This chapter will help you to:
- Discover why you need instructional design
- Begin to see what instructional design is
- Consider the advantages and disadvantages of instructional design
There is an old saying that if you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there. This is a fine philosophy if you are spending the summer between your junior and senior year “experiencing” Europe or if you have embarked on an Australian “walk-about,” but when you are developing training programs it leaves a lot to be desired.
One of the purposes of instructional design is to provide both an appropriate destination, and the right road to get you there, whenever you are responsible for creating a training program. Your destination is usually some form of learning that your trainees will accomplish, while the road is one of the many paths that instruction can follow to facilitate that learning.
Instructional design stripped to its basics is simply a process for helping you to create effective training in an efficient manner. It is a system, perhaps more accurately a number of systems, that help you ask the right questions, make the right decisions, and produce a product that is as useful and useable as your situation requires and allows.
Some people refer to instructional design as the “science” of instruction because it follows a set of theories and methods and is concerned with inputs and outputs. Other people see instructional design as an “art” because the best designs usually have a direct relationship to the creativity and talent of the designer. Still others see it as “a good thing to do if we have the time,” but it can't get in the way of producing the training.
How you see instructional design is up to you. In this book we will not champion one view over another, or even one definition as the “most correct.” What we will do is try to convince you that creating a training program without using instructional design principles is inviting failure. Once that is (we hope) accomplished, we will explore the most basic of those principles, not from a theoretical point of view, but rather from the direction of how to apply them, rapidly and successfully.
In fact, if you are seeking instructional design theory you've probably come to the wrong source; you may want to read Dick and Carey's Systematic Design of Instruction (1990). One of those basic instructional design principles we mentioned is to know your target audience. This book's target audiences were described in the introduction. Primarily, they are individuals with little to no instructional design experience who need to learn to do it right, but fast. For the most part you are not permanent training professionals planning to make a career out of instructional design, so the theory is not as important as the actual practice.
Our audience analysis (we'll be talking a lot more about analysis in the next couple of chapters) tells us that you are much more preoccupied with how it is done than with what is behind the doing. Not that you aren't interested in the theory, but you just don't have the time to explore these aspects when everyone is expecting your training program yesterday. So terms such as adult learning theory, learning styles, and even cognitive science may appear here from time to time, but we won't be discussing them in any detail. We will spend most of our time considering how to apply good instructional design principles specifically to the various ways you can deliver training, such as classroom training, on-the-job training, self-instruction, and technology-based training.
However, for the more experienced practitioner, we'll also discuss ways to speed up the instructional design process through simple hints and larger scale methods, such as instructional design software, learning object-based design, rapid prototyping, and performance-support-based design. If you are an experienced instructional designer, or plan to be someday, you might want to at least check out the shortcut icons and hang around for Chapter 8 to pick up some new ideas and shortcuts.
WHY INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN?
So why should you concern yourself with instructional design? Perhaps the best reason I can give is one we've all experienced: the course, class, seminar, or other training event that sounded good on paper, but that you left (and that left you) wondering why you ever came. There are a number of reasons for this universal phenomena, but in the end they all boil down to one cause: poor instructional design. Did the class not meet the objectives stated in the course description? Poor instructional design. Did the test at the end of the program not make any sense? Poor instructional design. Did the instructor meander from topic to topic with no clear pattern to what was being discussed? Poor instructional design. Was the material over your head, or too basic—blame it on poor instructional design. (OK, I admit there may be other reasons as well, but poor instructional design is often the most critical reason, and because this is a book on how to become a better instructional designer, allow me just a little overstatement.)
On an individual basis, these ineffective learning experiences are annoying, but when considered for a company-wide training course it is rather painful, particularly to the bottom line; and multiplied by five or a dozen or fifty training courses, it is appalling. Hundreds of thousands of precious training hours are wasted every year telling participants what they already know or things they cannot use.
The cost in wasted time, wasted money, and wasted opportunities is staggering—all because the person responsible for the program did not know, or did not take advantage of, a few mostly common sense rules for creating good training.
ASTD notes in their 2013 State of the Industry Report that over one and one-half billion dollars was spent by organizations on training in 2012. If even 5 percent of this expenditure was made on bad training because of poor instructional design (and chances are the real amount is well over that), knowing how to do it right would have saved companies over $75 million!
What instructional design will do for you, the training course developer, is to help you guard against making such mistakes. It will help you create good, clear objectives for your program that can be understood and mastered by your trainees. It will help you develop evaluations that truly tes...
