action.

Jinny faced exactly that situation when a learner who is fully blind enrolled in a course containing interactive activities that were inaccessible to screen reader users. The timeline was short, and a significant portion of the existing material needed remediation.

Her solution was to make a complex problem manageable.

First, she created a detailed AI prompt that guided the conversion of inaccessible activities into accessible alternatives while preserving the original learning objectives.

The goal wasn’t simply to make the interactions technically accessible. It was also to preserve the instructional intent behind them.

Then she organized a team of nine people into three working groups and created a tutorial video so everyone could follow the same process.

The result was a structured workflow that allowed the team to tackle a difficult remediation project without losing sight of the learning goals.

It’s another example of Jinny’s broader approach: when a project becomes complicated, break it down, standardize the process, and give people a clear way to contribute.

“Project management does more for me than keeping deadlines on track.”

With multiple projects moving at once, Jinny relies heavily on a project management system.

For her, it’s more than a productivity tool.

A long list of work feels heavy while it’s sitting in your head all at once, and the same list feels manageable once it’s broken into pieces with an order attached to them.

That distinction matters.

Instructional designers consider learners’ cognitive load — but they also have their own cognitive load to manage when too many tasks compete for attention.

By keeping projects and tasks in one place and establishing a clear order of priority, Jinny turns a potentially overwhelming workload into something she can carry.

So, project management does more for me than keeping deadlines on track. It keeps the work feeling like something I can carry, and that’s what protects me from burning out.

Designing interactions that matter

There’s a consistent idea behind Jinny’s work, whether she’s building a branching scenario, collaborating with an SME, remediating an inaccessible course, or experimenting with AI.

The interaction itself is never the point.

The point is what the interaction enables the learner to do.

A multiple-choice question can test recall. A branching scenario can ask learners to make a series of connected judgments.

An AI-powered activity can provide a generic explanation. Or it can address a learner’s specific knowledge gap.

An interactive experience can simply look impressive. Or it can help learners practice making the kinds of decisions they’ll need to make outside the course.

That distinction is what makes interactive learning meaningful.

Jinny’s first-place finish in the Scrollable Course category reflects that philosophy. Her winning work uses interactivity not simply to make learning more engaging, but to turn learners from passive recipients into active participants.

For Jinny, the goal isn’t to make learning more complicated. It’s to create experiences that give learners something worth remembering, practicing, and applying.

And sometimes, the best evidence that it worked is surprisingly simple: A learner remembers the decision they made long after the course is over.