You May Be an Instructional Designer

By Keith Hopper and Wei Sun

Pretend that you have been hired by the military to design instruction to train thousands of recruits to safely, effectively use hand grenades.

According to the Association for Educational Communications and Technology, U.S. employers spend about $110 billion each year for about 40 hours of training per employee. Corporate employers tend to see little distinction between what technical communicators and instructional designers do, and adding instructional design to your skill set and track record will make you stand out as a bargain in a field of applicants and possibly open an exciting new career track you may be surprisingly well prepared for.

Sister Fields

Like siblings separated at birth who meet decades later and discover that they have developed, matured, and worked in similar ways, technical communication (TC) and instructional design (ID) are “sister fields.”

The Society for Technical Communication defines the field of technical communication as the process of conveying useable information about a specific domain to an intended audience. Instructional design icons Robert Branch and Kent Gustafson define the field of instructional design as a system of procedures for developing education and training programs in a consistent and reliable fashion. Luminaries such as Saul Carliner and Michael Hughes, well known to both fields, have been pointing out the similarity for more than a decade.

TC graduates often find themselves being asked to develop and/or deliver training; ID graduates find themselves unprepared to design good documents needed in their training work. A graduate program at Southern Polytechnic State University was recently started that merges these disciplines into a single area of study (http://iid.spsu.edu/index.html). This first-of-its-kind program may signal a shift in the way both technical communicators and instructional designers see their knowledge bases and skill sets. Both fields have something to offer the other, and both fields lack important things the other has.

Some Good News

If you are a technical communication professional interested in moving toward work as an instructional designer, you already have knowledge and skills that apply. Professional technical communicators create and polish documents in a systematic way and may know that this follows the best-known model for managing documentation projects (see Hackos). Comparing this side-by-side with the foundation model of instructional design, ADDIE, shows how closely these match (see Table 1).

Table 1. Comparing seminal model of instruction design and comparable process model in technical communication

If you switch Hackos's steps three (implementation) and four (production), her model becomes identical to ADDIE. ADDIE is considered the touchstone and source of most models of ID. Similar TC literature, such as Thomas Barker on writing software documentation and Ginny Redish on information design, shows a close connection between TC and ID methods.

Whether you are creating a professional document or designing instruction, you begin by thinking about what the users or learners are like (because they are not all the same) and where they will use what you make. Then you specify how your product will look when it is finished, you create it, try it, get evaluation information from users or learners, and then plough this feedback into the process to make it better.

What You Have

TC professionals tend to be clear, logical thinkers who take complex mounds of raw information and transform them into sensibly organized, clear documentation for an audience of readers. Many TC pros also have an artistic and aesthetic sense that the typical instructional designer lacks. The work of ID is basically the same, but the outcome is not a document but rather a detailed plan of what to teach and how to teach it. The product of ID is also something intangible: learners know something that can be proved when they do something with the new knowledge.

What You Need

Think “Performance Improvement” Instead of “Teaching”

Performance technology is the parent field of instructional design. Grandfather pioneers and authors like the well-known Robert Mager and Peter Pipe team and the brilliant late Thomas Gilbert have been saying, writing, and doing this for years. From this hard-nosed perspective, the purpose and intent of training is never just to “have a class” but to fix a gap in a worker's (aka a learner or user's) ability to do something properly. One of the wise lessons from performance technology is that we should just stop trying to teach people to “wanna” because this is preaching, not teaching, and it doesn't work. It may appear to work on the short term, but that's probably explained by the fact that if workers are enduring “training,” they are smart enough to know that management is looking in their direction. It is the same thing you notice when drivers on the freeway see a police car and suddenly drive the speed limit, use their blinkers, allow space between cars, and put their hands at ten and two o'clock positions on the steering wheel—this lasts until the police car is out of sight. The lesson is that documents and training are often not the answer to poor worker or learner performance, although they may be part of an answer.

Instructional designers step up to solve gaps in performance, when training is really the solution or part of the solution, and do not make training just for the sake of having training. And when they do develop training, they do it by focusing on what the learner is missing and not on how the teacher wants to have class. This is why instructional designers use action verbs like build, solve, calculate, and assemble and never fuzzy words seen in a college syllabus such as appreciate, know, or understand—these cannot be measured, seen, or proved, and they do not result in learners being ready to do something new.

