Instructional Designers with Degrees: Latest Survey Results

Since I last reported the results of the survey asking practicing instructional designers if they have an advanced degree in ID, the picture has shifted slightly.

As of today, 86 instructional designers have responded to the survey: Do You Have a Degree in ID?

About 35% of instructional designers have an advanced degree in ID. And 65% of us don't.

As reported earlier, there continues to be a wide range of backgrounds for IDers, mostly in the liberal arts.

View the latest survey results here.

Instructional Designer as Consultant?

With the rise of rapid eLearning tools and the ease with which virtually anyone can now create a course, what's changing for the instructional designer?

Consider this part two of my response to the Learning Circuits Big Question for February: Instructional Design - If, When and How Much?

(See part one: Instructional Design as a Spectrum)

In eLearning Magazine's predictions for 2008, Patti Shank said this:

Learning content, activity, and assessment authoring tools continue to improve. There are great tools with a short learning curve (for example, Adobe Captivate and Articulate Presenter) and tools with a longer learning curve that are really excellent (for example, Lectora, and Flashform). Savvy instructional designers are starting to realize that they cannot be involved in the development of all instructional content in their organizations. Designers are beginning to help others author content and that should leave the more complex projects, where quality of instruction and assurance of skills is needed, in the hands of capable instructional designers. One oh-so-hopeful prediction: Instructional design programs will begin teaching instructional designers to write. Why this critical skill isn't considered a must-have has me scratching my head.

—Patti Shank, President, Learning Peaks LLC, USA

Instructional Designer as Consultant

Are we seeing this happen? Are "instructional designers" of the experienced/trained in ID sort, providing more consulting expertise to the lower-tier of instructional designers (a.k.a. SMEs using rapid eLearning tools)?

Clive Shepherd thinks so. And thus the 60-Minute Masters: a crash course created by an instructional designer to teach SMEs the basics of instructional design.

Tom Kuhlman is certainly providing this expertise to the Articulate user community and beyond with his Rapid E-Learning Blog.

Laura from Canada sees an increasing call for IDs as "instructional consultants." In her comments on The Value of Instructional Designers, she observes:

Just wanted to add that I think the role of the ID, as seen in Canada at least, seems to be one of instructional consultant. This is from the numerous job posts (mostly medium size organizations) where they are asking for instructional designers who can assess the learning needs of the company and deliver the right training solutions in a blended format. Basically, they want an 'expert' to tell them how and what to train. There seems to be a mix between contract and full time positions, and I'm not sure how to read into that. I've worked as a technical writer for a long time and am seeing a drop in that area and an increase in instructional designers.

I don't know how to interpret this, nor are my findings indicative of any official status in IDs.

Is this what's happening? Are designers beginning to help others author content? Are IDs starting to serve the role of consultant more than the role of creator?

Personally, I am starting to see a bit of a demand for this. One of the products that my company creates are Flash based eLearning templates. We customize them for each client, based on the instructional design approach that organization is taking, look and feel, etc. What we're finding now is that our clients' "IDs" often have little to no ID experience and need help figuring out how to make the best use of this great tool we've built for them.

Is this a standard part of the package now for most rapid eLearning tool companies? Is this rolled right into the product or is that consulting expertise considered extra?

The Big Question: Instructional Design as a Spectrum

The Learning Circuits Big Question this month: Instructional Design - If, When and How Much?

My response here is not so much an answer to this question, but rather, further musings on this endless topic that I've been rambling on about of late.

Shades of Instructional Design

What if we leave the labels aside for a moment. What if we say that everyone who creates instruction is an instructional designer.

Different tools; different projects; different expertise. Some instructional designers are trained in ID; some are subject matter experts who've been assigned a training project or see a training need.

Of course, there may be and there are many variations in the quality of instruction that result.

But one could argue that some SMEs may and do have a natural flair for the art of instructional design (Rupa's post on ID as art; Donald Clark's post).

Some instructional designers, with a Master's Degree and all, may have no natural flair and may design poor instruction.

Many instructional designers find their way into this job rather randomly. Look at our survey results. Look at my own path to instructional design.

I'm wondering if we should be talking about tiers of instructional design. Of course, this is all semantics, and maybe it doesn't matter. But maybe it does.

Some instructional designers:

• Design self-paced eLearning. PowerPoints on steroids.
• Create complex simulations and games.
• Work with 3D tools like Second Life.
• Use web 2.0 technologies to design collaborative, just-in-time training experiences.
  
• Look at organizations' structures and define strategy.
  
• Craft distance learning events for college credit that pull together elements of both asynchronous and synchronous learning experiences.
• Create online learning experiences for use in K-12 classrooms.
  

