I’m often asked “What is an Instructional Designer?” and “What exactly do you do?” There are two answers to this question. The short answer is…I create learning courses for companies. And the long answer… well, keep reading.
The work of an instructional designer, in the simplest form, could be described as the “art of education” combined with the “science of how people learn.” And as you have likely learned from personal experience, too often these don’t come together in very palatable ways. If we were to use a baking analogy:
- There are several key ingredients that go into making the dough, and
- There are several best practices that go into baking the dough
And at the risk of taking this analogy a bit too far, in this series of blog posts, I will break the conversation about instructional design down into slices, rather than forcing the whole loaf on you at once. We will explore how an instructional designer facilitates learning, creating an active learning experience as opposed to a passive teaching environment. Using the art of education combined with the science of how people learn (aka instructional design theory) to create a creative and engagingly effective learning experience, is the ultimate goal of the Instructional Design (ID) process.
ID is much more than just mastering the right tools, or having a shelf full of the best educational ingredients. It’s how they all come together that makes the learner enjoy the experience and want to come back for another course (literally)! So let’s go behind the scenes (and eLearning screens!) and really understand the art AND science of instructional design.