Inside the Life of an Instructional Designer in Higher Education

Feb 19

Feb 19 Inside the Life of an Instructional Designer in Higher Education

With the new year in full swing, you may have noticed the flood of instructional design and leadership positions opening up at higher education institutions. I’ve been sharing quite a few of them online, and in the midst of doing so, I often hear a similar question from you: What’s it like working in higher education?

For those of you contemplating the switch, you may already have an idea of what the job entails. I’ve certainly documented the day-to-day aspects of an instructional design role in higher education for years. But what about the culture, politics, promotions, challenges, and more? Well, my friend, today’s article is for you. I’ve been working in higher education for over a decade across four different universities. I feel like I can give you a lay of the land and help you determine whether a career in higher education instructional design is right for you.

Before we begin though, I must try and make one thing abundantly clear: I am painting in broad brush strokes. Higher education is massive, and every kind of institution falls under the higher education umbrella. A university that empowers 40 instructional designers to lead their online learning division and a local community college hiring their first ID to perform miracles both are in higher ed. Are these roles going to be the same? I mean, some parts will be the same, but obviously, they’ll have different challenges.

So, with all of that said, let’s talk about what it’s like being an ID in higher education.

The Day-to-Day

Contrary to what pops up when you Google instructional designers in higher education, we do quite a bit more besides flipping courses from face-to-face to online. Yes, for some IDs, this is the bulk of their job, especially during Covid times. Even then, the idea isn’t to move from one mode of delivery to another, but to transform the learning experience into something better. But I digress.

The components of an ID in higher education are:

Learning Design
Collaborating with SMEs
Project Management
Research
Technology (authoring tools and LMS)

Depending upon the project, you could be performing one or all of these tasks. If you are creating brand new courses, this will look a bit different compared to repurposing or revising past learning resources. At the heart of what we do, comes designing learning experiences and ensuring that these align to the learning outcomes, objectives, assessments, activities, and content. Every step in the design process means thinking about creating the best kind of educational offering for the students.

As you can imagine, we don’t do this alone. Collaborating with SMEs, who may be faculty, staff, admin, or leadership, is a significant portion of the design process. It’s also fair to say that collaboration among different departments is a crucial part. This could mean with faculty, LMS administration, academic advising, academic support, TAs, career coaches, etc. Project management skills are essential to what we do. You must keep everything on track with deadlines, deliverables, and within budget.

Research is a multifaceted approach since this means researching new product ideas. This could be something as small as new live webinar initiatives all the way to researching new degree programs. Technology will always be an instructional designer’s friend or foe depending upon what tools you are using. For higher education, the learning management system is where your learning experiences will live and you may use additional tools (Rise and H5P are common) to supplement the main learning products.

The one last tidbit I want to say about this section is that depending upon where you are located within the university will change some of these aspects. There absolutely are instructional designers outside of the online learning division. This always seems to catch people by surprise. My first ID position was all about educating faculty on UDL, creating rubrics, best design practices, etc. You’ll see that teaching and learning labs will employ IDs and there are some divisions who will want their own dedicated person for learning and development. With that said, instructional designers can operate within the context of online, in-person, or hybrid formats. Once again, it really all depends upon the goals of the organization and what they want the ID to do.

If you want a more in-depth look, you can check out the article called the day in the life of an instructional designer at MIT.

Rewards (The Pros)

Fulfilling Work

This is where and why so many designers I know of love working in higher education. You feel that your work makes a difference. At the end of the day, isn’t that what we are all looking for? Being an ID in higher education has instilled in me this deep sense of fulfillment. As an ID, you can see the impact you have on the university. Maybe this means reading about testimonies and reviews of the courses you designed. Maybe this means having a great conversation with a stubborn professor who now sees the benefits of online learning and they are now an online learning champion. Maybe this means leading a workshop for faculty about accessibility standards and now they are determined to raise the bar for their courses. When you can see that the effort you put in makes a difference, it will drive you to work harder.

Opportunities

Another advantage of working in higher education is the many opportunities available. Let’s say that you have an idea for how to improve the learning experiences for students. You make the pitch to your manager and show a demo of what you are talking about. Before you know it, you are leading the project to have this idea be implemented in all courses. While higher education moves slowly, I’ve always been shocked by the receptiveness of new ideas. To give you a few examples, I’ve proposed ideas around pilot programs, podcasts, and personalized learning tracks to better serve the students. Every one of those ideas were green lit and I ended up leading the initiatives to make these happen. This of course, does come down to your manager and a few other factors, but within every institution I’ve worked at, they welcomed creative ideas. Just be ready to do the follow up work and to figure out how to add this to your existing workload.

