What does an instructional designer do?

So let's get practical: what does an instructional designer do? Instructional designers need a polymath's set of skills to create effective courses and learning materials that meet their intended goals. These professionals need to master not only learning design but also technology. I'll walk through it as a chronological sequence, which also prepares you for the stages of building educational content. Sound good?

It's worth noting that I'm covering every responsibility of an instructional designer. Just as we could say a mechanic can fix anything from airplanes to cars, an ID doesn't always have to do everything. They can certainly specialize in one area or another, or work in a field with more or less depth. So this list is the ideal process, but that doesn't mean it happens in practice on every project. Everything starts with planning and the project kickoff meetings. These are essential for getting the information you need and identifying the key stakeholders. Knowing as much as possible about a project, what is needed or expected and who has to approve the final product are critical parts of an efficient, effective eLearning development project. Initial project meetings usually include you, a project manager, someone responsible for the platform (if that isn't also the instructional designer), the client or internal stakeholder and a subject-matter expert. This is your moment to define the target audience, learning objectives, technical requirements and other project parameters. Are there specific brand guidelines to follow? And so on. Next, if it's a more complex project, such as creating a school, an academy or a sequence of content, it's essential for the instructional designer to turn this information into a pedagogical proposal: a document that brings together the guidelines of the school or project. How will the content be taught? Why? How will it be formatted? What are the rules and restrictions for the content? Think of a brand guidelines document, used in graphic design, but for education. This document will later be used as a reference by everyone who works on the project in some way, such as content authors, designers, developers and so on. After the kickoff, you may be ready to start the storyboard. The storyboard is a valuable tool for planning effective courses and getting stakeholder buy-in. Whether you work for a company that develops custom learning solutions or create corporate training for your own company, you'll have a boss, client or stakeholder who needs to understand your vision. A storyboard can be made in countless ways. The most common is a slide presentation containing each screen of your content, a visual outline of how the material will look once finished. For instructional designers working in larger teams, the storyboard is a way to align everyone, including animation, narration and development professionals. Showing your bosses a storyboard before moving into development can help you avoid costly rework if the course you build isn't aligned with their vision or needs. Using the information from your kickoff meeting, you can analyze the learning objectives and break them down slide by slide to make sure you're covering every objective and creating a logical progression of content. The storyboard also helps you find out which content, resources and information you still need before developing the course. While building a storyboard, it's very common to realize that some information is missing. Second to last, we have the content development process. You'll probably work with a subject-matter expert to get the information you need for the course you're building. They might send content as PowerPoint presentations, screen recordings they made, PDFs and/or Word documents. In some situations, if time and budget allow, you might even go on site to interview experts or learners and observe the processes. Instructional designers should be good at sorting and digesting content to identify the main ideas and key points learners need to understand to do their jobs well. I won't sugarcoat it: this part can be a bit tedious, because it may involve a lot of back and forth, especially if the content is very technical and outside your understanding. I myself have had to develop content for healthcare and engineering, which included a lot that was far from my own reality. But it's up to you to turn raw technical content into an enjoyable learning experience, whether through interactive content, animated videos or other instructional strategies. This is where you can really get creative and use your knowledge of how people learn and how to create content that attracts them and drives behavior change. Of course, the most important thing is to take your audience into account. After all, the content may be hard or boring for you, but for the target audience of that material it may be the easiest thing in the world. Then the designer can produce the content: writing texts and recording scripts, creating presentations and ebooks, capturing and editing lessons, building interactive materials, quizzes and more. Of course, each of these materials requires a specific set of skills, but on smaller teams we have to do it all. That's why there are tools called authoring tools. So you're not left without help. Finally, the instructional designer should evaluate the content created and assess the results. They will look at learner engagement and performance, whether the content was effective, whether organizational results were achieved and, of course, implement the necessary changes. See? There's a lot, I know. Keep in mind that this is the "idealized" version. Each company will adapt the processes, stages and responsibilities to the knowledge and resources at hand. It's also worth noting that we see more and more tools being created to boost and speed up many of these processes. That lets the instructional designer work more on the front line, actually creating content, or more on strategy, planning and evaluating the results of the implementation. To recap: An instructional designer will meet with all stakeholders, put together a content plan and coordinate the production of each object. To do that, they rely on a variety of tools and methodologies, which we'll cover throughout this course. This content is part of my course Primeiros Passos em Design Instrucional (First Steps in Instructional Design), taught in Portuguese. Click here to read more and enroll!