Paper cards and design canvases are valuable tools for visualising learning experiences, supporting collaboration, and facilitating ideation. However, while they are excellent for mapping initial concepts, they lack the structured workflows, scalability, and digital integration required to fully develop learning content. This comparison explores their strengths and limitations, illustrating how Coursensu provides a seamless transition from ideation to fully realised learning designs.
Paper-based tools help teams visualise the flow of learning activities and key moments in the learner journey. However, they do not support the progression from concept to complete learning design, leaving gaps that must be completed elsewhere. in your learning design process.
While useful for structuring high-level learning sequences, these tools do not facilitate the creation of fully detailed storyboards, content resources, or assessment plans. This results in an incomplete design process that requires additional work to help your designs, and content, reach the right level of maturity to use with learners.
Paper-based approaches exist separately from your design documents, learning management system (LMS) and other digital tools, requiring manual transcription of ideas into other formats. This process is time-consuming, error-prone, and inefficient.
For a workshop, design cards or a canvas can ignite ideas to kick-start a learning design. Physical artefacts lack the support for remote collaboration or version tracking. Once the initial session ends, capturing, sharing, and iterating on designs becomes difficult, often requiring photos, notes, or another platform in which to place the contents of your cards / canvas.
There is no built-in structure for progressing from ideation to validation, review, or approval with paper cards. They can be torn up, or scribbled over - but this gets messy. This can be an asset for a workshop, but once that session has concluded you'll start to finalise ideation and move into refinement and content production. Teams can manually transfer information into a more structured format to continue development, increasing administrative overhead, but this does make the most of the workshop time you have together.
Each use of a paper-based tool is ephemeral - designs must be manually documented and recreated for future use. Unlike digital systems, there is no efficient way to retrieve, adapt, or reuse previous work without duplication of effort. Photos can help, but they are rarely useful for future re-use and instead tend to serve as a memory, or visual artefact to show the educator's design journey.
Paper-based tools, and design canvases, are very limited when it comes to AI-driven insights, automated structuring, or content recommendations. They score highly in terms of human engagement, which is their strength, but you'll need to transcribe them into another platform before using AI to help support your learning design process.
We are firm believers in the power of design cards, or a canvas, for ideation. We provide a free set of design cards for you to run learning design sessions. However, we also note the limitations above can be challenging for remote teams and those who need to work with digital-first formats.
Coursensu enhances and extends the value of paper-based ideation by providing a structured, scalable, and approach to learning design - from ideation through to contend production.
By moving from paper-based ideation to Coursensu, learning designers and educators can maintain creative collaboration while ensuring their ideas evolve into fully developed, structured, and scalable learning experiences.
Check out the comparison table below, sign up for a trial, or reach out for a demo.
Definition: For paper cards we refer to any paper, card and canvas based learning design systems. These tend to use either physical paper cards, digital shapes or single-sided documents for learning design. (For example Carpe Diem, LX Jam, ABC, Instructional or Learning Design Canvas and many more.)
Yes, anyone can start a one month, risk-free trial. This gives you access to all the features to get started. You can invite others into your team space, to evaluate together. You'll have access to the collection of learning strategies and can always export your designs in common formats.
Yes. Your existing paper cards may be a great start to get ideas and conversations initiated. After a workshop or two, you will benefit from moving into Coursensu to finalise the design and move towards production-readiness.
It will vary, depending on your exact card format. Generally speaking, you'll have to re-type your cards out. While doing this, use your cards to start adding the topics, approaches and technologies. Your cards may also contain extras such as user need analysis which we currently do not support. This means cards can make a good Coursensu companion.
No, and this is intentional. There are a lot of single-sided design canvas approaches that learning designers use. They all tend to have the same underlying components and the research we conducted for the Learning Designer (especially our Storyboard view) ensures high compatibility with most learning design canvases.
We help you structure learning activities, align with learning outcomes and collaborate with subject experts to create learning experiences in any format and for any platform.
