Speaker 1: Hello, my friends. Instructional design is a fast growing field and a very rewarding profession that focuses entirely on helping people learn. But what exactly is instructional design? That's what we're going to dive into in this video, as well as what instructional designers do, what skills you need to succeed and how to get started becoming an ID. So stay tuned. So welcome back to the channel. If you're new here, my name is Devlin Peck. And today we're going back to the basics. We're going to dive into what exactly instructional design is. So put simply, it's the process of designing and developing learning experiences and resources. So it's an interdisciplinary field and it draws on learning science, human computer interaction, educational psychology, systems theory, and a whole lot more. The body of knowledge when it comes to instructional design pulls from a lot of different areas. So there are specific ID models and the like, which you can learn more about on this channel, but very interdisciplinary. So a good way to talk about what instructional design is, is by talking about what instructional designers do. That can generally give you a pretty good idea of the profession. So put simply again, instructional designers are the ones who create the learning experiences and resources. Their whole goal is essentially to make it easier and more enjoyable for people to learn, or they eliminate learning. To help people do their jobs more effectively. And we'll get into that a little bit later by what we mean by eliminating learning. But the main idea is that instructional designers help people learn. That's the simplest way to think about it. So they can work in corporate settings, education settings, higher education, K-12, or even they can, they can be independent entrepreneurs and help people learn as part of their business model. So the primary responsibility is to bridge gaps in knowledge or skill. So if someone doesn't know something that they need to know, or they don't know how to do something that they need to be able to do, the instructional designer can come in and help bridge that gap to get them from where they are to where they need to be. And there's often a higher goal. So for example, corporate instructional designers often need to produce results for a business. Instructional designers who are self-employed or entrepreneurs may, their main goal may be to help their, their clients or their audience undergo a very specific transformation. Like how here on this channel, we help people become instructional designers. There's a higher goal. We're not helping people learn for the sake of learning. We're helping people learn so that they can undergo a transformation, produce results for a business, so on and so forth. You know, make a change in society. For example, if it's like a nonprofit instructional designer, the deliverables that instructional designers produce can vary quite a bit as well, but this may give you a better idea of what instructional design is. So corporate instructional designers, one of the most common deliverables in this day and age where everything's remote is interactive. E-learning experiences. So these are experiences created with tools like Adobe Captivate or Articulate Storyline 360. It's these learning experiences that will be uploaded and delivered to hundreds or thousands or millions of employees. So they're generally self-paced interactive kind of slide based e-learning formats. And there are plenty of different formats for these, but that's the idea. E-learning experiences on a learning management system. So if you've ever taken any online, like college classes or even some corporate settings might use this K-12, definitely education settings. It's where there's a learning management system like Blackboard or Canvas, and people can create courses or learning experiences directly in the learning management systems. So that's another common format or deliverable. There are video based courses. This is very common in the like creator economy, people who are like selling courses. It's like video based with worksheets and other stuff like that. Created with platforms like Teachable, Thinkific, Kajabi. Those are the common tools there. Face-to-face learning. So getting traditionally here or virtual instructor led learning. The deliverables for these types of learning experiences may be like slide decks for the facilitator, a facilitator guide that tells the facilitator like what to say and when to say it. Documents for the participants, like handouts or worksheets or that sort of thing. As well as job aides or other performance support. Tools. So for example, yeah, PDF that someone can reference while they're performing a specific task. That's definitely something that an instructional designer could help with. Or even performance support on your phone while you're dealing with something, a knowledge base. If you've worked for a company where you reference an internal knowledge base, instructional designers can help build those out so that people can access those resources when and as they need them. All right. So most instructional design projects follow a pretty similar process, or at least as all, they have pretty similar elements, I should say. So most of these processes stem from the ADDIE model of instructional design. We have a full video about that. It's generally what people first learn about when they dive into instructional design. So we should dive into it here. It's an acronym. It's one of the earliest ID processes essentially that people followed. It's pretty generalized now though. And yeah, most of the processes have these five elements. So the first one is analysis. So put simply, this is where you learn more about your audience and the problem. So you conduct interviews, observation, review any data you have. We want to make sure we know what the problem is and who our audience is so that we can serve them effectively. Then there's design. So this is where you do any additional research or work with subject matter experts to plan and write the learning solutions, the learning objectives, all of that good stuff. So you're actually writing out the objectives. A deliverable here is essentially a storyboard or a script or multiple of those documents. So that's where you learn more about your audience and the problem. Then it moves into development. So this is where you bring those