How does context/environment play a part in Instructional Design? Does a designer need to learn different skill sets for certain environments?
If you are interested in the field of Instructional Design (ID), the work environments you will be designing for will most likely be for academia or corporate. As a designer, you may do both if so desired, but others may chose to work for one field specifically. The question can be asked: how does go about deciding which environment is best for them? Does it require different mindsets or skill sets to be successful? The answer lies within what ID is at its core, and what each environment’s intentions are.
The academic field is, you guessed it, all about the instruction of children from primary school to higher education, how one goes about doing so, and seeing which strategies of delivery are the best for students. The intention of this environment is for students to acquire a holistic education of different subjects, and be able to critical think and engaging with them. There is not too much need for research, for there are teachers and professors who are content experts themselves to assist with the design, and the demographics are mostly consistent from year to year. There’s a lot of continuous collaboration between designer and teacher, as their focus is not only to see the effectiveness of learning, but see how the attitude of the class changes towards the content over time. These attitudes allow for experimentation with pedagogues and new experimental teaching methods. Although, limited funding within academia stifles the ability to take proper measurements. Despite that, there is a lot of room to investigate and experiment with new ideas to push Instructional Design.
The corporate field is any company that deals with employers (adults) learning a specific task to improve the company. The intent is to learn a specific skill or process to increase effectiveness and profit. Corporate has more front-end work than academia, for a lot of companies have different, varying demographics; the content designers need to focus on might require more research to organize and refine, since companies want to teach new skills to employees or the skill set is spread across different departments. Here, the goals are more defined on what the company wants; “x” leads to “y”. This mindset doesn’t leave much room for experimentation, as the company was guaranteed results. This means that the designer will be working with the same theories and models time and time again. Measurements and assessments are important, and you use all possible statistics to describe the results of the cooperate training you composed.
Both fields are vastly different: academia is experimental, abstract-like, and focuses on critical thing, while corporate is definite, precise, and focuses on procedural skills for profit. But where they both are similar is their foundations: working with people. Whatever field you decide to work for, the best transferable skill will be understanding, empathizing, and guiding people. Charisma, awareness of social and cultural context, psychology, learning theories and a bit of anthropology will take you a long way, no matter where you go.
Here’s the article on which this post’s information was based on; there are more details on the dichotomy and options from other designers in the comment sections:
http://cammybean.kineo.com/2010/03/instructional-design-as-practice-in.html
LIS 4022 Spring 2020 