Instruction is not something that just happens because an educator shows up ready to teach. It is more than just following a lesson plan or a scope and sequence document. It is designed from the ground up with a specific purpose and goal in mind. Even if you did not think of designing your unit or lesson, you made conscious decisions about your unit so the instructional design was there.
Designing instruction is what all good educators do no matter if they have been trained in it or not. They make decisions every time they plan on their own or as part of a professional learning community, PLC. These decisions about what activities to include, how to explain concepts, and how to gauge or test the learner’s understanding are all part of instructional design. It truly means the creating of a learning experience by an educator. This can take many forms. It can be as simple as the way you decide to explain a sport to a friend while at a game or and complex as designing an employee intake program for a Fortune 500 company. In each situation, the educator makes decisions on how and when to present the material that the learner needs to learn. They are different intensity scales but are both designed instruction to disseminate information to a learner.
Many times, the decisions might not be totally thought out and done in a manner that was successful last time, explaining the sport to a friend, but the decisions are still made. Instructional design is everywhere someone wants to teach someone anything. It happens all the time. Only in formalized learning environments are these decisions ever really thought about. Instructional design has a large place in the human resources world that many people do not think about. New employee orientation and training is something where instructional design plays a key role. No longer can you just have employees come in and fill out some paperwork and start their job in the afternoon. They need training on how your company does its business, company policies, and even state and federal policies that are important to their job. These tasks can be done quickly and efficiently if the instruction is designed properly to maximize the knowledge retention and time. These trainings are important to the new employees being onboarded quickly and becoming productive in their new roles for their companies. That is an area that was not designed for a long time and many companies are now realizing the importance of that skill in their human resources departments.
There are several skills that you need to be an effective instructional designer. The first and probably most important is the ability to change tactics if something is not going well. You can spend days, weeks, or months designing a training and then when you start delivering the training, everything goes wrong. You must be able to look at the issues that arose and be able to change them without hesitation. Many people become too attached to their ideas when they spend that much time on them that they do not really want to make any changes. A good instructional designer sees the goal, education their learners, and makes whatever changes are necessary to reach that goal. You also need to be able to think about how multiple types of learners will process information differently. You need to be able to design instruction so all different types of learners will be able to use their strengths in some way to gain the knowledge. This helps you make sure that all of the learners that will be using your instruction will have a chance to be successful. You do not want a learner to feel like they are already working from behind when the instruction begins. You also need to have good communication skills. You might not be the expert in the field you are designing courses. You will have to work with a client or expert in that field to create the courses. Many times, you are the one working for the expert to put their knowledge in areas they cannot. You are the expert in digital learning, for example, and they are the expert in their field. You are designing a course around their expertise. Being able to effectively communicate with them and gather their expectations will be key to a successful project that does not frustrate either party.
Instructional design is in more places that many people understand. It is a key part of educating people in our society from how to brush your teeth or tie your shoes all the way to how to properly solve advanced mathematical equations.
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