written solutions. So the storyboards are script into their final form by using any necessary technology. So maybe recording videos of someone speaking, or maybe it's self-paced e-learning with like animated videos, lots of different options there, but this is where you're actually using the tools to bring those pieces to their final form. Then there's implementation, which is where you actually deliver the learning experience. So if it's a face-to-face experience, this is where the facilitator actually goes in front of the audience. So this is where the facilitator actually goes in front of the audience and delivers it. Or if it's an online thing, this is where it actually gets uploaded to the learning management system and students get assigned to that course or experience or whatever it is. So it's where you actually connect what you've created with your audience. And then there's evaluation. So this is where you want to look at the data. You want to, you want to measure the results, you know, do surveying to determine the effectiveness of the program and then update it if, or as needed to make it more effective. So that's the process in a nutshell. There are other more modern processes. Again, other videos on the channel to help you learn more about different processes and a full video about Addy, if you want to learn more about, about this most common process. Okay. But put simply I instructional design, the main goal is to know your audience and help them achieve their goals by helping them learn. So you again, bridge those knowledge and skill gaps. That's the main goal of an instructional designer, particularly if it's helping someone achieve a specific goal. And here's the caveat. The other way to go about it is by eliminating learning. So people don't have to learn something. And I debated putting this in here, but I think this is an important concept, especially for new people coming into the field. It doesn't always have to be, Oh, let me build a course for that, or let me build a full learning experience. Sometimes you can be much more effective instructional designer by creating some kind of resource so that people can access with that so that they don't have to actually learn and memorize the thing themselves. So I should say, this is a term I got from Nick Shackleton Jones. I love how he, how he phrased it. We have a Q and a with Nick Shackleton, Jones, if you want to learn more about how people learn, but the goal here is to essentially provide performance support or tools so that people don't need to memorize information. So some examples here, GPS while driving while you're driving down the road. I mean, like myself, I don't memorize where to go. Really. I just kind of have my phone up on the dashboard essentially. And it's telling me turn by turn where to go. So I don't have to commit to memory how to get to certain places. I can just put in an address and I just look at my phone. I don't have to actually learn anything. Good. Googling info when I need it. Another example there, you don't, you know, we don't need to memorize a lot of things because Google is kind of like a second brain for some of us. We just Google what we need and we have it within a couple of seconds. And then the more practical example in an instructional design context is providing a job aid for a work related process. So people don't have to memorize how to do all 100 processes. They just need to know how to access the resource or the job aid that tells them exactly what to do in the moment when they need it. So. That's one way to think about instructional design as well. Not just helping people learn, but helping make it easier for people to do their jobs without having to memorize stuff. And then the ID skills. So in case you're wondering what skills make a successful instructional designer, you will need to know how to apply instructional design theory and learning science. So applying some of the theory, just to make sure that we are helping people learn most effectively when learning is part of the solution. Writing skills, very important for instructional design. We need to be able to write clear and concise copy scripts and storyboards. Technical writing background could really help as well as a creative writing background because a lot of instructional design work is quite creative. We want to keep people engaged. Storytelling could help a lot. Development skills. So you're going to be developing or programming e-learning and authoring tools or with custom code. There are authoring tools like articulate storyline that are really easy to use. So you don't need to be like a, you know, computer programmer, for example. You. It's if you, people succeed with knowing how to use like PowerPoint, essentially the tool is very similar to PowerPoint, but of course there are opportunities to specialize with any of these skills. Designing visually appealing user interfaces and layouts. So good instructional designers often have to design layouts as well. So visual design skills help. And you don't need all of these skills. Like there are some IDs who just have a few of these skills. There are certain roles that only take advantage of one or two of these skills. So those vary, but generally these are some common ones, effective communication and collaboration with stakeholders. That one is very important. I would say for most roles like communication skills, probably some of the most important skills you can have as an ID and then analyzing and making sense of data. That's important too, to know if what you're doing is effective to draw valid conclusions from any surveying you're doing before designing a solution. All very important, but essentially problem solving. That's a key skill here. If there's some sort of problem. Instructional design. So you can do all of these things. So you can do all of these things. Instructional designers need to go in, see if learning is part of the solution and then design that part of the solution, if it would make sense to do so. So if you are interested in instructional design and you want to become an instructional designer, I do have a full, how to become an ID video and playlist. So that's basically the primary goal of this channel is to help people become instructional designers and build their ID skills. So feel free to check out that video. I will link it in the description below, and I will see you in the next video.