How to Become an Instructional Designer - The Grind is not Glamorous

A few weeks ago, I stumbled across a powerful 4-minute lesson on filmmaking where, Casey Neistat, a YouTube personality, filmmaker, and co-founder of the multimedia company, Beme, said:

"The grind is not glamorous."

- Casey Neistat in "Filmmaking is a Sport" bit.ly/3d2pwo4 (Context starts @1:33; phrase @1:49)

It isn't anything new or something others haven't said before. But these five words say more than their worth when it comes to understanding and managing expectations around building expertise.

Over the last few years, perhaps triggered by the pandemic, there has been an uptake of people wanting to join the learning/training industry. Teachers are looking to transition from teaching children to training adults and folks from other related industries such as media and User Interface Design are looking to explore how best to make their way into the field of learning experience design. And to address this growing need, there are articles, posts, videos, and a range of individuals and consulting firms that are sharing their version of the steps to become an instructional designer.

Some wonderful people from the L&D industry have provided specific tips and strategies to build a career in the field of instructional design. Some of those resources provide a fairly decent picture of what it takes to become an instructional designer. There is a good focus on the skill set including technical and technological skills and there is also a lot of discussion around the glamour behind the job - good salary, fancy titles, flexible work arrangements, awards and recognition, career progression, etc.

However, the one thing that I find missing in many of those articles, blog posts, videos, and webinars is the gap between describing what expertise looks like versus describing what it takes to develop it.

Few people talk about the 'rougher' side of how to become an instructional designer and how it takes solid, grinding work to get to the glamorous part. Yes, there are opportunities to be creative, but there can also be endless days of monotonous work. Yes, there are a variety of projects but there can also be years of doing the same thing for the same client or doing the same thing for different clients. Yes, there are rewards but there can also be mistakes with serious consequences.

So, what is this process of developing expertise and why is it not glamorous?

Developing expertise is not simple and there is no mess-free way to do it. No two people develop expertise in the same way and the struggle is real. One cannot become an Instructional Designer only by gathering certificates, attending conferences and webinars, learning software tools, and collecting other 'shiny' stuff. It is the everyday, so-called, boring things that Instructional Designers do - like stakeholder communication, project planning, content research, needs, task, audience, and content analysis, instructional writing, etc. that yield the results. The routine stuff in an Instructional Designer's job can sometimes be predictable and monotonous. But it is important to do the so-called boring stuff and keep doing it well over a long period in order to become successful. It is the days, weeks and years of doing basic things right - every time - that have a compounding effect on developing expertise. But it takes more than experience; it also needs time and continuous feedback.

Author of New York Times bestseller Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman says, "True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes."

Patty Shank describes in this article how, "Expertise takes sustained, deliberate practice in the tasks of expertise over time."

Mary Myatt describes in her article, "If everything is easy, it is hard for learning to take place. Expertise comes through the struggle of not knowing everything, having sufficient support and making sense of it on our own terms"

While the 10,000-hour rule on developing expertise widely promoted in popular literature has been dismissed and debunked, there is something to be said about the value of and importance of the grind.

The grind is not glamorous but without it, there is no glamour.

Photo by: Taruna Goel

Resources:

https://youtu.be/ksopQLMQsq8 - Daniel Kahneman
https://www.td.org/insights/science-of-learning-101-job-performance-and-expertise - Patty Shank
https://www.marymyatt.com/blog/developing-expertise - Mary Myatt

Saying "Yes" With 13 Smart Questions

Image Source: Pixabay

As performance consultants, we are often called upon when "training" has already been established as the proposed "solution" to the performance problem. We hear requests like: 

"We need training on ABC. Can you do it?" 

In such a situation, we are expected to act quickly and be responsive to the needs of the stakeholders knowing fully that "training" may not be the solution after all! Our first reaction as performance consultants is perhaps to say, "No! Training is not the answer to all performance problems." 

But is there another way to respond? 

 
In one of his many blog posts dedicated to Joe H. Harless, Guy W. Wallace talks about how Joe taught him never to say "No" to training requests and instead say:

“Yes – I can help you – and I can help you even more if we can do a little analysis first!”

Joe Harless was the originator of the term "front-end analysis" (FEA) in his book, An Ounce of Analysis Is Worth a Pound of Objectives, originally published in 1970 (Harless, 1975).

He believed that analysis is more effective at the front rather than at the end. What he meant was that it is helpful to analyze the problem before developing a solution rather than to only conduct a back-end analysis, i.e. training evaluation. 

