Following a recent Job Family Alignment that changed our job title from "SSD E-learning Instructional Designer" to /*takes deep breath*/ "Design & Documentation Consultant IV, Technical Training", the suggestion came up for our ID Team to decide on a more informal, marketable label. One viable option is to just stick with what we've always been called before: Instructional Designers. But if we are to commit to something more representative of our full range of tasks and competencies, AND of the identity we'd like to adopt in the mid/long-term, then it'd be appropriate to review the current state of the broader instructional design space. Here's my Monday afternoon attempt.
WHAT INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN TRADITIONALLY ENTAILS
First, a fun fact: Instructional design--as a formal process distinct from other existing educational methodologies--has its roots in the US military during WWII, due to the observation of high failure rates in fighter pilot training programs. To address this, the government recruited a lot of psychologists and educators skilled in experimental research and tasked them with conducting research and developing training resources for the military.
Fast forward to today. What does instructional design entail in the modern day? And what do non-IDs think instructional design entails? What might IDs outside of KP think we KP IDs do, and vice versa? It's not straightforward. ID roles and responsibilities across different orgs vary tremendously, both according to the competencies they bring with them and according to the specific needs of the organization. But what I can describe to you in one simple sentence is that, at its core, instructional design traditionally entails the planning and use of systematic processes and supporting knowledge to improve learning outcomes. And for all intents and purposes, an ID is a professional who carries out instructional design (funny enough, it's not always true in practice).
This feels unhelpful not just because the term is part of its own definition, but more importantly: (1) the actual domain of instructional design has become more cross-disciplinary over time, and (2) there's less of an expectation for IDs to "do it all", largely as a result of (1). So the notion of "carrying out instructional design" is too open-ended by today's standards. Conversely, I think there was once a time where defining an ID as someone who "does instructional design" was sufficient AND universally understood, with a more standardized ID toolkit including things like the ADDIE model, formative vs. summative assessments, and of course, learning objectives. It may also include standards by professional organizations like the IBSTPI (International Board for Training, Performance, and Instruction) competencies--the most accepted standards for instructional design practice--with other organizations also recommending competencies related to technology and instruction/education.
More recent and differentiated definitions tend to explicitly describe some kind of technological integration, though what THAT means specifically, I think, is largely shaped by the prevailing technological trends of the time. I.e. In the early 2000s, that could mean merely digitizing teaching content from paper to PDF. We actually still get requests like that today, and I guess that can technically qualify as tech integration. More commonly for us, that also means using a select few Web 2.0 technologies to build scripted experiences (e.g. Articulate Rise). An improvement over PDF conversions for sure, but that medium-before-message approach is something we've projected onto the definition ourselves, rather than being inherent in that definition.
At least in the higher education space, IDs may also take on various adjacent roles such as facilitator, mentor, trainer, collaborator, reviewer, and mediator, with their involvement requiring collaboration with faculty and SMEs (subject matter experts). Are these adjacent roles becoming part of the modern ID's scope of regular work? Or are they niche favors in addition to the core work? If we apply our ID team's (existential) logic, it would be the former, due to the simple fact that we've defined ourselves by the sheer amount of graphic design and multimedia production work we've been sought out for each month, despite it not being part of the traditional instructional design canon. That is completely legitimate, for the record. On the other hand, in an agency model, the ID is almost always distinct from the graphic designer and multimedia producer (Arnquist, 2020). This has led me to ponder about my own professional identity within SSD over the past 12-18 months, where I've definitely gained somewhat of a reputation as "the design guy", and I'm still thinking about how to process that.
Education and human performance research communities have actually empirically observed how the instructional design definition has evolved. The top competencies for jobs in "elearning" according to research studies of current job postings include content management, collaboration skills, website knowledge, project management, and understanding adult learning theories. Other important competencies include interpersonal communication skills, pedagogy, digital technology tools, assessment strategies, and oral and written communication skills (Arnquist, 2020). A really cool bibliometric study by Sacak, Bozkurt & Wagner (2022) used social network analysis and text-mining analysis to uncover prevailing understandings of what instructional design entails more recently. According to their findings, a more modern (re)definition of instructional design is "a systematic and often theory- and/or model-driven process of developing, assessing, and evaluating instruction that can be enhanced by the use of technology."
LEARNING DESIGN, AND NOTABLE 21st CENTURY SHIFTS IN THE INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN FIELD
In their publication titled "Preparing Instructional Designers: Traditional and Emerging Perspectives" (2014), Tracey and Boling highlight a shift in the broader, professional understanding of instructional design. The basis for the rise of "design thinking" and "reflective designing" in recent decades is that no single approach can effectively address every (instructional) situation. Designers are seen as akin to researchers, with their personal perspectives significantly influencing their work rather than claiming to be objective and completely distanced. The Duolingo owl might be a pretty good example of that. Tracey and Boling also get into more "academic" things like how traditional IDs tend to use existing solutions as starting points, which relies heavily on precedent and episodic memory, which in turn means a greater proportion of the expected instructional design value comes from IDs with more years of experience, which as a corollary deprioritizes the potential value for newer IDs to position themselves as change agents due to more unique insight blah blah blah… It's all interesting stuff, but can be rather dense to wade through.