Stop Thinking Like a Teacher

Probably the toughest change a TC professional must make to become an effective instructional designer is to refrain from teaching as we were taught and think like an instructional designer. The difference is subtle but critical. For most teachers, curriculum has already been decided by others and there is no media choice to be made—teachers by and large deliver traditional stand-up instruction. Teachers very sensibly begin by considering what they think best fits in a lesson and how they can personally best deliver it. This is why teacher lesson plans often resemble the following: “Students will watch a short film on temperature measurement, then the teacher will perform a demonstration.”

But this is a description of what will happen in the classroom, not an instructional goal that would be developed by a professional instructional designer. A proper instructional goal in ID focuses on the learners and what they will do. For example: “Learners will use mercury thermometers calibrated in Fahrenheit to measure temperatures of various liquids, then convert these measurements to Celsius units.”

Professional instructional designers begin and end with what they will see the learner do rather than how they plan to conduct class. The elegance in this approach is that it trims away the extraneous and leaves only the essential. It also decides what and how testing will be done—professional instructional designers test learners on exactly what was taught—no surprises or tricks.

Consider this example: Pretend that you have been hired by the military to design instruction to train thousands of recruits to safely, effectively use hand grenades. You are not a soldier, you have never seen a hand grenade, and you have two weeks to develop this training. Can you do it? How? There is no time to find and digest all the literature on warfare, explosives, and hand grenades. You will probably simply find an expert hand grenade user and watch how they perform the task, taking careful notes, dividing and chunking the steps and essential information, and designing instruction based on this. This is the elegance of systematic instructional design—it eliminates the temptation to include anything that is not essential. It also automatically suggests the way to test proficiency. What sort of test would satisfy you that learners can properly use a hand grenade? A multiple-choice test? A written reflection on hand grenades? An essay on the ethical aspects of war ordnance? No, as a technical communicator with common sense, you would require learners to show that they can use a hand grenade.

See, you may be an instructional designer!

Steps for instructional designers

Step 4) Evaluate results.

Step 1) Plan for learner target.

Step 3) Help learners transfer lesson to their work.

Step 2) Get learner attention, toss them the content, ask them to DO something with it, give and get feedback, refine the plan for next time.

Information is Not Teaching

The sort of people who are attracted to work in technical communication tend to be pretty good readers and writers, and there are some people who seem to learn perfectly well with only a nicely written document, their own initiative, and a little time. People like Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, and Bill Gates have taught themselves to understand and do all sorts of things, some as complex as practicing law or becoming fluent in another language. If you are like this and a good technical writer, it may be tough for you to grasp that you are in the minority. The most skillfully prepared document will not fix the performance gap in many learners.

A key to planning how to transform information into instruction is an insight by David Jonassen: “Learning is a process of meaning making, not of knowledge reception” (57). Jonassen and many other leaders in teaching and learning have come to the same basic conclusion—real learning doesn't happen from listening passively but by rolling up sleeves and doing something.

Can Your Document Be Made Into Training?

In many cases, the answer is a confident yes. The way to begin is to think of the best teachers you ever had. What, exactly, did they do? What made them effective that resulted in you learning? The name you must know in ID is Robert Gagné who described clearly what makes effective instruction in his “events of instruction”:

Gain attention
Inform the learner of the instructional objective
Stimulate recall of prior knowledge
Present content
Provide learning guidance
Elicit performance
Provide feedback
Assess performance
Enhance retention and transfer

You can transform your excellent document into effective instruction by repurposing it using this roadmap. For example, old farmers say that the way to train a mule to pull a wagon is to first hit it over the head with a board. They are only partly joking because they understand that no learning will take place until you get the learner's attention—Gagné's first event of instruction. What does this look like? In the hand grenade example, the trainer can hold up a disarmed grenade (the learners don't know it is harmless), pull the pin, and ask, “Just what's going to happen in about five seconds?”

Then the instructor says, “This happens to be a dummy grenade, but what you expected is what will happen to you if you don't listen to every word that I say in this lesson.”

Mager, Robert Frank, and Peter Pipe. Analyzing Performance Problems, or, You Really Oughta Wanna: How to Figure Out Why People Aren't Doing What They Should Be, and What to do About it. Vol. 3. Atlanta, GA: Center for Effective Performance, 1997. A short, fun read that introduces performance technology thinking. An older edition is fine. Includes a great, simple model to follow.

It Isn't About Media

Instructional media and development technologies have advanced rapidly and there are truly wonderful software tools available that can quickly produce dazzling instructional products. The danger is that professional instructional designers know that focus cannot be on media. We recommend a close reading of Richard Clark's 1983 article, which includes this provocative statement: “media are mere vehicles that deliver instruction but do not influence student achievement any more than the truck that delivers our groceries causes change in our nutrition” (483).

