Instructional designers at work: A study of how designers design

12 Apr 12

Heather Ross

In another common element, they defended their departures from prescriptive practice with ideas from the broader design literature: ideas from Nigel Cross on “designerly ways of knowing” (Cross, 2000), and from Donald Schön on reflective practice (Schön, 1987, 1988).
Contextual inquiry has three key features: 1) actual practitioners are the source of data; 2) practitioners collaborate as partners in the data collection; 3) data collection focuses on a clearly defined set of concerns (Raven & Flanders, 1996). In our case, we did not observe our participants at work, but rather we collected their reflections on how they go about doing their work. We used a lightly structured protocol to interview the participants, beginning with the questions that follow, which asked them to focus on events drawn from experience, and the actions they generated: “Can you recall encountering a specific problem in designing instruction for a client?” We followed this up with: “What did you do about it?” and “Can you show us by reconstructing what you did?” In general these questions generated long, laterally-branching conversations involving the designers and the researchers, ranging over various examples of design challenges, a wide range of techniques for responding to these challenges, and to issues we had not anticipated.

20 Aug 11

Samantha Fecich

01 Oct 09

Barbara Ritter

Instructional design (ID) in its short life has been dominated by behaviourist approaches despite critique focusing on issues of practice as well as theory. Nonetheless, little research has addressed two fundamental questions: “What constitutes good instructional design?” and “How do instructional designers create good design?” We have begun a search for answers by asking a sample of eight instructional designers to reconstruct how they helped faculty members deal with challenging design problems as they adopted a Learning Management System and other web-based technologies in support of their teaching. From audio-recordings we derived response categories consistently recurring within and across interviews, then validated our analysis with the sampled group of instructional designers. Our analysis suggests that instructional designers employ a set of social skills and cognitive tools that enable them to act as a pedagogical “conscience” in the design process. We interpret these skills in terms of “theory of mind” in the context of instructional design.

27 Apr 09

Eva Wilhelm

Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology / La revue canadienne de l’apprentissage et de la technologie, V34(2) Spring / printemps, 2008

e-learning research instructionaldesign

12 Apr 09

This also tells us that the effective instructional designer will have to spend a lot of time plumbing the SME's mind, learning as much as possible about the material, and trying to understand the learners' perspectives, rather than relying upon the classical ID models to provide the requisite insight.

dennis_dicks cindy_ives CJLT instructional_design behaviourism systems_thinking theory_of_mind

Our interviews appear to confirm the findings of Kenny, Zhang, Schwier, and Campbell (2004) that instructional designers do not do their work by following established models, nor by basing actions on theory. Instead, our designers’ tactics suggest they view design as an “ill-structured problem” (Jonassen, 2002; Schön, 1987) or “wicked problem” (Becker, 2007) with many possible solutions, which they pursue with a large repertoire of social and cognitive skills.

06 Apr 09

wayne anderson

Instructional Design education instructional strategies

05 Apr 09

Dan Tao

Instructional Designers at work: A study of how designers design

ID

03 Apr 09

Allisun O'Connell

instructionaldesign

Stylianos Mystakidis

elearning instructionaldesign

31 Mar 09

Sheri Edwards

Our analysis suggests that instructional designers employ a set of social skills and cognitive tools that enable them to act as a pedagogical “conscience” in the design process. We interpret these skills in terms of “theory of mind” in the context of instructional design.

27 Mar 09

bearclau

article on instructional designers

InstructionalDesign article ID ArticleToRead elearning

26 Mar 09

Claire Brooks

Abstract: Instructional design (ID) in its short life has been dominated by behaviourist approaches despite critique focusing on issues of practice as well as theory. Nonetheless, little research has addressed two fundamental questions: “What constitutes

instructionaldesign e-learning pedagogy learningdesign for:dhirst0

Wenyi Ho

What constitutes good instructional design?” and “How do instructional designers create good design?” The researchers have begun a search for answers by asking a sample of eight instructional designers to reconstruct how they helped faculty members deal with challenging design problems as they adopted a Learning Management System and other web-based technologies in support of their teaching.

instructional design ID process models

Kenny, Zhang, Schwier and Campbell (2004) were able to find only ten papers dealing with the topic six surveys, one interview and three case studies examining how instructional designers view their work. All these studies focused on very broad roles and tasks, such as those outlined in a standard ADDIE model: Analyse, Design, Develop, Implement, Evaluate (e.g., Seels & Glasgow (1998); or very general skills (e.g. communicate with the client). No study discovered designers following a theory-based approach, and none investigated the cognitive processes underlying design activities.
we adopted a grounded theory approach (Glaser, 1992), with a modified “contextual inquiry” methodology.
Our study focused on instructional design practitioners working in an instructional technology support unit at an urban Medical-Doctoral University.
Our purposive sample (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) consisted of a group of eight professional instructional designers responsible for helping university faculty members shift some of their instruction to an online Learning Management System (WebCT Vista, in this case) or other web-based environments.
we did not observe our participants at work, but rather we collected their reflections on how they go about doing their work. We used a lightly structured protocol to interview the participants, beginning with the questions that follow, which asked them to focus on events drawn from experience, and the actions they generated: “Can you recall encountering a specific problem in designing instruction for a client?” We followed this up with: “What did you do about it?” and “Can you show us by reconstructing what you did?”
activity sequencing, information flows, attitudinal issues, artifact manipulations and physical conditions
We interpreted these actions as interventions directed towards two types of goals: building relationships through the use of social skills; and building sense through the use of cognitive tools.
Table 2 lists the set of cognitive skills we distilled from what our designers reported using as they shaped the design concept in discussions with their clients.
instructional conscience
who must deploy her own abilities to shape the expertise of the client into a sound pedagogical structure.
nstructional designers do not do their work by following established models, nor by basing actions on theory. Instead, our designers’ tactics suggest they view design as an “ill-structured problem” (Jonassen, 2002; Schön, 1987) or “wicked problem” (Becker, 2007) with many possible solutions, which they pursue with a large repertoire of social and cognitive skills.