The Role of the Instructional Designer

Blogging the 2014 AECT International Convention.

Understanding the Collaborative Relationship between Instructional Designers and Clients: A Typology of Instructional Designer Activities

Presenters: Bill Sugar, East Carolina University; Rob Moore, UNC-Chapel Hill

Slides online here

Based on instructional designer log entries, interviews, project information. They were trying to see what happens in the “day in the life” of an instructional designer. The study was done on one instructional designer’s daily life over a whole year, and 111 unique activities were categorized. Most of the clients thought they saw the instructional designer monthly or once every two or three months.

Types of Activities

  • Design: elearning, graphics, instructional design planning, PowerPoint, social media, webinars
  • Production: audio, images, video
  • Support: courses, elearning, just-in-time support, LMS support, social media, webinars
    • Webinars included supporting the back channel and making sure things go well. They do a lot of webinars.
    • Just-in-time support includes walking the hallways for a break to just see if anyone needs anything
    • On faculty support: Anything you only use every six months is going to be hard and you will need support for. good attitude towards faculty asking for training over & over.
    • It really helps to know the faculty, to know what’s happening with their families, travel, etc. and to negotiate on deadlines.
  • Non-Instructional design activiities: administrative tasks, meetings

ID Roles

Interesting Notes and Reflections

  • About 19 hours per course
  • In our shop, we split these different functions across different positions and roles on our team
  • The next step after this study is to generate a survey or instrument for instructional designers
  • Lit review prepping for this study is published as a book: Studies of ID Practices

Instructional Designers and Faculty Developers: Pedagogies, Perceptions and Practices in Mobile Learning: A Qualitative Study

Presenter: Kim Hosler, University of Denver

This study looked at how nine instructional designers were supporting faculty with mobile learning efforts.

Mobile learning definition: learning happening across locations, times, topics, and technologies using small hand-held, and possibly in the future, wearable devices. People can interact with their surroundings using digital tools. See Mobile Learning.

The instructional designers had to have education in either instructional design, educational technology or curriculum and instruction (yay here’s evidence that using C&I folks as my instructional designers is appropriate)

One thing she found as a surprise of the research is that really not much was happening on the campuses with mobile learning – and faculty weren’t as involved as expected.

What frameworks were they using to support faculty with mobile learning? Some said ADDIE, some said Bloom’s and Dee Fink’s Significant Learning Experiences.

In this study, each instructional design created a visual representation of how they would approach mobile learning on their campus. Interesting on their focus. Most of these instructional designers were working in centers for teaching on university campuses.

  • One started with mobile learning jumping off from the LMS.
  • Another one took a high level administrative and planning perspective.
  • Another started with a faculty centric view and worked out thrugh faculty issues such as workload, support, resources, etc.
  • Another one said we don’t have time for mobile learning because we are working on pedagogy, andragogy. If faculty can’t write learning objectives well, how can we focus on mobile learning?
  • Another found the infrastructure support as the foundation of implementation of mobile learning and thought about institutional needs.

One thing to consider was how teaching and learning centers are organized. They have different names, different foci, etc.

I’m inspired by the focus in this research on how instructional designers are using models and frameworks to guide their work. There are additional models and frameworks that are built around educational technology that we could be using more effectively to guide our work.

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