The Accidental Instructional Designer, 2nd Edition: Learning Design for the Digital Age

by Cammy Bean

“concerned primarily with prescribing optimal methods of instruction to bring about desired changes in student knowledge and skills.”

Reigeluth, Charles. From Instructional Design Theories and Models, probably.

There are also an increasing number of certification programs offered by practitioners-turned-certifiers that may or may not offer the credibility or rigor you’re seeking.

I'm pretty sure I know exactly who she has in mind here.

One of the best things about being in this business is the variety.

Agree + possible podcast interview question.

As the global workforce and economy continue to evolve, the spotlight will be on L&D to deliver even more value through upskilling, reskilling, and retaining talent.

While their overall goal is to reduce risk for the company, that box-ticking approach results in a lot of downright horrible training created in the name of compliance and risk reduction.

You risk sounding like a pompous know-it-all smarty pants.

Scaffolding (Bruner)

Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky)

Nine Events of Learning/Conditions of Le...

Five Moments of Need (Gottfredson...

Social Learning Theory...

Cognitive Load Theory...

ARCS Model of Motivational Des...

Elaboration Theory (Reigeluth)

Experiential Learning (Kolb)

keep in mind that this is a widely varied field with a lot of diversity in what hiring managers are looking for and what practitioners actually do.

“I create online learning programs for companies—you know, like distance learning.”

According to ATD’s 2022 State of the Industry report, US organizations spent, on average, $1,280 per employee on direct learning expenditure in 2021. Technology-based delivery, including self-paced e-learning and virtual classroom, saw a rapid rise from 2019 to 2020 as one might expect, with technology-based methods accounting for 79 percent of available learning hours (up from 54 percent of hours available in 2019). And while that number fell to 69 percent in 2021, that’s still a lot of e-learning. Now think of the thousands, perhaps millions, of hours that employees must endure of this awful, awful stuff, just so they can tick a required box in their LMS and say, “See, I learned it!”

Trained instructional designers, as you may already know, come from education programs, not design schools.

“Art can exist for art’s sake. Design cannot.”

Ward says there are three pillars to design: purpose, intention, and content.

Design is not solely about making things aesthetically pleasing, although that is part of it. Design, at its core, is about solving problems.

Nancy Duarte (2008)

A critical element of design is that you know what to do with this thing. Is it usable? Is it intuitive enough that you can figure out what it is and how you can use it?

Is the navigation clear and intuitive

Far too often, learning organizations spoon feed people in how to navigate a course, spending precious time explaining where the “next” button is and that they should click it to move on to the next screen. Are people so clueless these days that you need to go through that process? If your program is poorly designed, then maybe.

I think this is often a sort of throat clearning or saw sharpening that designers fall into as a way of getting started. But this level of direction is offputting. If navigating your learning experience isn't intuitive, make it so. Don't try to train around it.

The most critical question in design is, does it solve the problem? Does it produce the desired outcome?

Cathy Moore asks her readers, “Why is so much e-learning so boring? Because we’re obsessed with designing information when instead we should be designing experiences. We need to focus on what people need to do, not what they need to know.”

This is different for those of us who are IDs in higher education. For us, the very point of the design is often conveying knowledge. At the same time, we need to--and often do not--keep in mind how we're going to assess that knowledge. How will we know they know?

But there’s nothing special about ADDIE that helps you build better “instruction.” That’s because ADDIE isn’t a design model; it’s a project management model.

This was a revelatory point, for me. So much has been made of ADDIE that it's useful to be reminded that there's nothing magical about it. It's just a project management methodology. And, in fact, not the best of them. It's a waterfall model, which most people have moved beyond.

Articulate 360.

Adapt is an opensource framework that produces HTML5, fully responsive content, which Kineo’s development team brought to market in 2011.

Adobe Captivate

API (application processing interface)

Correction: Application Programming Interface

learning experience platform (LXP)

Once a learning program is required, it ceases to be as fun as you had hoped it would be, even if it’s a game.

Cathy Moore even encourages us to never speak the word course. The right solution may end up being a job aid or a change to a workflow.

And this is another point of divergence for higher ed IDs.

Spending this time up front to lay out expectations, agree to tasks, and plan a schedule that you can all stick to is the key to staying on time, on budget, and creating a successful training outcome.

Who’s going to do what?

a high-level description of each key project milestone,

One of the more lasting effects of the COVID-19 pandemic was an increasingly remote and hybrid work world.

chunking,

Keep It Short and Sharp

instead of meaningful training experiences, they create slide after slide of text bullets, uninspired stock photos, and a few poorly written multiple-choice questions to test “understanding.”

Julie Dirksen, author of Design for How People Learn, and Steve Flowers, a performance technologist with the National Archives, turned me on to design patterns, a term typically used in software and user interface design.

Those who are capable of the desired performance with only guiding information neither need nor benefit from instruction. They need only the information.”

Michael Allen

According to Julie Dirksen (2016), the way to differentiate between a skill and information is simple: Just ask yourself, “Is it reasonable to think someone can be proficient without practice?” If the answer is yes, then you’re probably safe with information and awareness models.

Articulate’s Tom Kuhlmann: “People aren’t successful because they have information. They’re successful because they know how to use it!”

Best practice would be to provide practice exercises that the employee can use to create strong memories, which will allow them to pull up the right information at the right moment of need.

To assist some behavior changes, you’ll also need to provide opportunities to practice.

The knowledge and skill builder condenses the nine events into six, giving us a simple and effective blueprint that works to help people learn a new skill. This could be your go-to model: 1. Gain attention. 2. Set direction. 3. Present. 4. Exemplify and practice. 5. Assess and summarize. 6. Call to action.

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