It might be worth mentioning an insight from Tracey & Boling's literature review, whereby Larson and Lockee (two prominent instructional design researchers from Virgnia Tech) found a gap between the culture and value systems of business & industry environments where IDs practice, and the environment in which they were first trained to become IDs. So the need to incorporate skills in workplace politics, decision-making in situations of scarcity and ambiguity, change management, innovation, and risk management, came as a bit of a shock to newer IDs. Sure, it's a challenge you'll find with pretty much any new first job, but more significantly for our ID team, this raises the question of whether, say, client management is considered a core instructional design competency. If it is, (IMO it absolutely should be and you can't convince me otherwise), then where do you draw the line between a core responsibility and an ancillary one? If instructional design is a skill, then how do you know when you've "mastered" it the same way that Steph Curry has mastered three-pointers, or that Bill Nye the Science Guy has mastered scientific inquiry?
in, ultimately, altering knowledge, skill, and/or the performance of the learner. That much is easy to understand. But I don't think that is what's being questioned in our ID huddles/meetings; it's more about the how of achieving that (and whether our job title reflects that "how").
We claim to be learner-centric. A lot. Whether we actually are by any measure is a completely different conversation, but if we are to really own that claim, then that actually makes our decision pretty easy: Learning Designer is an objectively more representative job title than Instructional Designer because it is exceedingly well-documented in both professional and academic communities that learning design entails, well, just that. Learner centrism.
Okay, let's unpack that.
There's a ton of literature published in recent years on how instructional design has evolved toward learning design, and what differentiates their underlying philosophies, but it essentially boils down to the following:
Instructional design has a stronger focus on theory-driven approaches. This is not to say that ID teams are necessarily theory-driven, but that the methods they employ (like the ADDIE model) tend to have some grounding in theories, principles, or frameworks, whether they're aware of them or not. This includes, for example, emphases on assessment, or a broader intentionality on systematically designing "the approach of instruction". This last part is crucial, as tautologous as it may sound, as it frames instruction as a one-to-many relationship. You design some system (whether self-contained like a web-based training or an in-class curriculum & lesson plan) that is internally optimized with all the content you envision, and you ultimately distribute it among a population of learners in a way that is agnostic to or "removed from the constraints of context or culture" (Parchoma et al., 2019). You could say that instructional design's underlying philosophy is a belief in objectivity, measurability, precision, and mastery.
In contrast, learning design focuses more on the goal of learning rather than the approach of instruction, making it more inclusive and generative of a wider range of instructional approaches and environments. Instead of internally optimizing for the instructional system, the design endeavor is a lot more conscientious about who your learners are, drawing from design thinking and user experience design. (The basis for design thinking is that having empathy for your users is a prerequisite to developing effective experiences for those users.) The backdrop for this approach is a grounding in constructivist learning approaches and more holistic, humanist values, compared to ID's more behaviorist orientation. I haven't conclusively researched this myself, but I suspect that the emergence of learning design was partly accelerated by the big data movement, enabling the derivation of sub-disciplines like learning analytics, learning experience design, and learning engineering. Being able to operationalize otherwise invisible things like "user engagement" opened doors to further tailoring the learning experience in a more informed way. And in contrast with ID's striving for objectivity, LD in its purest form embraces the notion of (and designs for) learning as a subjective experience, often taking place within a distinct community of learners.
Of course, there's a lot of overlap between the instructional design and learning design fields. It's not my place to decide for our ID Team whether there's sufficient overlap to render them interchangeable for what we do. After all, I'm involved in a lot of niche projects, and I focused more on the differences above anyway. But in a vacuum, they're not so much different processes as they are benchmarks on two ends of a continuum of evolving practices and philosophies (somewhat influenced by evolving circumstances) "within the same ecosystem" (Sacak et al., 2022).
ALTERNATE JOB TITLES
Plenty of other job titles already exist out there for us to choose from, though in my humble opinion, we might be better served to just draw inspiration from them or to treat them as conversation starters around what is in our scope of core services. This list is by no means exhaustive, but it represents a good balance of spread and prominence, at least according to research on current job postings in the instructional design space. (There are distinctions between "designer" and "developer", but as far as this list goes, you can substitute them for each other.)
Teaching and learning consultant
Digital learning coordinator
Learning content designer
Instructional technologist (this is a fairly common one, and not the title I'd personally prefer for myself, but is arguably the most representative on this list for what we currently do)
Course developer
E-learning designer
Training design specialist
Learning architect
Learning experience designer
Learning manager
Technical communicator
Learning and development specialist
E-learning development and training specialist
E-learning course developer
Training and knowledge management specialist
PARTING THOUGHTS
In my mind, I'm a learning designer first, and will always refer to myself as such in my own professional channels outside of SSD (LinkedIn tagline, personal website, etc.). This doesn't mean that I exclusively work in the ways of the learning designer; I don't make many strategic choices when it comes to developing a WBT. But I try to look for opportunities to, say, ask "learning design-type" questions beyond "Who's our learner?" I think part of the challenge in figuring out our identity is simply that while a job title change happens literally overnight (maybe with the click of a Submit button in some HR dashboard), the shift from ID to LD is a gradual process that entails large-scale epistemological shifts. If we do decide to call ourselves Learning Designers from here on out, I imagine there'd be some "identity negotiation" period where we're experimenting with going through the motions of one discipline while still holding onto (slowly letting go of?) the philosophies of another. That's not a bad thing (and some of you might point out that that's just Change Management 101). It's just something to anticipate and embrace as part of the process. On the other hand, the "now" state is the default state, so as long as we're not consumed by some existential crisis, sticking with the Instructional Designer title is perfectly legitimate too.