Why instructional design matters
It may seem obvious at first that you'd want an instructional designer planning the educational activities of your company or organization, but let me open up the reasons why it's worth learning a bit about instructional design.
The designer will focus on making learning efficient. That means every party spends fewer resources in the process: the learner, the instructor and the company. We've made information easier to access and consume. But there is a difference between accessing information and understanding it in a way that helps you do better at your job.
When you learn something on your own, with little or no instruction, you spend a lot of time digging through irrelevant information. Wouldn't it be easier if someone did that for you, so you could skip to the important stuff? Instructional designers help simplify and structure information in a way that makes it easier to learn and fold into your day-to-day. The instructional designer will also focus on making learning more engaging. If you want to teach someone how to do a job interview, you could simply list the different steps to communicate the process effectively. That approach, however, won't engage learners in a way that helps them internalize the information. Wouldn't it be more fun and more effective to reframe those steps as an activity that lets them explore how to prepare, how to behave and learn from their mistakes? And that goes far beyond just saying "I'll gamify the process." Know this: making things playful shouldn't be done just to look innovative, with no purpose. A bad instructional designer, or someone poorly informed, will add interactive elements just to make the content look innovative. But did you know that can make learning slower and even boring? There are cases where your learners will think, "Oh great, another connect-the-dots activity. Ugh." Activities need a purpose. The ID focuses on the learner's experience. Hiring an instructional designer only to build the course syllabus or to coordinate and supervise recordings and content deliveries is very, very limiting. While they can certainly do that, an instructional designer has a think-first mindset: what do I need the learner to be able to do, and what's the best way to deliver that? The natural impulse of companies, whether HR, enablement, marketing or customer success departments, is to dive deep into theories, articles and open courses on instructional design and apply frameworks to build courses. We'll talk more about the models later. The most important point in customer education is working on the content: its format and quality. An instructional designer will think about your target audience and which formats would suit them best, taking into account what you already have and which distribution channels you own. Keep in mind we're not talking about recording quality. Your focus should always be content and format. A course recorded in 4K is great, but it doesn't replace content or a well-written script. We also have to think about delivery. Is it a knowledge base, a dedicated YouTube channel, a course platform, in-app notifications, a blog, ebooks? On top of that, a good instructional designer will care about delivering value very quickly and at very high quality. That probably means they won't build a framework of 300 hours of video before launching. A good instructional designer understands that you need to deliver something now and test it, because no theory or planning survives real life. After all, the time it takes to record and edit those 300 hours to teach a piece of software, for example, means the video tutorial will already be outdated at launch. Did that make sense? Instructional design is there to:
- Give your educational content a purpose
- Keep you from including content that doesn't need to be there
- Make the learner's experience more enjoyable
