Thanks for reading! This is a bit of a storage space for my various thoughts on Instructional Design, so that I have a hub from which I can share posts to social media, email newsletters, etc. I’m happy to introduce the blog with this first entry!
I love my job. So many people, hearing the word “Design” and knowing my artist background, assume this job is little more than a graphic design position. It is so much more than that. It’s a process of taking apart problems, auditing their causes, and designing not only individual training modules, but company-wide solutions. The ability to tinker and improve like this is a privilege.
Training is a part of the human condition- from when we first hunted side-by-side with our experts or passed lessons through our stories, we’ve been teaching one another. And in our modern society, there’s a lot of misconceptions about training. There are conflicting opinions over how our brains absorb information, who benefits from training, and what problems it can solve. Instructional Designers help with all of this, and when we don’t know the answer to these questions, we’re excellent analysts and Googlers. 😉
My biggest concern when designing is retention of information and its application in the moment (specifically a high-pressure moment). It is not enough to have a learner simply watch one video or attend an hour-long meeting- we need to consider how the learner will access this content later on, and in what ways they’ll need to apply it. Do they have time to sift through a knowledge management site to find the correct article? Is this an emergency, and do they need an alert that triggers upon a specific event in a system? For the more low-tech projects I’ve been on, such as on-foot volunteering, how do we build “cheat sheet” files that learners can review on their phone?
These are the questions I love to solve, so feel free to peruse my works and thoughts on these matters!
