Teaching and training as related to instructional design
In thinking about your own experience, reflect upon about the teachers, college instructors, or trainers you’ve had over your lifetime: which were the most effective? Which was the most influential on your life and motivated you to move in new directions?
In my own experience as a college instructor and administrator for over 20 years, I have found that both classroom and online instructors are most successful when they:
- Are adaptable
- Understand their learners and the differences in the classroom
- Have strong and precise written and verbal communication skills
- Are patient and empathetic
- Structure and deliver content in a way that all learners understand
- Are enthusiastic and set a positive tone
- Are consistent and fair-minded in assessment and grading practices
- Are available and supportive toward getting others to learn
Let's focus on the online piece of teaching, and take a look at what makes an effective online instructor, as much of instructional design involves designing learning that will be delivered as online, for example eLearning. Research has shown that some of the key success factors for instructors teaching in an independent, eLearning environment include setting learner expectations early, incorporating readily available materials, providing a course-closing activity, and asking for feedback (https://elearningindustry.com/10-best-practices-effective-online-teacher). These are also aspects of a well-designed learning experience in the field of instructional design.
Similarities between teaching and instructional design
In reviewing my experiential list of what it takes to be an effective instructor, we can see many correlations between instructional designers and effective online and classroom teachers.
An effective instructional designer must have a strong command of written communication and possess the ability to verbally present and defend their ideas backed by readily available resources. They need to lay out and structure learner expectations from the outset. So does an effective teacher or trainer.
Moreover, empathy and patience are key tenets of the most successful instructional designers. IDs need to be able to put themselves into the learner’s shoes, as they create courses and patiently wait for stakeholder feedback. Lastly, a good ID wants to help others to learn and needs to be fair-minded when it comes to Subject Matter Expert (SME), stakeholder, and learner feedback, and even when creating assessments.
From these similarities, I’d like to dive a bit deeper and offer you some further insights into the importance of teaching as an instructional designer and the interconnectedness of having been an effective instructor and becoming an effective instructional designer. We’ll call this the takeaways section.
Takeaway 1 – Teaching is designing curricula. Instructional design is, too.
Curriculum design is a bit of its own art form; anyone who’s ever been charged with structuring their own course, class, or lesson plan can attest to this. It’s a process that needs to consider the learning environment, the learner, and the content at hand. The basic aspects of curriculum design include the following:
- Knowing who your learner is and what they might already know (or not know)
- Understanding what your learner aims to get out of the learning experience
- Identifying your course, class, or lesson’s learning objectives (LOs) and goals
- Making the connection between how your learning experience will allow your learners to attain the course LOs
- Analyzing the best/most logical sequence and structure of the material to attain the LOs you’ve set forth
- Deciding what kind of activities you’ll develop to interest and engage the learner
- Planning for how you’ll check their knowledge before, during, and at the end of the learning experience to gauge for learning needed, and later attained
- Identifying how you’ll follow up to see whether the learning is truly realized
- Developing the types of feedback questions that you’ll ask for to consistently iterate and improve the quality of your course, class, or lesson
Now, let’s compare these concepts to the basic aspects of instructional design by using one of the most important instructional design process frameworks, ADDIE which stands for Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation. ADDIE was first developed for military training purposes at Florida State University in 1975. Due to its simplicity, ADDIE has now been adopted by thousands of instructional designers delivering a wide range of training and educational content. While there are other frameworks for the instructional design process, such as the Successive Approximation Model (SAM) – as discussed later in this book – the ADDIE model is a great place to start for those who are newer to instructional design.
Glossary
ADDIE stands for analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation.
Figure 2.2 – Dave Braunschweig under a CC-BY-SA-3.0 license
The first phase of the ADDIE model, Analysis, is probably the most important phase of the instructional design process, and certainly the most closely related to teaching and curriculum development. The good news for those with any type of instructional background is that you’ve probably done this type of analysis for courses, classes, or lessons you’ve written time and time again – without ever realizing it.
The analysis phase is where you will learn more about your audience, their needs, and the solution you’ll provide to them. Think of this as a needs assessment of sorts: you need to figure out if the training will be a solution to the problem/knowledge gap at hand. If the learning gap exists because of other organizational culture issues, then no amount of training will help. This is what your needs assessment should uncover.
In the analysis phase, you’ll also be taking a long look at your target learner audience: after all, you need to know who you're designing this training for! You need to know about their prior learning efforts, level of subject knowledge, learning mode preferences, motivation to complete the training, and learning style. You'll also need to uncover any other barriers to learning, such as English as a second language, or specific technical or software limitations.
Lastly, after you’ve gleaned whether the training will indeed be a solution to a learning gap and who the learner is, you’ll need to figure out how you can map the training experience’s proposed LOs to tangible organizational performance goals. This is especially important if you're designing learning in a corporate environment, versus for an educational institution.
As you can see, the analysis phase of ADDIE is an important step for all learning experiences, but is often not completed thoroughly. Stakeholders will ask their instructional design team to move straight to the Design phase of ADDIE, without the proposed audience's needs - or the learning solutions that should be provided to them.
Now, let’s look at how the ability to design curricula maps to the instructional design ADDIE process:
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Takeaway 2 – Teaching is helping others to learn. So is instructional design
If you’ve wondered why you’ve often landed in some sort of teaching or training capacity, it’s probably because you enjoy helping others. On some level, you’re probably patient, empathetic, and/or even altruistic. It’s no wonder why so many people correlate teaching to volunteerism (not just because of the pay!): there’s hard neuroscience behind feeling good after you’ve helped someone.
It’s called the Helper’s High. After doing a good act or helping someone, it’s been found that our bodies release endorphins, which help to lift mood. In fact, according to a national survey done by the US-based UnitedHealth Group, 94 percent of people who volunteered/helped others in the last 12 months said that it improved their mood (https://projecthelping.org/benefits-of-volunteering/).
It’s been found that helping others also increases gratitude, increases life satisfaction, distracts you from your own problems, and even has been found to improve physical health (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/benefits-of-volunteering_b_4151540).
Will you see the lightbulb turn on for your students and get that helping high in instructional design? Probably not quite in the same way. But you will work alongside others to garner feedback about learning experiences you’ve designed, and hopefully, hear some reviews from learners and stakeholders first-hand.
Think about it
Many IDs I know often get the same helping high from simply knowing that we are designing learning in key subject areas that will help others to grow and learn. The feeling may not be as "direct" as in teaching, but it's the same long-term feel-good outcome.
Takeaway 3 – Instructors enjoy learning new things, so do instructional designers
Another reason why you might be in some sort of sort of teaching or training capacity is that you enjoy learning. Good teachers are always learning something new to help their students, as are good instructional designers. Quite honestly, instructional design is a field full of learning nerds who not only enjoy imparting knowledge to others, but "learning a little about a lot" themselves.
And why not continue to learn? Not only does it foster a growth mindset, but research has also shown that level of education is the single most telling factor in higher levels of health and living longer. People who are more deeply engaged in continuous learning have also been found to have higher levels of happiness and overall well-being (https://bit.ly/3XsxlEF).
Pause and reflect
No matter what you’ve done before, if you’re open, curious, and enjoy researching new topics, the Teaching Competency in instructional design will come naturally to you.
