Behind the Design: Bringing Telehealth Training to Coursera

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The Duke Learning Experience (LX) Design team recently launched a new series of seven Coursera courses on telehealth, designed to help healthcare professionals build timely and essential skills. These courses, developed in collaboration with Duke School of Medicine instructors, provide flexible learning pathways that expand access to patient care knowledge and support the growing demand for telehealth expertise.

A Project That Started with Pandemic Innovation

The roots of this effort go back to Spring 2021, when LILE (known as Duke Learning Innovation at the time) launched its Carry the Innovation Forward program. The initiative was designed to extend the best teaching innovations that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic into sustainable long-term practices. Among the projects selected for support was an effort led by Daniel Ostrovsky, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics, and Kathleen Waite, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine, to create telehealth training modules for health professions students.

Just as instructors at Duke had been asked to rapidly adapt their teaching for remote delivery in 2020, many clinicians with no prior telehealth experience were suddenly expected to care for patients online. Ostrovsky and Waite saw this shift not as a stopgap, but as an innovation worth investing in.

Scaling Up with Market Research

Fast-forward two years: the LX Design team saw both the potential and the gap in the global learning landscape. While the telehealth modules already existed in Duke’s Playposit platform, there was little telehealth training available on Coursera, one of the largest platforms for professional learning.

Market research confirmed the opportunity: over the past five years, employers had posted more than 114,000 nursing jobs and 48,000 physician and physician assistant jobs that required telehealth skills, and the need was growing steadily—about 6–9% annually.

Armed with this data, the LX Design team proposed bringing the modules to Coursera, positioning themselves not just as support partners, but as project owners. This shift gave them the autonomy to define timelines, budgets, and processes with clarity.

Designing Under Constraints

The instructors had limited availability, Duke medical students needed access to the courses by the start of the upcoming semester, and to thrive on Coursera the original modules needed restructuring, new assessments, and additional context. To help them tackle this project in the face of these constraints, the team piloted the use of generative AI for assessment design – but carefully.

“While GenAI did speed up our work, we used it with a specific process,” said Hannah Rogers, Learning Experience Designer. “As an internal team, we began by discussing how to use AI through a values-centric process and how we could ensure we were following through with our ideals. We also collaborated with the instructors on this process and provided transparency into what we were doing.”

Other tactics that sped up the team’s process were using a project charter to establish expectations early, creating and using templates, meaningfully engaging with the 80/20 rule in terms of both design and project management, and developing a review process with the instructors that worked on their schedules.

The results were striking. The project launched on time, came in 52% under the original effort budget, and offered learners a set of courses that felt cohesive and learner-centered.

Flexible Learning Pathways

The courses were designed with flexibility in mind. Learners can enroll in individual courses, or pursue one of five specialization tracks. Each specialization begins with Telehealth Clinical Essentials, continues with Telehealth: Interprofessional Team-Based Care, and culminates in an exam course tailored to a specific professional area. This structure allows learners to pursue targeted skills or work toward a specialization certificate, aligning with their professional goals.

The full five specializations are:

Early Impact and Future Directions

Launched in August, the courses have already drawn over 370 enrollments. The instructor team is collecting survey data, while the LX Design team is studying Coursera feedback and learner sentiment surveys to guide improvements to both to the courses themselves and to future design processes.

“We wanted to understand more about the continuing education landscape at Duke, and in the future we hope to use this set of courses to test workflows with Duke’s existing continuing medical education infrastructure. In this way, we hope to continually increase the value proposition for our learners in the courses we create,” said Michael Hudson, Learning Experience Designer.

Lessons Learned

Reflecting on the project, the LX team identified three key takeaways:

  1. Efficiency with integrity – High-quality design work can be achieved on lean budgets with thoughtful processes.
  2. Responsible use of AI – GenAI tools can increase efficiency when integrated through a values-driven and transparent approach.
  3. Learner-centered design – Understanding learner needs and creating accountability mechanisms remain at the heart of successful projects.

In a landscape where healthcare and education are both evolving rapidly, the telehealth project demonstrates what happens when instructional designers don’t just respond to needs, but anticipate them. By pairing market insight with creative, learner-centered design, the LX Design team has built a resource that expands access, strengthens professional skills, and reflects Duke’s commitment to innovation in lifelong education.

Generative AI transparency statement: This story was originally drafted using ChatGPT 5 and then revised and edited by Blythe Tyrone with contributions by Hannah Rogers.