<div> The Fay Institute Learning Framework (FILF): </div> <div>  A Practitioner-developed Instructional Design Framework for AI-powered Educator Course Creation in East African Contexts </div>

This paper presents the Fay Institute Learning Framework (FILF), a practitioner-developed instructional design framework for online course creation in resource-constrained East African professional education contexts. FILF responds to a synthesis gap in the instructional design literature: while Constructive Alignment, the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework, ADDIE, Bloom's revised taxonomy, the Successive Approximation Model (SAM), and Laurillard's Conversational Framework each address distinct dimensions of effective online learning design, no existing framework integrates these six traditions into a single, practitioner-facing model for non-specialist educators operating without formal instructional design training or institutional support. 

FILF was developed through a six-month Design-Based Research (DBR) pilot conducted between January and June 2025, with nine Kenyan professional educators from diverse backgrounds, including corporate training, NGO education, digital marketing, instructional design, and artisan education, using the Microsoft 365 ecosystem as the authoring environment. Data were collected from training logs, digital artefacts, community and communication records, a structured Community Engagement Report, and weekly researcher field notes, and analysed through thematic coding supplemented by descriptive statistics. 

Four core educator needs emerged: accessible and low-friction authoring tools, differentiated scaffolding calibrated to prior digital literacy, modular and flexible pacing for time-poor professionals, and continuous feedback loops to sustain motivation. These findings yielded five empirically derived design principles governing platform operationalisation (DP1 to DP5) and four core pedagogical principles, namely progressive learning, active engagement, community learning, and immediate feedback, governing FILF's three-phase structure: Introduction, Learning Units (repeating cycle), and Synthesis.

FILF makes three contributions to the scholarly literature. First, it demonstrates that practitioner-developed synthesis frameworks are a legitimate and necessary category of instructional design scholarship. Second, it advances the Learning Engineering tradition's agenda in a Global South context the field has rarely addressed. Third, it provides the first documented instance of a practitioner-developed pedagogical framework being natively embedded in an AI-powered authoring platform (FayEDU), establishing a proof of concept for platform-embedded pedagogy as a scalable, equitable response to the instructional design accessibility gap facing professional educators across Sub-Saharan Africa.