The Direction of Instructional Design

I read the Article Do You Need an Instructional Design Degree and was a little dismayed that the sentiment from many including the author was no. I believe the demand is growing for instructional designers, what I think is driving this sentiment, is that instructional design has moved from a career path most commonly found in the educational sector and moved into the corporate world.

While the academic world is slower to adjust to expansion into online learning, corporation and for-profit educational institutes are not (Bates, 2011). These organizations work on business models and are trying to generate profit. The entire notion of rapid e-learning is driven from the business world, time is money. Cheap and fast is what corporate America wants.

I have been in the field for nearly 15 years now and what I have found over time is that corporations don't want instructional designers, they want Flash developers and people with skills with Captivate and Presenter, who can rapidly dump content into programs like Captivate and get a course developed. Unfortunately the job postings for these positions are called Instructional Designers or ELearning Specialists, which in all actuality they are not.

Bates, in his article 2011 Outlook for Online ELearning and Distance Education lists, as one of the barriers to distance education, poor quality offerings. With the advent of great tools for easy media development, the quality of most online learning is still poor, but it is convenient so people will continue to access these types of learning opportunities. Flooding the market with individuals that lack prerequisite knowledge of learning theory, instructional strategies, assessment techniques, principles of multimedia design, cognitive load theory and adult learning theory to design these courses is not helping the situation. Simply because someone can use the tools does not mean that they can design learning experiences that allow for the building of new knowledge by the learner. The technology is being placed before the pedagogy.

I think a better model to adopt is to have a design team, which includes an instructional designer, PLUS media developers at a minimum. At the end of the day instructional designers are not Flash experts, videographers, or Captivate gurus (although some may have the skills), and likewise those techosavvy masters are not Instructional Designers, so don't try to combine the two into one. It is doing the field of online education no good. Instead build a team, it can be a team of two, a designer and a media developer and then marvel at what they can build.

Moving Learning Design Forward

I constantly read about new design ideas, new technologies and the implementation of social media into education. However, at least in part of the world, I rarely find more than text based online courses, that primarily point to course readings with discussion forums time and time again at a post-secondary level.

Working in this world I find faculty very reluctant to move outside of their comfort zone and explore new approaches to learning. Even though we can reassure faculty that their time commitment does not need to be extensive I find that the advances in technology themselves are overwhelming for most.

What are the BIG ideas in e-learning we need to get faculty to embrace?

1, I think we need to have them view technology as not a different way to teach but a way to
teach learners in a manner that could not otherwise by reached in the classroom. What can e-learning provide that classroom instruction cannot? Often as instructional designers I don't think we present e-learning in this manner to instructors.

2. Teaching in the classroom is different than teaching online. Not all good classroom strategies work well online.

3. Multimodal learning. One of the greatest selling features of e-learning is that we can present the same content using different learning paths.

4. When planning instruction consider:

• How will the students interact with other students
• How will the students interact with the instructor
• How will the students interact with the content

5. In e-learning there needs to be a movement for passive learning to active learning. Student engagement is important to e-learning success.