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.