Why engage the services of an Instructional/Learning Designer?
In my first blog, I talked about the differences between Instructional Designer and Learning Designer. In this article, I’m going to discuss about the importance of engaging the services of an Instructional or Learning Designer.
Before I start, let me ask you a question: why does learning or instructional design matter? In his article ‘What Everybody Ought to Know About Instructional Design’, Tom Kuhlmann said:
“Without instructional design, the learner might or might not get the information they need. Because of instructional design, you can get the learners to cut through a lot of extraneous information and get right to the important stuff.”
To emphasise this point, instructional or learning design is a methodology that guides a person to consider all the necessary elements when designing an instructor-led course or online activity. The things a designer need to consider are mainly about: the needs of the audience (learners); the targeted results (learning outcomes); the situations (learning environments); the relevant players or influencers; and the learning approach.
Let’s look at an example. When a content developer creates an eLearning module, the steps he generally follows are:
Identify the relevant content
Group content into bite-size chunks
Design the look and feel as well as other media elements
Deploy the content onto the eLearning platform
Roll-out the online course
These steps carry out the development process of an eLearning course, but do not often provide effective learning experience.
This is where an Instructional/Learning Designer can help – to create better learning experiences. A designer knows how people learn and can come up with ideas that will help them learn better so that learning is more than just an information transfer. The main goal here is to assist learners make sense of the information they acquired from the learning program and use it in, let’s say, solving a problem, so they can improve their performance.
Experienced Instructional/Learning Designers come with skills, that help them to execute the following tasks successfully.
Identifying what learners need to learn
Developing the learning outcomes
Organising the content to make it easy to understand
Identifying the appropriate learning resources that will aid and enhance user experience
Formulating assessment activity or activities that do not merely focus on revisiting the information but ensuring that the learner applies this new knowledge or skill in real life.
If you need to develop excellent learning experiences that focus on passing on real-life skills that can be harnessed well, you need an experienced learning designer.