Instructional Design Conversations
I’ve been following a couple blogs lately regarding the role of instructional designers, more specifically, how individuals come to call themselves instructional designers. It all started with Cammy’s post, “Who Gets to Be Called an Instructional Designer?”. I then followed some jumps to Karl’s response and Clark’s response, which stressed the importance of formal degrees and/or a wide range of background knowledge necessary to successfully practice instructional design. While I agree with both posts…there’s still elements of instructional design I find lacking (and this is coming from someone with a Master’s degree in the field).
After practicing ID for nearly 10 years now after my degree, I rarely call myself an instructional designer, but simply a “designer”. Why? I think part of it was my Masters experience at Bloomsburg, which was coupled with a lot of elearning design, which continues here at Penn State. Instructional design provides a great viewpoint into certain aspects of learning, but seems to lack emphasis on things like:
- HCI and user interfaces - create the best learning experience, but put a poor interface on top of it, and you lose the majority of your audience.
- Motivation - some models take this into account, but it’s almost never emphasized enough. Both from the standpoint of what the learner’s initial motivations might be, plus how I can build on these motivations or create new motivations.
- Engagement - instructional design seems to place little emphasis on how to actually engage the learner with the materials at hand. Objectives, examples, scaffolding, and other elements that often guide the design process do a very poor job of creating an engaging learning experience.
- Cognitive psychology - as Clark points out, a the foundations of ID are partially built on early psychology work related to learning. A colleague of mine with a PhD in learning sciences points this out as THE pitfall of most ID programs. We do a poor job of understanding the psychology of learning, particularly the context of the learning environment.
I still believe ID is extremely valuable on any project related to learning. But I’ve dealt with instructional designers who have Masters or PhDs and want to follow some ID model to a “T” for every project, and if we don’t follow the models to a “T”, it’s not good instructional design. I think this is at the heart of the point Cammy wanted to make: we need a much better balance between theory and practice in the field.
I could bend this into a game-related post, but that would take up another 5 paragraphs. Marc Prensky often muses that “game designers make better instructional designers than someone with an instructional design degree”. I don’t agree with Marc, but on some fronts, I find this very true.
I would tend to agree with you. Many times the people with many ID degrees in their pockets have lost touch with the reality of the classroom or the “instructional back room” and look at ID as much as a campaign for theory X as much as a way to learn. This is to me where many of the cookie cutter designers fall. I think those of us who have come through a traditional education background do much better with the people we work with compared to those without that connection. Personally, I find the psychology parts of my education far more useful than the rest. More often than not, I’m coaching instructors through taking “risks” as opposed to designing anything.
Personally, I still use the term as it tends to help those I work with understand a bit better what I do.
I agree that in the current environment, standard ISD does not produce the requisite content to bring elearning to life.
Years and years ago, when I was taking my degree, my instructor made a comment that stayed with me and made it all seem so easy. He said standard training is needed for those skills that your student could not do even if his life depended on it, and in those instances, you better figure out a way to make sure he learned it, especially when his or others lives did depend on it. The rest he tended to characterize as coaching,guiding, motivating, etc.
Now as a person who never, ever enjoyed the standard classroom experience, I have always been enthralled with alternative learning. I can remember asking my mom as a kid why school could not be on TV like Romper Room. I loved gaming since PONG, and as an ID and Econtent specialist for the Navy, I am getting to work with simulators for young sailors and it is incredible, but challenging to bring the instructors on board.
All this said, I just completed an elearning project where we had a lead ID who was so concerned with all the framework and documentation, she forgot that we were supposed to be engaging 19 year old men and women. I was in constant conflict, both on ID principles and content development, because we were designing to meet the letter of the contract and not the needs of the students.