Community Guidelines

The eLearning Designer's Academy is a place for eLearning and instructional design professionals to learn, share, grow, and support one another.

Whether you're just getting started or have years of experience, we're glad you're here. These guidelines exist to keep this community positive, respectful, and productive. Please take a moment to review and follow these guidelines.

1Be Kind & Professional

Treat others with respect, curiosity, and empathy. We come from different backgrounds, industries, and experience levels. Healthy discussion is encouraged, but personal attacks, harassment, discrimination, or disrespectful behavior will not be tolerated.

2Share, Don't Just Consume

The strongest communities are built on participation. Ask questions. Share your work. Celebrate your wins. Offer encouragement. Give feedback when you can. If you're requesting feedback, try to support others by offering feedback on their work as well.

3Add Value First

We love seeing what members create and accomplish. Sharing your work, portfolio pieces, articles, videos, tools, or resources is welcome when it's relevant and genuinely helpful to the conversation. When in doubt, focus on contributing value first.

4What Is Encouraged

• Share full ideas, frameworks, or stories directly in your post
• Share original thoughts, frameworks, or behind-the-scenes lessons
• Add relevant links that directly support a discussion or answer a question
• Share feedback, ideas, and discussions constructively
• Stay on-topic in discussion threads, and start new threads for different topics
• Encourage others and celebrate each other's successes
• Like or react to posts you find helpful to encourage a positive atmosphere

5What Isn't Allowed

• Do not spam
• Do not use mass-produced or copy-paste replies across multiple posts
• No self-promotion
• Do not post solely to generate leads, subscribers, sales, or traffic
• Do not repost content from LinkedIn, email, or blogs just to link out
• No unsolicited pitches, promotional messages, or repeated direct messages without a clear reason for reaching out
• Do not share partial insights to push readers toward your site, blog, or any other external page
• Please don't use the community to recruit participants for surveys, academic research, interviews, usability testing, beta testing, or other research projects.
• Do not use the community for market research, customer discovery, or to gather information to develop or promote your own products, services, businesses, or communities.
• Do not use posts or comments to solicit private coaching sessions, video calls, or off-platform contact through personal email addresses.

6Respect Privacy & Intellectual Property

Please respect the privacy, work, and intellectual property of The eLearning Designer's Academy, Tim Slade, and fellow community members.

• Do not share private conversations, member posts, screenshots, project files, feedback, or community discussions outside of this community without permission.
• Do not redistribute, copy, resell, repost, or repurpose any content, resources, templates, examples, lessons, videos, downloads, or materials provided inside The eLearning Designer's Academy unless you have explicit permission to do so.
• Do not share anyone's nonpublic personal information (including names, screenshots, messages, project details, or anything shared here) outside of this community without their explicit permission.
• Only share content you own, have permission to share, or are allowed to use under the appropriate license.
• Give proper credit when referencing someone else's work, ideas, examples, or resources.
• Do not use this platform to dox, extort, harass, impersonate, or spread false and disparaging rumors about others.
• Do not create graphics, promotional materials, or other content that uses The eLearning Designer's Academy branding, Tim Slade's likeness, or other Academy assets in a way that could be mistaken for official Academy content or endorsements without explicit permission.

We want members to feel safe sharing questions, work-in-progress projects, feedback, and ideas here. Please treat what is shared inside the community with care and respect.

7Keep It Safe & Inclusive

Everyone deserves to feel welcome here. Do not post content that is:

• Harassing, hateful, threatening, or discriminatory
• Sexually explicit
• Offensive or intentionally disruptive
• Illegal or in violation of another person's rights

Do not post or transmit any file that contains viruses, corrupted files, "Trojan Horses," or any other contaminating or destructive features that may damage someone else's computer.

Anti-Intolerance

The eLearning Designer's Academy stands against all forms of dehumanizing or unlawful treatment of others. Including but not limited to all forms of cyberbullying, cyber-harassment, hate speech, or threats based on their age, race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, caste, sexual orientation, sex, gender, gender identity, disability, or immigration status.

8What Happens If Someone Breaks the Rules?

If a post, comment, or message goes against these guidelines, we may remove it without warning, especially if it is clearly promotional, harmful, spammy, or disruptive.

In many cases, we'll reach out with a friendly heads-up the first time. If the behavior continues, we may send an additional reminder or take further action.

Repeated violations, unsolicited pitching, spam, harassment, or behavior that disrupts the community may result in removal from The eLearning Designer's Academy.

Violations of our anti-intolerance policy, threats, harassment, doxxing, or other serious harmful behavior may result in an immediate ban. If you believe someone has violated these guidelines or you have questions about what is allowed, please email Tim Slade at tim@elearningacademy.io.