Is Instructional Design Dead?

I've just bought a house with a "cottage style" kitchen (i.e. there's nothing in it but bare bricks and a couple of shelves). So the last couple of weekends I've been assembling IKEA flatpacks using what they call "instruction leaflets".

This has set me thinking about whether there's any similarity between my job, as an Instructional Designer, and those of the people who write these leaflets. And of course, there isn't.

But looking at a lot of e-learning that's out there right now, you might have thought that many of our current crop of instructional designers worked for IKEA in their spare time: "read this information and answer these questions, and you'll be able to manage conflict situations more effectively".

I don't think so. It's also ironic that just as the inventors of the "science" of instructional design - the Americans - are questioning many of its tenets, the British are, at the very least, starting to use the label more, as if it gives our fledgling industry more scientific credibility.

Over the last year I've seen an increasing number of Instructional Design jobs advertised, and I've employed freelancers who I used to know as "training writers" who've upped their daily rate and re-labelled themselves "Instructional Design Consultants".

Instructional Systems Design (ISD) for a long time provided an excuse for the unimaginative to produce turgid learning experiences that kept technology-based training in the dark ages. Even in the hands of the talented, ISD-type methodologies took too damn long.

But in an era when the learning industry is trying to reposition itself as genuinely supportive of rapid business change, it's no longer true to say "you can't train yourself out of a problem". You can, but not with ISD.

So now most of the large US e-learning companies are radically re-working their Instructional Design methodologies - and removing much traditional ISD terminology - in order to cut development schedules, encourage multi-disciplinary collaboration and produce compelling learning solutions that are responsive to changing business need.

To be successful, the designers of these more compelling learning solutions are going to have to develop some diverse new skills: the dramatic abilities of a TV script writer, the ingenuity of a games designer and the zeitgeist-sensitivity of an advertising creative. E-learning has abandoned the training room and is headed for the mass-market. And the mass-market expects certain standards to be maintained.

We in the learning business have a wonderful opportunity to make our lives and those we help learn, ever more interesting and fruitful. Unless of course we sit down, cut up the whole opportunity into little pieces and start writing out performance objectives.

by Patrick Dunn

Patrick is was formerly a Senior Associate with PricewaterhouseCoopers global e-learning team and is now Senior Learning Strategist with DigitalThink UK.