Growth

The last reward I want to call out is growth. From a personal and professional perspective, you’ll grow as a designer, educator, mentor, and leader. I’ve been incredibly fortunate to have had authentic and genuine leaders who saw the value in training me. I jumped all over these chances to learn more and this contributed to promotions overtime. I’ve never felt “stuck” working in higher education and that I hit a dead end. Even when I did face significant roadblocks that I knew I couldn’t overcome, I found ways to transfer to different departments who welcomed my talents.

All in all, it’s rewarding being in higher education.

Challenges (The Cons)

Now that I’ve probably convinced you that worked in higher education is the greatest thing ever, let me bring things back down to earth because at the end of the day, this is still a job. Every job comes with pros and cons, and there are definitely challenges with working in this field.

Politics

The most significant challenge has to be institutional bureaucracy. Do you consider yourself a politician? Of course you don’t. You’re an educator. But… you have to think like a politician. If you want to move an idea along or get immediate help, it’s all about your connections and who you know. I have done so much networking over the years just to simply know people and figure out who does what. Higher education is famous for providing employees with illogical titles and you have to think to yourself, what does this person actually do? What are you really responsible for?

We even have this challenge in the instructional design space where if you search instructional design postings on LinkedIn right now, you’ll find 25 similar titles. Some people strongly believe that all of these titles share the same responsibilities (ID vs LXD vs LD), while others will die on the hill that they should be called X over Y. The point is that you have to learn more about who you work with and who is responsible for what. You need to know this for helping you in the long run and of course, how you can help others with their initiatives. Overall, you have to play the game and know the key players.

Compensation

Let’s talk about compensation. My first instructional design position paid $42,000 a year. My second paid me $60,000. And my third paid me $72,000. The average salary of an entry level corporate instructional designer in Boston is between $85,000 and $90,000. So, with that being said, compensation in higher education isn’t splendid. What sort of offsets this is tuition reimbursement, a high amount professional development funding, and excellent benefits.

The other part that makes this confusing is that higher education pays by salary grades. These are wildly drastic ranges with some institutions saying that IDs fall into the ranges of $60,000 - $110,000. As an applicant, you won’t know the real range until speaking with the recruiter or hiring manager. The department has a budget and that’s the max they are allowed to spend. It’s rarely ever the full range you see online. More institutions have been sharing what the actual pay range is on job postings, and kudos to them! Here’s hoping more follow this path.

One last note about compensation is your location. Rural America vs a densely populated city will pay differently. You can look up the salaries for positions in New York vs Vermont and that’s all you need to see. If you are looking to earn more though, you’ll need to move out of the individual contributor path and become a manager. It’s quite the different role, but leadership positions pay more.

Hierarchy

This next challenge is difficult to talk about because I feel like it feeds into a stereotype and that’s the last thing I want to do. However, I do want you to be aware of this challenge, just in case. If you search online what’s the difference between higher ed and corporate positions you’ll find that most talk about how faculty are royalty and what they say goes. This answer though suggests that all faculty abuse their power and make you feel like a peasant. Here’s the truth, 99% of faculty you work with are fantastic. Just like with any other job, you’ll have someone in power who has an extreme ego, and it ruins the whole project. Out of all the learning experiences I’ve designed over the years, there were only two times where I felt extremely disrespected. It happens and life goes on.

This does completely come down to the culture of the university and how the role of an ID is perceived. If leadership positions instructional designers to have a seat at the table and clearly articulates that instructional design matters, life will be good. If leadership makes instructional design an afterthought, you’re going to have a challenging time. When you are interviewing and searching for an ID position, try to get a sense of how instructional design is valued.

The Future (AI)

So, what is the future like being an instructional designer in higher education? You can probably take an educated guess to say that everyone is trying to learn more about AI. Higher education always gets hit with a new trend that will “revolutionize” education, and right now, it’s gen AI. I’ve been on record for saying that I don’t see gen AI as a typical trend because of how powerful this technology is. We will learn to incorporate it into our workflows, and many have already done so.

What I find interesting is that the past is coming back up and now we are improving on ideas. To give you an example, Georgia Tech created a virtual TA back in 2014 called Jill Watson. The idea was to have a virtual assistant for students to reach out to for help at any point in time. It was trained off of the course materials and to not search online for anything else. This idea has now come back in full swing with universities exploring AI Agents to assist students with their studies. There is plenty of research and experimentation taking place to figure out how AI fits into our world, while at the same time, being aware of the dangers it presents.

Before you ask, no, I don’t think AI will replace us anytime soon. I led a workshop for faculty the other day on how to use gen AI to improve their learning experiences, and for many of them, it was the first time they’ve used ChatGPT. It was stunning to watch them use this new technology and to see how quickly they didn’t give it a chance. Maybe stunning isn’t the best word there, but all of this is to say that if you learn more about gen AI, you’ll already be ahead of so many people.

And that folks is some insights into the world of higher education. I hope it helps!

Follow on LinkedIn

A huge thank you to our sponsors! Consider supporting those who support our show!