Joe Harless explained that the purpose of conducting a front-end analysis is to ask a series of “smart questions” in order to prevent spending money on unnecessary activities, to come up with the most appropriate solution(s), and to produce desired performance outcomes and that front-end analysis is about money, first and foremost. 

"It's about how to spend money in ways that will be most beneficial to the organization and the performers in that organization. It is also about avoiding spending money on silly things like instruction when there is no instructional problem; or training everybody in everything when you can get by with training fewer people in a few things; or flying lots of trainees in for a course when a send-out checklist would do." (p. 229)

Harless (1973) shared 13 smart questions to be asked during a front-end analysis:

1. Do we have a problem?
2. Do we have a performance problem?
3. How will we know when the problem is solved?
4. What is the performance problem?
5. Should we allocate resources to solve it?
6. What are the possible causes of the problem?
7. What evidence bears on each possibility?
8. What is the probable cause?
9. What general solution type is indicated?
10. What are the alternative sub classes of solutions?
11. What are the costs, effects, and development times of each solution?
12. What are the constraints?
13. What are the overall goals?

The underlying assumption of conducting a front-end analysis is that training is not always the answer. These 13 questions offer a job-aid. These are not the exact questions to be asked and will need to be modified to make them specific to the problem/challenge being analyzed. However, these questions can help begin a conversation and help analyze the problem to identify the underlying issue(s). 

Here is a video of late Joe H. Harless being interviewed by Guy Wallace as a part of Guy's HPT Legacy Series. Joe Harless was the first in the series. (https://youtu.be/02gkvX5-NV4) 

The HPT Video Series was started by Guy in 2008 as a means of sharing the diversity of HPT Practitioners and Practices in the workplace and academia. The full set of videos, over 160 can be found here. (https://eppic.biz/guys-video-locker-drawer-hpt-practitioner-and-legacy-series/). 

I have been following Guy's work on improving performance since I started working in the learning industry in 1999 and I was humbled and honored to make the HPT Series list at #154 in April 2022 (https://eppic.biz/2022/04/28/hpt-video-2022-taruna-goel/)

Designing for Unpredictability of Use

"It is Raining Umbrellas!" by Taruna Goel (Underbrella at Bill Curtis Square, Vancouver March 2019)

A few days ago, as I was researching more about the practice of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), I came upon an intriguing idea related to designing for "unpredictability of use". It isn't the first time I have heard it or read about it, but this time around, I approached it with a UDL lens as a way to be more inclusive in the design of learning experiences.

Do you think about the unexpected use(s) of the learning products/ services you create? Do you imagine how your “learning product” may be reused, reshared, or remixed in serendipitous ways? In my effort to learn more about this idea of the unpredictability of use, I ventured into a few compelling reads, and here are some highlights that were uncovered from that exercise:

• "Between specificity and openness: How architects deal with design-use complexities": https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0142694X19300869

Liesbeth Stam, Peter-Paul Verbeek, Ann Heylighen, Design Studies, Volume 66, 2020, Pages 54-81, ISSN 0142-694X, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2019.11.010 

"Anticipating use entails a continuous testing of solutions between specificity and openness. Seeking a balance, these architects repeatedly ask themselves how open their design can be, such that it can still support specific use practices (e.g., meeting colleagues, recording or editing video's). And vice versa: how specific can they be in imagining use such that different interpretations (e.g., by users or the client) remain possible? These questions are explored continuously. To foster particular social outcomes, architects develop specificity into their designs. To deal with the unpredictability of use architects aim to create open designs.

The more specific the design (focus), the more difficult it is for a building or space to respond to the unexpected and unforeseen – i.e., to diversity of use(r)s as well as changing contexts, e.g., related to social and technological change. So designs need to be specific, yet simultaneously ‘open’."

• "Users as co-designers: Visual–spatial experiences at Whitworth Art Gallery": https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2095263519300275

Ahlam Ammar Sharif, Frontiers of Architectural Research, Volume 9, Issue 1, 2020, Pages 106-118, ISSN 2095-2635, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foar.2019.04.003

"This paper implies that designs and users are co-created by the ways they interact, which means that the success of designs should not be determined by how they align to specific uses but by how they are adaptable to the multiplicity and unpredictability of use. 

Designs could be recreated by uses in different ways, making them more livable. Designs could further uncover new potentials because of the creativity of their usage. In the case of museums, users could be mistakenly expected to interact with an artwork in specific ways.

On the contrary, users bring new potentials to the building while inviting different types of interaction. Accordingly, designs should be adaptive to and flexible for different categories and functions to invite more users and stimulate their creativity with respect to the ways they interact with the building." 

