How instructional designers script learning experiences

How do instructional designers design and develop learning experiences?

Our job is to put learners in institutions that will stimulate their minds’ innate learning mechanisms. Which is why we need to know how these mechanisms work and have good strategies to exploit them. A really good learning experience is something like a real-world experience, but more focused, time-compressed and emotionally enhanced. A flight simulator curriculum is like that and so is a video game, which is why there is so much interest in the use of games in learning. Instructional designers need to do the same. 

Are there any typical difficulties that one faces while creating curriculum?
I would point to three challenges unique to instructional design. First, everyone seems to be an amateur instructional designer, and most people consider instructional design to create something like the class room training they experienced in school. Unfortunately, schools, with their predominantly passive, teach-by-telling approach, are a terrible model for education. To create a great curriculum, you have to get everyone involved to try to teach people by lecturing them. Secondly, subject matter experts have the skills you want to impart to your learners, but seldom remember how they learned it. So it’s a real challenge for the instructional designer and subject matter expert working together to figure out exactly what learners need to know, and how best to get at it in training. Also, a lot of organisations struggle with the economics of training. They don’t accurately account for what it costs to send people through training—travel costs, time off the job, opportunity cost and so on. As a result, companies replace a day of face to face learning with lowest-common-denomenator e-learning that costs only a few thousand dollars per hour to build. 

These days, companies employ social media technology in e-learning courses to create social learning opportunities. What is your take on the benefits and challenges of using social media tools in e-learning?
In a learning context, social media tools generally give you the ability to create a sort of virtual classroom interaction. That can mean anything from share-and-comment model, which is interactive, to the use of social media tools to facilitate virtual teams working on learning projects together. Much more interesting is the ability of social media to support unstructured peer-to-peer learning or more accurately the self-organising peer-to-peer learning. In a broad sense, social media can facilitate what are called communities of practice—that is, communities that form spontaneously amongst people in the same trade or profession.

What are the current trends in instructional design?
A lot of interesting things are happening. But the one that I think holds the most promise is gaming. I think in the future we’ll take a lot of our training in the form of real-time 3D interactive games. And I think that’s going to be fantastic.

Any advise to aspirants who wish to take this up?
I think, the thing that distinguishes really good instructional designers is a big interest in—and understanding of—how people learn. It may sound pretty obvious. But strange as it seems, it is possible to approach instructional design as a trade in which the key is to learn all the rules for producing the various work products that add up to a course design. If you can design an experience with all of these properties that aligns well to the real-world context in which learners will be called upon to employ the skills they are learning, you are going to be successful as an instructional designer.