What Instructional Designers Do - What Clients and Instructional Designers Need

Intro

I am essentially conducting my own personalized needs analysis relative to this project: Simply stated, I need to determine the tasks the average instructional designer completes most days and the tools and techniques they will utilize in order to complete them. Go back and read my first post if you would like to know what this is about.

Suppositions

Surely soliciting the feedback of other IDs would yield a more detailed result. However, I am operating under a couple of suppositions:

  1. Most IDs will tell me most organizations strongly prefer deliverables using only commercial ($$$) products.
  2. We currently have an orientation toward "edutainment." Style currently rules over substance in many settings.

 ID Overkill?

Anyone who is "classically" trained in ISD or worked in the field long enough knows as long as we follow "brain rules," and also soundly align the experiences, methods, and assessments to the learning objectives, the mediation of instruction should not matter. In the current eLearning era, we seem to care an awful lot about a Disney World approach (as I have often heard it described) to instructional development. I do not understand all the reasons for this, but I have three "hypotheses":

  • It might be somewhat novel for some learners and decision-makers. 
  • Certain eLearning packages are easy to enter (but hard to master).
  • The entry point to acquiring industry standard tools tends to be exclusionary while ID has many people coming from other professions looking to make a career change.
Is the current commercial approach to ID overkill? It is certainly overpriced. Is it more effective? Prior research suggests it is.

My Approach

I am attempting to go open source because I want to offer an approach the gets the job done reliably and professionally for tens rather than hundreds of dollars.

Toward that end, below is my initial list of production-level tasks. Much of the conceptual level tasks can be handled with any writing technology, including pencil and paper.

Much of my inspiration comes from the ID models with which I am most familiar:
  • Dick, W., Carey, L., & Carey, J. O. (2005). The systematic design of instruction.
  • Morrison, G. R., Ross, S. J., Morrison, J. R., & Kalman, H. K. (2019). Designing effective instruction. John Wiley & Sons.
Yes I am talking mainly about instructionalism, and there are many more approaches to education and even training. My academic and professional background is heavily steeped in systematically creating learning experiences through careful consideration and creation of instructional objectives and linking these cogently to activities, experiences, and assessments within an instructional unit or situation.

I hope that others may connect to my little project and offer other perspectives and approaches we can leverage to suggest low cost tools and techniques.

A question one of my mentors repeatedly asked me was, "How would you design instruction from this perspective?" This is a fundamental and powerful concept of our profession. We must often do our jobs considering what others feel is important, using tools and techniques with which we may not have high expertise.

Initial Task List

  • Communications
    • Email
    • Videoconference
  • Learning Management System considerations (much of this should be platform agnostic)
  • Metrics
  • Multimedia development
    • Audio recording/editing
    • Graphics editing
      • "Icons"
      • Raster
      • Vector
    • Presentation
    • Learner-control interfaces/functionalities
    • Video editing
  • Note-taking/documentation
  • Print publication
    • Conversion/Exporting
    • Pagination
    • Word processing
  • Storyboarding
  • Webpage development (fundamental)
I will add/refine this list as time allows. The point I suppose I am trying to make here is instructional develoment does not have to involve high cost applications. Creatitvity can flow from free or very low cost applications using proven approaches many wonderful scholars and action researchers have developed.

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