• “Serendipitous Reuse” IEEE-Serendipitous_Reuse.pdf (vinoski.net)

Steve Vinoski, Verivue

Steve opens his article with a powerful quote: “Engineer for serendipity. —Roy Fielding” Taking an enterprise architecture perspective, Steve asks:

"If we’re wise, we never assume that serendipity will come along just in time whenever we need it. So is it really possible, as Fielding suggests, to make a given situation more amenable to serendipity? Is it feasible to arrange the primary elements of an area such as enterprise integration in a way that encourages the "development of beneficial applications that the enterprise architects never dreamed of? 

The more specific the service interface, the less likely it is to be reused, serendipitously or otherwise, because the likelihood that an interface will fit what a client application requires shrinks as the interface’s specificity increases. 

Highly specialized interfaces inhibit general reuse because only purpose-built clients can invoke them. Should requirements change — and they will — modifying such highly specialized services and clients to fulfill the new requirements can be costly because of the high degree of coupling between them."

-.-.-.-.-

All of this is to say that there is an important relationship between design and serendipitous use. Even though we design things based on what we know and what we might imagine happening in the future, it is still a lens that’s based on trying to solve the problems we are facing now. But knowing that the future may not be anything like the present, if we don’t design for serendipitous use and unpredictability, our designs have failed from the get-go.

Needless to say, we can’t plan for all possible uses. But what we can plan for is to create those opportunities and spaces for the unpredictable to happen. Infact, I’d say that designing for unpredictability is a critical part of designing for inclusivity.

Perhaps, as learning designers, we can do more to explore how serendipitous knowledge exchanges happen and how designing for unpredictable use nurtures these kinds of opportunities. We need to think about what can we do to allow, enable and nurture the reuse and repurposing of the “learning experience” in other ways. What kind of systems, processes and techniques can we use that allow folks to customize and personalize the learning experience in ways that they find most meaningful and valuable?

The two key ways I have found I can do this are to:

• involve a range of stakeholders in the design process including the learners, and 
• give learners the choice and voice in exploring and participating in the learning experience by providing a variety of ways to develop skills and competencies in ways that meet their specific interests and needs. This can mean anything from simply unlocking course navigation to more complex choices about what resources to explore and how best to assess their own learning. 

Essentially, when we design for the unpredictability of use, we give back the learners some control of how they want to engage and learn and more importantly, how they want to represent and express what they have learned. 

When Roy Fielding said “Engineer for serendipity", he juxtaposed two very contrasting ideas and did it in a beautiful way. And that’s the balance we need to constantly strive for: designing for and making things specific and at the same time, allowing for and enabling unpredictable and accidental use.

Becoming an "Expert Learner"

Photo by: Taruna Goel

“Essentially, the goal of education has shifted from knowledge acquisition to learner expertise… becoming an expert learner is a process, not a fixed goal.” ― Anne Meyer, Universal Design for Learning: Theory and Practice

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) defines "expert learners" as learners who are resourceful and knowledgeable, strategic and goal-directed, and purposeful and motivated. The UDL framework is about guiding learners to become better learners. So, the expertise that we seek here is not in the subject area being taught. Instead, it is the expertise associated with #learninghowtolearn and doing it strategically and purposely. As some would say, it is the "mastery of learning" rather than the "mastery of knowledge". 

As described in the video by CAST (See References), among other things, expert learners:

• Set goals
• Make choices about learning
• Reflect on their learning 

In the book, Universal design for learning: Theory and practice, Meyer, Rose, and Gordon (2014) note that expert learners are not created in a vacuum. They argue that expert learners require expert teachers who need to be expert learners themselves. They go a step further and highlight that learning environments need to support, encourage and nurture the goal of learning expertise for all.

As L&D professionals, teachers, instructors, facilitators, we need to approach our learnability and learning expertise as a continuum. And a big part of becoming an expert learner is to view learning as a process, not a product.

References:

UDL & Expert Learning (Video)

UDL Practices of Expert Learning by CAST (Document) 

What is an expert learner? (Blogpost)

Meyer, A., Rose, D. H., & Gordon, D. (2014). Universal design for learning: Theory and practice. Wakefield, MA: CAST Professional Publishing. (Book)

Writing in the Margins with Hypothes.is

This post was originally published at BCCampus as a part of the FLO Tech Tool Tip for the month of February.

We are all too familiar with marking up books with highlighter pens and adding hand-scribbled notes along the margins. If your books were hand-me-downs like mine, then you’ve probably already seen the power of collaborative annotation.

But how do you take notes while reading websites, blogs, and online articles? Perhaps you hand-write in a physical notebook but then have to capture the related context too. Or you type notes in a notes app or a Word document and save them on your mobile phone or computer. Maybe you bookmark the hyperlink only to never see it again.

