Time to bring teaching into the instructional design practice

Image by Harish Sharma from Pixabay

Instructional design at its core is a teaching profession

Prior to the COVID crisis, I had begun to have a sneaky suspicion that we were getting it wrong about instructional design and online learning. Despite all the tools, platforms, processes, rubrics, standards, theories, and methods, something just wasn’t adding up.

When words like metrics and scalability began creeping into instructional design jargon, I knew something was askew. Who decided that teaching and learning needed to be assets of mass production? Why are we applying assembly-line principles to learning and development?

I recently scanned a job board to get a general sense of what organizations are looking for in instructional designers, and the job descriptions were sprinkled with terms such as, “progressive methodologies, content mapping, metaphor design, learning quality at scale, operational efficiency, human performance improvement, differentiated design framework, scrum-based development cycle, and right-sized experiences.”

There were also the requisite acronyms such as VILT, ILT, RLO, ERP, SME, QM, ALE, CBL, ICM, ILO, VR and AR. My argument is that familiarity with these terms or the ability to parrot their definitions in an interview is no indication that someone will make an effective instructional designer. What’s missing is determining whether someone has both the heart and demonstrated competencies for instructional design.

Instructional design at its core is a teaching profession. Although an instructional designer should have essential technical skills, above all else, they should have the ability to teach.

How can you determine if someone has the ability to teach? There’s no algorithm for that.