The point is that powerful media tools in the hands of amateurs can make instructional products that are visually striking but ineffective. A professional instructional designer is the learner's advocate, and products that impress the boss or sponsor but do not enable learners to perform are not good enough.

Richard Clark and David Feldon looked at research on the common myths of multimedia instruction and showed that multimedia does not result in more learning, is not more motivating in the long term, and does not really cater to different learning styles. But compared to traditional instructor-led training, multimedia can be faster, presumably because learners can go to just what they need when they need it, and it can be scaled. That is, something digitized can be copied and delivered quickly and in this way used again and again by an unlimited number of learners. This is a major advantage compared to the expense and time involved in delivering instruction by live trainers to a large, multinational corporation.

Nobody Has (All) the Answers

Do you feel intimidated by the blizzard of ID models and the dense literature on teaching and learning? Take comfort in the sage conclusion of David Jonassen (2003): “There is no unified theory of teaching and learning” (5).

What this means to TC professionals looking at ID is that nobody has all the answers related to teaching and learning, especially the scholars, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Instead of fretting about nuances of cognitive theory, just ask: “Can your learners do what you set out to train them to do?”

Stay Out of the Training Versus Education Swamp

Systematic ID is obviously not a good fit for all learning needs. For example, a course on medical ethics of physicians involved in end-of-life care is not the same sort of task as training recruits to use ordnance. ID best fits learning goals of the training rather than the education variety. What is the difference? Training tends to apply to specific things that will be used immediately. To illustrate: your teen's school curriculum might include sex education but how would you feel if it read sex training instead?

Learn from Your Learners

Courses, workshops, and programs in instructional design are certainly useful but are no surer of making good instructional designers than lectures can make Olympic athletes. The best teachers and trainers seem to have a flair for entertainment, they learn to read the audience, fine tune as they go, and adapt their ways to become successful. Your imagination and intelligence count more than ID books and theory, and your skills will improve as you go.

How to Get There

You move toward a career as an instructional designer by mingling with that culture, learning their ways, their lingo, and their secrets. The second-largest special interest group in STC is now Instructional Design & Learning and that's a good place to start. Then find local chapters of important instructional design professional groups such as the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD), the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT), and the International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI). Finding an ID mentor is perhaps the single most effective way to move toward ID career opportunities. There are a great many good ID resources available online; many nicely summarize ID literature and theory.

Keith Hopper (khopper@spsu.edu) earned his doctorate in instructional technology from Georgia State University after a career as a health professions educator. He is the instructional design-technology specialist for the Southern Polytechnic Information Design and Communication graduate program.

Wei Sun (wsun@spsu.edu) is an undergraduate honors student at Southern Polytechnic State University, specializing in information design.

REFERENCES

Barker, Thomas. Writing Software Documentation: A Task-Oriented Approach. 2d ed. New York, NY: Longman, 2003.

Carliner, Saul. “Different Names, Similar Challenges: What's Behind the Rumored Merger of Instructional Design and Technical Communication?” Performance Improvement 39.7 (2000): 5-8.

Clark, Richard E. “Reconsidering Research on Learning From Media.” Review of Educational Research 53.4 (1983): 445-459.

Clark, Richard E., and David F. Feldon. “Five Common but Questionable Principles of Multimedia Learning.” Pp. 97-115 in The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning, ed. Richard E. Meyer. New York: Cambridge UP, 2005.

Gagné, Robert M. The Conditions of Learning. Chicago, IL: Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1985.

Gilbert, Thomas F. Human Competence: Engineering Worthy Performance. Silver Spring, MD: International Society for Performance Improvement, 1996.

Gustafson, Kent, and Robert Branch. Survey of Instructional Development Models. 4th ed. Syracuse, NY: ERIC Clearinghouse on Information & Technology, 2002.

Hackos, JoAnn T. Managing Your Documentation Projects. Wiley Technical Communication Library. New York, NY: J. Wiley, 1994.

Hughes, Michael. “Mapping Technical Communication to a Human Performance Technology Framework.” Technical Communication 51.3 (2004): 367-375.

Jonassen, David H. “Learning as Activity.” Educational Technology 42.2 (2002): 45-51.

Jonassen, David H. “The Vain Quest for a Unified Theory of Learning.” Educational Technology 43.4 (2003): 5-7.

Redish, Janice C. “What is information design?” Technical Communication 47.2 (2000): 163-166.

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