Where Instructional Designers Can Get Honest Feedback on Their Work

It’s difficult to judge instructional design objectively when you’re inside the project. After hours of shaping the structure, rewriting screens, and fixing interactions, you already know what everything is supposed to mean. A peer sees the project from the learner’s or hiring manager’s perspective. They might notice the confusing instruction, the unclear explanation of design decisions, or the decision path that only makes sense to its author.

Whether you’re polishing a résumé, building your portfolio, or reviewing a live course, external feedback can save you from presenting work that feels finished but still has obvious gaps. Below are the best ways to get quality ID feedback that will help you improve your projects and grow as an instructional designer.

Start with the question, not the platform

Before posting your work anywhere, decide what you need to have reviewed.

“Can someone give me feedback?” shifts too much of the burden onto the reviewer. They have to inspect the entire project, guess where you might have doubts, and decide which standards to apply. Many people will scroll past or leave a broad comment that doesn’t help you make any decisions.

A focused request is easier to answer:

• Does the opening of this portfolio case study explain the business problem clearly?
• Do these answer options feel believable, or is the correct one too obvious?
• Can you understand the navigation without additional instructions?
• Does this résumé show enough evidence of analysis and stakeholder work?
• Where did you lose interest or feel unsure about what to do next?

You can still invite general observations, but give reviewers two or three areas to concentrate on. Mention the intended audience, the project goal, and any constraints you had to work around. 

Reddit: useful when you’re ready for direct answers

Reddit can be one of the best places to get unfiltered feedback from people outside your immediate professional circle.

The r/instructionaldesign community regularly discusses portfolios, career transitions, authoring tools, learning strategy, and day-to-day project challenges. It also has specific moderation rules for portfolio, capstone, and feedback requests, which are currently published on Wednesdays. Check the rules before posting so your request doesn’t disappear into the moderation queue at the wrong time.

Reddit works especially well when you want reactions from people who don’t know you and have no reason to soften their opinion. However, the quality of responses will vary. Look for patterns and don’t treat every comment as an instruction. 

Facebook groups: better for ongoing conversations

Facebook still hosts a number of active communities for instructional designers, eLearning developers, freelancers, and learning experience designers. You can look up these groups and join them to discuss careers, tools, projects, and professional questions.

The format suits feedback that develops through conversation. You can post screenshots, explain the situation, answer follow-up questions, and return later with a revised version. Some groups also run portfolio threads, critique sessions, or recurring opportunities to share work.

Spend a little time observing before you post. One group may be heavily focused on people entering the field, while another attracts experienced freelancers or corporate L&D professionals. A résumé aimed at a university role may receive much better feedback in one community than in a group built around freelance course development.

LinkedIn: ask the people whose perspective you actually need

LinkedIn gives you more control over who sees your request. You can approach peers whose experience matches the project instead of publishing a general appeal to your entire network. 

For example: 

• A learning manager can review how clearly you connect the project to business outcomes.
• An eLearning developer can test the interaction and flag technical issues.
• A recruiter or hiring manager can tell you whether your portfolio makes your contribution easy to understand.
• A fellow ID can look at the learning logic.

You can also use dedicated communities like the iSpring Learning Exchange, a global LinkedIn community for L&D and instructional design professionals. Members discuss career development, instructional design, tools, learning strategy, and real project challenges. 

LinkedIn requests tend to work best when you share a small, reviewable piece rather than dropping a link to an entire course. Post one scenario screen, a short portfolio section, or a specific design decision. Explain what you tried and where you’re uncertain. 

Course contests: structured feedback with real stakes

Entering a course contest changes the way you look at your own work. You’re no longer finishing a project only for a client, manager, or portfolio. You’re preparing it to be seen alongside other designers’ work and assessed against shared criteria.

This process alone can reveal many weak spots in your approach. You start asking whether: 

• The objective is clear
• Each interaction earns its place
• An unfamiliar reviewer can understand the course without hearing your explanation first

Seeing other entries can also expand your sense of what’s possible far more quickly than reviewing templates in isolation.

For instance, the iSpring Course Creation Contest allows instructional designers, L&D professionals, educators, and course creators to showcase their projects to an international audience and have their work seen by industry experts and peers. Participants also get access to iSpring tools during the contest period. You can learn more about the format and previous entries in the iSpring Course Creation Contest 2026 overview.

Vendor communities: go where people know the tool

When your question is tied to a specific authoring tool, its user community may be more helpful than a general ID forum.

Vendor communities bring together people who understand the platform’s capabilities, limitations, and less obvious workarounds. They can tell you whether an interaction is difficult because of your design or because you’re approaching the tool in an unnecessarily complicated way.

Almost all major eLearning vendors run LinkedIn groups, customer communities, academies, webinars, and user events where participants can share work and talk directly with experienced users.

These spaces are particularly useful for questions such as:

• Is there a simpler way to build this interaction?
• How can I make this course more accessible in this tool?
• What’s causing this publishing or tracking issue?
• How would another developer organize this branching structure?

Remember: don’t limit every conversation to software. Use vendor communities for tool-specific insight, then ask a broader group to review the experience from the learner’s perspective.

Make feedback a fair exchange

The best source of feedback is rarely a single giant community. It’s a small circle of peers who understand your work, challenge your assumptions, and trust you to do the same for them.

Start by reviewing other people’s projects. Be specific, respectful, and honest: 

• Mention what worked before pointing to what was unclear.
• Ask questions instead of redesigning the entire project around your preferences.

Over time, you’ll find people whose judgment you value and who understand enough about your goals to give much sharper advice.

You don’t need to implement every suggestion. Your job is to look for recurring issues, weigh comments against the project’s goals, and decide what genuinely improves the experience.

The earlier you make that process part of your work, the less likely you are to discover major problems after the course has launched or after a hiring manager has already made a decision about your portfolio.