Instructional Design Dilemmas

Designing, building and deploying instructional products – or any products for that matter – can be fun. But these projects can be filled with myriad challenges.

The field of instructional design has plenty of theories, processes, and design approaches to guide our endeavors. Social media and websites have more content than is possible to read in a lifetime. There are local, national and international associations dedicated to developing the ID knowledge and skills of their membership.  All of this leads us to think there is an example or pathway we should follow.

That is a wrong assumption.

There are no written or documented approaches to the instructional design for the project on which you are currently working. Not a single one.

Each project is different. Each organization in which these projects occur is different. Each project faces a different set of challenges and opportunities.

It’s folly to think that someone could have accurately envisioned your specific criteria and addressed them eloquently in a book, academic study, scholarly article, or even a blog post. But that’s what most of us do. I’m just as guilty as the next.

This is not to imply these works have no value. Quite the contrary. Each and everyone of the approaches, processes, strategies, and theories are foundation to the work we all inspire to do. But at the start of the day tomorrow, you will be faced with the specific challenges of your project, for your organization, for your team, and for your learners.

Keep reading and studying. Be a lifelong learner. But look beyond the obvious instructional design resources for direction in your current project.

I know you are likely asking yourself, “Then why the hell am I reading this!?” That’s a good question.

My passion has always been to improve the speed and efficiency of instructional design projects. Being formally trained and educated in classic instructional design, I have a very clear understanding of the foundational expectations of our field. I have an even clearer understanding of the failings of classic ID approaches, in addition to their contemporary variations mulling about in our field.

Simply, choose the process, approach or theory you believe is the most effective and I’ll still show you how to improve your work.

Understanding the Dilemmas

At some point in every ID project, you will be faced with a dilemma (or a fork-in-the-road), and you will have to choose an effective strategy to approach it. Too often we seek to move past it or just ignore it.  I know I have on many occasions. But if you think back, then you realize (like I do) how bad of an approach that was.

There are countless dilemmas faced by instructional designers and instructional design teams. This is not an exhaustive list, rather a list of the top four dilemmas of which I try to stay very focused on during every project.

1.      Time Dilemma – The amount of time a training should take to adequately address the training need.

2.      Design Strategy Dilemma – The instructional design strategy or strategies incorporated in the final product.

3.      Process Dilemma – The activities, their sequence, and the artifacts needed to complete the project.

4.      Right Dilemma – The explicit and implicit expectation of what makes the instructional product or process correct.

Time Dilemma

This is the easiest one to recognize because so often we are asked to create a 2-hour or 4-hour online course or half-day workshop. This expectation is set from the very beginning and there’s not much we have to consider. That is unless we want to challenge this completely arbitrary instructional expectation.

Since you may feel you don’t have the place, position or opportunity to say it, I will. This is the dumbest thing we must deal with in modern instructional design. The completely unfounded expectation that there is some correlation between the amount of time a learner participates in a training and the training’s effectiveness is universal.

Again, and so I don’t have to keep repeating myself, there are NO articles, books, studies or otherwise which envision a universal time requirement regardless of the specifics of the topic, performance expectation, learner background, etc.

Design Strategy Dilemma

The only aspect more expansive than instructional process variation is instructional design strategies. Ever since someone put the first instructional product online there have been more and more ways to deliver instructional content to learners. This has been fueled by the tools available to build the products, the creative desires of instructional designers, and the broad choice of methods for learners to consume the product.

For the true instructional designer, this is the best part of our field. Everyone loves dreaming up all the ways we can deliver content, entertain and motivate the learner, document completion or simplify the experience. The endless – and ever growing – number of strategies available to any ID team makes choosing the most appropriate one the real dilemma.

Process Dilemma

Since I have been writing about, teaching on, and working with instructional design processes for nearly thirty years, I have passion for this one. The early instructional design models were intended to create consistency throughout and across projects within an organization – specifically the US military. They were then adapted to address the need for instructional design in public schools, universities, and corporations. Early on, these worked as intended because most, if not all, instruction was classroom-based and instructor-led.

However, with the explosion of the internet and corresponding online instruction, these models failed to provide the needed direction. Contemporary approaches came about to provide more relevant guidance. [I’m a big fan of the Successive Approximation Model (SAM) if you weren’t already aware.]

Yet, like their predecessors, these processes only provide a contextless approach to deal with general and expected challenges in the design and development of online instruction. You are still left needing to modify your process to address the context of your organization.

Right Dilemma

I am using the word Right in place of Quality for this dilemma. The reason is that there is no such thing as quality in the design and development of a creative product. There are best practices which provide guardrails for our efforts. But there is no universal definition of quality, no matter what anyone says to the contrary.

That’s why this dilemma is the hardest nut to crack.

Even if there was this universal measure of quality, how would we know we reached it or that everyone agrees to it or that this project demands it? The only way a universal measure of quality would be of benefit is if we were creating the same thing repeatedly. We aren’t. So, we can’t possibly know any and all of the things which will be or not be right from the onset of our instructional design project. However, we can find out during the process.

If you are being honest with yourself, this dilemma is the one that makes you the most angry, the most frustrated, and the most dejected. The only thing that is universal is our collective – almost daily – disappointment being told something isn’t right. We start projects praying that if it must happen, it happens early or in time to revise the deliverable.

Engage Throughout the Project

These four dilemmas are very common barriers to our success as instructional designers. Failing to effectively identify or address each of these will make projects run over schedule, cost too much or deliver ineffective products.

Without the specific guidance missing in contemporary instructional design literature and teachings, we are dependent on our ability to identify these dilemmas and mitigate their impact on our projects and products.

The core of my instructional design belief is that we are measured by our ability to engage those within the project more so than the impact of the product. Understanding these dilemmas and creatively incorporating strategies to address them will be your greatest skill as an instructional designer.

If you are interested in finding out some ways I have identified and addressed these dilemmas, follow my blog. I’ll be discussing these and other challenges every week.