What if you had a tool that would allow you to mark directly on the webpage and embed your notes right into the particular passage just like you did in your books? What if you could also make it viewable for others to add or respond to and have conversations about your notes within the text? 

Hypothes.is can help you do that! 

Hypothes.is (Hypothesis) is an online social annotation tool you can use to annotate websites, blogs, and online articles and journals. You can use it as a private note-taking tool or create groups to work collaboratively to annotate a webpage or any online text. Hypothesis is a free, open-source tool. Once you create an account, you can download a Google Chrome browser extension and annotate any webpage or online text. You can annotate privately or publicly and create groups for friends, co-workers, or course participants to annotate collaboratively. 

To get started with Hypothesis:

1. Create an account. 
2. Install the Chrome extension, or install the Hypothesis bookmarklet if you are using a browser other than Chrome. 
3. Start annotating!

Using Hypothesis, you can highlight text, which is the digital equivalent of swiping a yellow marker over a passage of text. You can annotate text, which is the digital equivalent of a marginal note, and you can reply to an existing annotation and add your comments or feedback. 

Source: web.hypothes.is

Annotations support and enhance individual reading by helping the reader be more present in a world of online distractions. You can interpret the text based on your individual context and purpose and highlight sections of the text for future reference or reading. Annotating can help you stay focused on the text, and annotations “anchor” the discussion right into the text. If you open it up and make it collaborative, by reading the annotations by others, you can interpret the text from different perspectives. The real value of social annotation is that it can help you recognize opposing views or understandings of the text. This creates an opportunity to engage in critical reading and deeper thinking. 

I have used Hypothesis to create opportunities for discussion on my blog posts and look forward to using it in courses I teach. But you can use it in many different ways, including for taking personal notes, course instruction, or in the workplace to collaboratively review and annotate work documents. 

If you are teaching a course, some strategies for using Hypothesis are:

• Inviting participants to review course curriculum, study notes, and reading materials and annotate parts of the text that are confusing or unclear
• Pre-populating the reading materials with annotations tagged as “Instructor Questions” and encouraging participants to respond to the questions and share ideas as they read
• Asking participants to create discussion questions by annotating parts of the text and inviting peers to share opinions 

Annotations using Hypothesis “makes reading visible, active and social for students.” In addition, social annotation tools like Hypothesis support Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles and help build “learner choice and voice” into the design of learning by providing multiple options for student engagement, representation, and action and expression.

In “From the Margins to the Center: The Future of Annotation,” scholars Joanna Wolfe and Christine Neuwirth identify four primary functions of text annotations, including: 

• Facilitating reading and later writing tasks, which include annotations that support reading for both personal and professional purposes
• Eavesdropping on the insights of other readers, which involves sharing of annotations
• Providing feedback to writers or promoting communication with collaborators, which can include personal, professional, and education-related feedback
• Calling attention to topics and important passages for which scholarly annotations, footnotes, and call-outs often function (Wikipedia)

Are you ready to “write in the margins” using Hypothesis? Here’s a short video that can help you get started! 

Did you know the annotations made in the margins of a book or any other document are called marginalia? The scholia on classical manuscripts are the earliest known form of marginalia.

Marginalia in the hand of grammarian and politician James Harris (1709–1780) in a 1556 edition of Aristotle’s Physics

Needs Assessment Versus Needs Analysis

The terms, “Needs Assessment” and “Needs Analysis” are often used interchangeably. How are they similar? What makes them different? 

This is a question that comes up often in my conversations with both new and experienced instructional designers. There are many views and perspectives about the correct answer. It doesn't help that we have different types of analysis including performance analysis, task analysis, context analysis, audience analysis, etc. 

So, here's my response. 

Given a business problem or an opportunity:
Needs Assessment is the identification of the gap that exists between the current state and the desired state.

 
Needs Analysis (or Gap Analysis) is the identification of the root cause of the gap. 

When applied to training, we also see it being referred to as Training Needs Analysis (TNA). In the context of TNA, there is a performance gap in terms of the underlying knowledge, skills or practice.

But a performance gap may also occur due to poor environment, inadequate processes, lack of tools or resources, lack of motivation, absence of performance standards, etc. Training is not the right choice given these gaps and that's when one would use Performance Analysis. The scope of Performance Analysis is much wider than that of Training Needs Analysis.

Both Training Needs Analysis and Performance Analysis require gathering information about the learners/employees (Audience Analysis), the tasks/work they are expected to perform (Task Analysis), and the context in which the task/work is performed (Context Analysis).

Clear as mud? :)