How Do You Get Subject Matter Experts to Create eLearning?

Published 11 August 2026

The problem usually isn't that your SME won't make time. It's that "make a course" is a vague, open-ended ask handed to someone who has never designed one.

Key Findings

Chapman Alliance's 2010 benchmark study of 249 organisations found it takes an average of 79 development hours, across an entire team, to produce one finished hour of basic eLearning, and 43 hours to produce one finished hour of instructor-led training.
That benchmark measures a whole development team's time (instructional designers, writers, graphic artists, and SMEs combined), not the SME's time alone, and it predates AI-assisted authoring tools.
The "expert blind spot," a term defined by researchers Nathan, Koedinger, and Alibali in 2001, describes the documented tendency of subject matter experts to underestimate how difficult their own content is for a novice.
Experts are less able to describe their own thought process while performing a task within their area of expertise, a finding from cognitive research on expertise, which is why asking an SME to "just write it down" often produces content missing the steps they no longer notice themselves taking.
The instructional design layer exists specifically to compensate for the expert blind spot; removing that layer without replacing its function is what usually causes SME-authored courses to confuse novices.

Why Do SMEs Resist Creating eLearning Content?

It's rarely reluctance about the subject. It's usually one of four specific frictions.

The ask is open-ended. "Can you put together some training on X?" has no defined scope, format, or time budget, so it sits at the bottom of a busy person's list indefinitely.
The tools are unfamiliar. Authoring software built for instructional designers has a learning curve most SMEs have no reason to climb for a one-off task.
Writing for a course doesn't feel like their job. An engineer, nurse, or compliance officer is an expert in their field, not in instructional design, and being handed a course-building task can feel like being asked to do someone else's job on top of their own.
There's no fast path from what they know to a finished course. If the only route is "write a script, then wait for someone else to build it," the SME's actual expertise sits idle for weeks between their input and a usable result.

What's the Biggest Bottleneck in Turning SME Knowledge Into a Course?

It's translation, not motivation. An SME can explain a process perfectly to a colleague who already knows 80% of the context. The same explanation, handed to a new hire with no context, is missing the parts the expert stopped noticing years ago. This is the expert blind spot in practice: the inability to perceive which parts of a task are actually hard for someone encountering it for the first time.

The fix isn't asking the SME to try harder at empathy. It's structuring the extraction so it surfaces the missing context automatically.

How Do You Interview a Subject Matter Expert to Build a Training Module?

Ask them to walk through the task as if training a new hire's first day, not summarise it
Ask "what do people usually get wrong here?" before asking "what's the correct process?"
Ask for a real example they've seen go wrong, not a hypothetical one
Ask what a new starter needs to know in week one versus what can wait until month three
Record the conversation rather than asking them to write from a blank page
Ask them to name the two or three decisions where judgment matters most, not just the steps
Ask what "good" looks like in a way that could be observed, not just described
Ask what they wish someone had told them when they were new to the role
Confirm scope explicitly: what this module will and won't cover
Ask what existing materials (SOPs, decks, onboarding docs) already partially cover this

How Do You Turn an SME's Knowledge Into a Course Without Them Writing Anything?

The most reliable pattern is separating knowledge capture from course construction, and letting the SME only do the first.

Capture their knowledge as a conversation, recording, or existing document rather than a blank-page writing task
Extract the structure (what needs to be known, in what order) separately from the SME's own words
Build the course shell (screens, questions, sequencing) without requiring the SME to touch authoring software
Route the draft back to the SME for a single accuracy check, not a full edit
Keep the accuracy-check pass short and specific: "is this right?" not "does this read well?"

This is where AI-assisted authoring genuinely changes the Chapman Alliance math. That 2010 benchmark of 79 hours per finished hour of eLearning reflects a process where a human writer, a human instructional designer, and a human graphic artist each touch the content in sequence. Converting an SME's notes, recording, or existing SOP directly into a structured course shell removes several of those sequential handoffs, though we don't have a directly comparable modern benchmark study to cite a specific new ratio.

SME-Led vs. Instructional-Designer-Led vs. AI-Assisted Course Creation

Approach	SME time required	Main risk	Best fit
SME writes the course directly	High — full authoring, not just content	Expert blind spot: content misses novice-level context	Rare; only when the SME has genuine instructional design skill
SME briefs an instructional designer, ID builds it	Moderate — interviews plus review rounds	Slow; content quality depends on ID's domain understanding	Complex, high-stakes courses (safety-critical, regulatory)
SME provides source material, AI-assisted tool structures it	Low — one conversation or document plus a review pass	Structure may need adjustment for genuinely novel content	Most internal training: onboarding, process, product knowledge

How Do You Get Better Value From an SME's Limited Time?

Book one structured session, not an open-ended request. A scheduled 45-minute interview produces more usable material than an unscheduled "whenever you get a chance."
Bring existing material to the conversation. If an SOP, deck, or onboarding doc already exists, use it as the starting point and ask the SME to correct and extend it, not start from zero.
Separate "what's true" from "how it's presented." Ask the SME to validate accuracy; don't ask them to also judge pacing, screen design, or question wording unless they want to.
Keep the review loop to one pass. Multiple rounds of "can you also check this version" is what makes SMEs dread the next request.

FAQ

Why do SMEs resist creating eLearning content?

Usually because the request is open-ended, the tools are unfamiliar, and the work doesn't feel like part of their actual job. It's rarely about the subject matter itself.

What questions should you ask an SME before building a course?

Start with what a brand-new hire needs to know in week one, what people commonly get wrong, and a real example of a mistake they've seen. These surface the context an expert usually forgets to mention.

How much time should an SME expect to spend on one training module?

There's no reliable modern benchmark specific to SME time alone. The most-cited historical figure, from Chapman Alliance's 2010 study, is 79 development hours across an entire team per finished hour of basic eLearning, not SME hours specifically, and that figure predates AI-assisted authoring.

Can AI turn a subject matter expert's notes into a finished course?

AI-assisted authoring can convert an SME's existing notes, recording, or SOP into a structured course draft, which the SME then reviews for accuracy. This removes several of the sequential handoffs that made traditional development slow, though the SME's review and correction step still matters.

What is the "expert blind spot"?

A term from a 2001 study by researchers Nathan, Koedinger, and Alibali, describing the documented tendency of subject matter experts to underestimate how difficult their own content is for someone encountering it for the first time.

Where SME-Led Content Still Falls Short

Even with a good extraction process, an SME's account of "how it's done" and the actual, observed way work happens on the floor sometimes diverge. SMEs describe the official process; new hires learn the informal shortcuts from colleagues within their first week regardless of what the course says. No interview technique fully closes that gap. Pairing SME interviews with direct observation, where the task allows it, catches what conversation alone won't.

Want to see how source material turns into a structured course draft? Start free.