Learning design lies at the heart of all workplace training. Although the design for learning is usually concealed from employees, it involves deliberate choices about what, when, where and how to train. Decisions need to be made about the content, structure, timing, pedagogical strategies, sequence of learning activities, and type and frequency of assessment in the course, as well as the nature of technology used to support learning. Making these decisions is the process of creating your own design.

Designing a course for learning is similar to completing a jigsaw puzzle: completing the big picture by using the different pieces requires careful planning and using an instructional design approach or model helps, as it provides a structure and meaning to the learning material. It allows designers to visualise the learning need and break down the process of designing the material or materials into steps.

There are a number of learning design approaches that designers use: Gagne’s Nine Events of Instructions, Bloom’s Taxonomy, SAM (Successive Approximation Model), Design Thinking, and ADDIE (Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation).

As an approach, ADDIE has almost become a standard as it is a versatile and can be used to design any type of training or instruction, including workplace training. It is a great jumping off point, with clear steps and procedures that are simple for beginners to understand, yet still employed by experts. Each step of ADDIE is flexible and can be varied according to the specific circumstances of the project. Yet, it is also rigid. Each step must be thoroughly executed, and well-documented, for it to work successfully. It can be tempting to cut corners, and skips steps in the process, but returning to previous steps is very difficult and time consuming.

As a designer, my approach to design and development learning solutions is to apply the all-important adult learning principles, integrating it with the most pertinent instructional design model that suit your requirements, with contemporary design and techniques to ensure that your content best serves your learner’s needs.

Hi, I’m Manny. I design learning.

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:

1. Identify the relevant content

2. Group content into bite-size chunks

3. Design the look and feel as well as other media elements

4. Deploy the content onto the eLearning platform

5. 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.