How RCPI Built a Shared, Learner-Centred Design Approach Across Its Learning Team

The Royal College of Physicians of Ireland designs and delivers postgraduate and professional education for the medical profession spanning short CPD courses, full medical training programs, and professional diplomas. Janet leads the multidisciplinary Learning Innovation and Development team responsible for the quality, innovation, and scalability of that portfolio.

Since the pandemic, RCPI made a strategic shift toward digital learning scaling rapidly across more programs, more learners, and more stakeholders. Digital learning moved from a "nice to have" to core to the majority of the college's activity.

The team itself was strong and motivated, but came from a mix of different backgrounds, with no shared foundation for how they approached learning design. Working within a highly regulated healthcare and education environment raised the stakes further. What RCPI needed wasn't just new skills it was:

• Consistency in how learning experiences were designed

• Confidence for the team to challenge assumptions and advise stakeholders

• Credibility, internally and externally, that design decisions were grounded in evidence and best practice not instinct and tools

For Janet, DLI hit a specific sweet spot: academically robust, but practical; recognized, but flexible; and built for people already working full-time in the sector.

Its currency, credibility, and reputation were also a deciding factor important for a team operating in a highly regulated space where design decisions need to hold up to scrutiny.

Over time, RCPI sent several members of the Learning Innovation and Development team through a number of different DLI programs deliberately not as a one-off course, but as an ongoing capability investment.

The key to making it stick was intentionality. Janet's brief to team members was explicit: connect what you're learning directly to your development work. In practice, that meant:

• Projects redesigning existing learning journeys

• Projects embedding new design approaches

• Team members rethinking how they engaged learners in the experiences they were designing

Rather than treating the course and the day job as separate, RCPI created space for the team to bring their learning back into practice and to talk openly about what they were learning and applying during project meetings.

The partnership with the Digital Learning Institute led to:

• A more confident, deliberate team visible in how they talk to each other and to stakeholders

• More evidence-based decision-making, grounded in frameworks rather than instinct

• A consistent starting point for design conversations: learner and outcome first, tools and platforms later

• Stronger stakeholder engagement and more strategic conversations across programmes

• Clearer, more standardised learning journeys across RCPI's portfolio without curbing the team's creativity

• A team better equipped to navigate fast-moving change, including the emergence of AI in learning design, without losing sight of learning quality

• Practical: Learning was tied directly to live RCPI projects, not delivered in isolation from the job

• Flexible: Built for people already working full-time in the sector, fitting around real workloads

• Timely: The programme landed alongside RCPI's own internal transformation, so upskilling and organisational change moved together

• Shared: Multiple team members went through the training together over time, building a common language that made fast organisational change easier to navigate

• Recognised: A credible, respected qualification that gave the team's design decisions more weight, both internally and externally

Meet the team and hear how they applied what they learned to transform learning at Royal College of Physicians of Ireland.

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