We're all still instructional designers. But the shades are many.

I pick purple. What color are you?

Photo: chalk by frumbert

Online Schooling for the K-12 Set

It's not homeschooling, it's online schooling. And it's increasingly being funded as part of the U.S. public school system.

This hasn't gotten onto my radar before -- I'm not sure if there are any state-funded online programs in Massachusetts. Or maybe it's just that my kids haven't gotten to that age yet.

See the article in the New York Times: Online Schooling Grows, Setting Off a Debate

Despite enthusiastic support from parents, the schools have met with opposition from some educators, who say elementary students may be too young for Internet learning, and from teachers, unions and school boards, partly because they divert state payments from the online student’s home district.

What do you think? Is this the inevitable wave of the future for U.S. education?

Will's New Taxonomy for Learning Objectives

Will Thalheimer, along with many other illustrious eLearning professionals, made some great points in the comments of Writing Less Objectionable Learning Objections.

Be sure to check out Will's post from June of 2006: New Taxonomy for Learning Objectives:

Instructional professionals use learning objectives for different purposes—even for different audiences. Learning objectives are used to guide the attention of the learner toward critical learning messages. Learning objectives are used to tell the learner what's in the course. They are used by instructional designers to guide the design of the learning. They are used by evaluation designers to develop metrics and assessments.

Will talks about four, and possibly five, different types of objectives:

• Focusing Objectives
• Performance Objectives
• Instructional-Design Objectives
• Instructional-Evaluation Objectives
• Content-Outlining Objectives (Which is what many of us are used to producing in the form of text-bulleted lists of course objectives).
  

How does this jive with how you've been thinking about objectives?

Writing Less Objectionable Learning Objectives

My recent post on alternatives to listing out learning objectives generated a lot of interest and a good conversation. ( See My Objection to Learning Objectives.)

I attempt to summarize here, but feel free to go back to the original post and read all the comments:

• Clive Shepherd hates when learning objectives are the first thing you see. It's like the opening credits of a movie. Boring. When clients insist on the objectives list, Clive includes an opening scene to spice things up.

• Karl Kapp suggests starting off a course with a series of questions related to the objectives, or to start off with a scenario. [In the comments of this post, Karl clarifies: he's not suggesting pre-test questions, but rather a series of thought-provoking questions to get the learner to THINK about the content at hand].
  

• Jay Cross says it's "presumptuous and confining for developers to foist objectives on learners, for it disregards the learner's needs, prior learning, and context." He suggests a list of potential outcomes with check boxes, effectively allowing the learner to create his or her own objectives.

• Chris refers us to Will Thalheimer's “The Learning Benefit of Questions”, in which Will argues that introductory questions have a notable impact on learning. Chris suggests that a reasonable alternative to the “At the end of this class you will be able to” list is a series of questions. Chris is also a big fan of Michael Allen.

• Pete Blair always includes the objectives. "Personally, I don't like to hide things from learners and play guessing games, so I am an advocate of letting the learner know, up front, what they will be expected to do at the conclusion of the course, lesson, or whatever. If they choose to skip that part of the course, then that's OK by me, they must still meet the objective(s) before they complete the course."

Christy Tucker did a nice write up from the the opening presentation of the WebEx/eLearning Guild Online eLearning Summit. Michael Allen was one of three keynote speakers. He had this to say on objectives:

"...throw out the crutches we’ve used in the past, like starting every unit with objectives that make sense to designers. You can write objectives in a different way so they fit with a context of why you want to learn something. There are better ways to do some of the things we’ve been doing. You can just throw some of that out though. Think like a learner. Give them a challenge at the beginning so they experience what they have to learn instead of just telling them what they need to learn."

How do you try to think like a learner? Have you come up with some novel way to handle learning objections? Have you met resistance from your clients when you tried to do it differently?

Photo credit: I Learn By Going Where I Have To Go by Joe Shlabotnik

Putting the Demand Back in On-Demand Learning

I didn't come up with that headline. One of my very smart and witty clients said that in a conversation we were having the other day with a group of his internal subject matter experts. I'm co-opting it and encourage all of you to do the same.

So much on-demand training consists of boring page turners. I've created my share. The learner cringes. If you're lucky, they actually view every page (probably because they were forced to by a menu lockout).

What have you done lately to create a course that will intrigue and inspire your learners? That will motivate them to come back for more? That puts the demand back in on-demand training?

Hmm....?

Perhaps you need some instructional design inspiration? Perhaps you need to think about motivating the learner?

I know I do. I'm writing financial industry software training course storyboard #10, in a series of 29 courses! Needless to say, it's demanding.

Photo credit by RossinaBossioB