In this conversational video, Christopher Parsons and a co‑speaker discuss how Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) firms are redesigning their learning programs for the AI era, using Lionakis’s design‑technology bootcamp as a concrete example. The legacy program delivered 52‑54 hours of live, synchronous instruction to new design‑technology specialists. Christina Williams at Lionakis has begun converting this content into a hybrid, multimodal format: short, pre‑recorded micro‑segments (often 15‑20 minutes or less) that learners watch together, followed by live discussion or brief one‑on‑one meetings to reflect on AI policy, tool usage, and ideas. This approach enables learners to pause, replay, and revisit material at their own pace, improving recall and accessibility. By digitizing the content, the firm can leverage AI‑powered search on its intranet, allowing users to retrieve specific steps (e.g., adding users in Autodesk Construction Cloud/Forma) instantly. The speakers also highlight the strategic benefits of breaking courses into standalone video clips—mirroring TV production—so that updates affect only the relevant segment, reducing technical learning debt. Overall, the discussion underscores the need for upfront strategic planning, user‑centric design, and AI integration to create modern, flexible learning experiences that scale across AEC firms.
Chapters
The example that's coming to mind, and people are going to learn about what Christina Williams has been up to at Lionakis, you know, they'll hear about it through the podcast and webinars in K Connect this year, but she's taken a longstanding program, which is their design technology bootcamp, which was all live synchronous instruction. And over a number of, I think it's 52, 54 hours a year for new people who are going to be design technology specialists and be embedded in project teams to support the teams with Revit and all the other tools they're using. And so what Christina's been doing is, well, let's try and do some hybrid formats. How about the instruction-y part of this where I teach you what design options are or how to do Keynotes or how to do whatever the kind of the technique is? I can, instead of that taking me 30 to 35 minutes to teach you, if I'm efficient in making it prerecorded, maybe that's 18 minutes, maybe that's 20 minutes, and I can cut out some of the sidebar stuff and just simplify it down to the core things you need to know. What they're gonna do is watch that together as a group and then discuss it. Or, you know, we've seen— you and I were in some beta cohort calls yesterday where it's like, I want you to read our AI policy, right? I want you to watch this short video about how we're approaching AI tools, and then I want you through a link in here to book a 15-minute meeting in my schedule to talk about what you learned, what what your ideas are, how you think AI might help you. And so these like multimodal hybrid environment, like that's what I think a modern learning or experience looks like. It's not one size fits all. But the side benefit of that is that in the Lionakis example, sometimes people learn better if they can pause and they can go back, you know, or they can break it up into like, maybe it's a, maybe it's 18 minutes, but I just wanna pause this think, go get some coffee, come back, watch the next 9 minutes, make some notes, open up Revit, maybe try the thing, keep watching. And letting people go at their own pace is more accessible for more people. But it also means that I can go through the course and then 6 weeks later, 6 months later, and I don't remember how design options work, I can come back and rewatch it, right? It wasn't contingent on me being live with the instructor in the room. So it's also thinking about recall and retrieval. And then now that it's digitized, anybody at Lionakis who's trying to figure out design options, they just search, you know, on their intranet and AI search is going to pull them exactly the answers they need out of that course. So you've done a lot of things by digitizing this, both for the immediate experience of someone going through that learning program, but then also, you know, downstream and for others.
One of the things that actually came out of some of our work with Lionakis preparing for them sharing their story is thinking about that retrieval while you are building the course. And there was a specific example with Autodesk Construction Cloud, mm-hmm, slash Forma, where they were breaking out the courses and they're like, one of the things you're gonna have to do is add, you're creating your project in Forma, you have to do all these things, and then you have to add your users to the project. So instead of making the add users and project part of a broader video, they pulled that out as a separate lesson and separate video because they're like, that's a thing people are going to have to come back to a bunch of times probably. We need to make that recall really good. So they optimized for the recall of a specific step that they thought people would need to recall.
Yeah, it's almost like if you're producing Saturday Night Live or you're producing The Daily Show, you're thinking about it in terms of clips and segments. And those clips and segments are gonna be standalone videos on YouTube downstream. If you're thinking about your course that way, it's like these are key moments that will stand alone, but added up, they make a continuous experience. And I think again, that canonical hour-long thing, maybe, maybe it's an hour long because it wasn't as efficient it could have been. So maybe it's down to 45 minutes, but 45 minutes can still be the right length, but maybe it should be 9 5-minute segments or 5 9-minute segments or 3 15-minute segments. For exactly the reason that you're saying. In addition, it makes it easier to maintain that knowledge too. So if something changes that was in minute 37 of your hour-long thing, but you've got it broken down into a 9-minute segment, maybe you just have to replace that 9-minute thing, you know? And so you've got less of a technical learning debt that you're taking on. Yeah. Yeah. So this is, this is it, right? We're talking about modern learning or this is how you're thinking about this, right? You're thinking, long-term strategic value, working back, thinking about the needs of users, thinking about retrieval while you're thinking about the person that's gonna take it. Maybe they're gonna take it live, maybe they're gonna take it on demand. How does AI factor into letting people easily extract the piece they need? So you're thinking on multiple levels, which is, I think, getting back to the stress that you talked about at the very beginning. It's like, this is a huge opportunity. I don't wanna screw it up. Yeah. Yeah. So then it's also worth some more strategy upfront. Is kind of what we're talking about.
