What Is Instructional Design?
If you’re a newcomer to the field of e-learning or instructional design (ID), you might feel overwhelmed by the amount of information available online regarding the various ID models and all the different learning theories. Where to start?
First, it’s a good idea to understand exactly what instructional design is. In simple terms, it’s the practice of making learning experiences effective, interesting, and engaging for a learner. Anyone can create an e-learning project, but a skilled instructional designer will build e-learning that meets the learning objectives and needs of the audience.
You’ll be happy to know that there are some basic guiding principles of ID that can provide a good starting point for your first e-learning project, and can help you make your training more meaningful for your learners. In fact, even if you’re an experienced pro, you can apply these instructional design basics to tighten up your course.
Know Your Audience
Analysis is a big part of the instructional design discipline. You might analyze a variety of factors—but always make sure one of them is your audience. You need to know exactly who you’re designing your training for to develop a successful e-learning program.
Ask yourself, and your client: Who are your learners and what are their needs? Are they computer-savvy or completely non-technical? How much do they already know about the topic at hand? Are they experts or newbies? Knowing who your learners are and where they are coming from will help you decide how to develop content that best meets their needs.
For more specific tips on how to do an e-learning audience analysis, check out this article:
Separate “Need to Know” from “Nice to Know”
Another key ID task is to distinguish need-to-know information from nice-to-know information. You should omit superfluous information that doesn’t help learners do their jobs or tasks.
When you’re deciding what information to include in your course, ask yourself: Is this critical? Will the learners ever need to know this to do their job? And if they don’t know this, what would be the impact? If the information falls into the nice-to-know category, leave it out.
For example, if you’re designing an e-learning course on how to reply to a vendor e-mail, you don’t need to include a huge section on the background of your organization and its employees, or the history of e-mail. Just stick to teaching learners what they need to know to write effective vendor emails.
You need to be a member of eLearning in the Fire Service to add comments!