The New Age Instructional Designer

Instructional design provides a gamut of principles and models that enable you to train people effectively in various areas of expertise. The role of an instructional designer is essentially driven by a need to find appropriate solutions by applying instructional design strategies and models to transfer information to users who use a particular product or service to perform their jobs.

Changed Learning Methods
As time progressed and technologies evolved, the role of the instructional designer as we understood it several years back, underwent a paradigm shift. In spite of client demands to create conventional elearning courses, the fact is that the way people are learning today has changed phenomenally due to the increased access to social media tools and advanced mobile devices. Twitter, blogs, wikis, and discussions have become the new age learning methods. Learner's look for relevance and access information only when it is needed. The concept of reading everything that comes your way and conventional ideas about increasing knowledge generically have phased out. Learner's now search for what they want, skim through to establish relevance, and move on if the information is irrelevant. The attention span of today's learner is short and they want quick and easy access to information. Working smart is the code word and learner's will only use resources that enable them to do so.

In such times, we can no longer talk about the standard learning deliverables, like elearning and instructor-led training materials in isolation. It has now become important to understand the factors influencing the learning process. The solution lies in viewing the job of an instructional designer more from the perspective of convergence of discrete learning entities that were created earlier and new ones that have evolved. It is also important to be aware that the concept of learning styles of a learner were never proven or found beneficial when designing learning content. The extensive variation in learning styles of individuals and lack of proven theories in the area, have automatically eliminated the need to talk about learning styles any more.

The New Role of IDs

When I listed the skills sets of instructional designers, I tried to be a generic as possible, but today I would not like to classify them only as skills sets any more. The way conventional instructional designers used to think about designing learning content needs to change.

Here are some things we can do to change the way we have been planning the creation of learning content:

• Look at an IDs role as a supplier of information to audiences who are consumers.
• Understand that learners have matured and are capable of finding what is relevant to them, while deciding on the value of the information available.
• Appreciate that learning will be influenced by several information resources due to the learner's access to social media tools. 
• Leverage available information resources and help organize them effectively for the learner.
• Plan learning in a manner that assumes the use of social media resources like wikis, social groups, blogs, and tweet as part of the learning process. 
• Start looking at learning as an ongoing activity that does not just end with a training.
• Identify the need for performance support on the job and create modular content that is accessible when ever a user requires.
• Stop assuming users read course materials and user guides sequentially. 
• Break content into smaller independent learning units targeted at an audience role, ensuring you accommodate those learners who may access learning content using mobile devices.
• Employ strategies to make the content searchable and increase the relevance of information to the task the user is performing.
• Design content solutions that are specific to an audience and the tasks the role is expected to perform.
• Design models that address the needs of constantly changing information.
• Plan learning deliverables in various forms to make them accessible from intranets or centralized content management systems.
• Present information succinctly rather than beat around the bush in the name of overviews and long winding introductions.

Applying the above, does not de-emphasize the underlying principles of instructional design:

• Know your audience.
• Thoroughly understand the tasks they perform in their jobs.
• Employ appropriate learning strategies to improve learning.

To me instructional design has always been a guideline of the mental process of creating any kind of content that a learner will consume. It is therefore imperative that we stop thinking of elearning or instructor-led training as the only learning deliverables. Being aware of the fact does not undermine the value of these traditional learning materials, but rather helps you identify the gaps and think about how to reorganize the existing models to make learning effective.

Quoting from Harold's blog on social learning for a business:

Tacit knowledge is best developed through conversations and social relationships.

Training courses are artifacts of a time when information was scarce and connections were few; that time has passed.

Social learning networks enable better and faster knowledge feedback loops.