The 3 Biggest Mistakes I’ve Made as an Instructional Designer
We all have to start somewhere. No one hits the ground running and doesn’t have a few hiccups along the way. I was sharing something recently about how one of my YouTube videos hit 10K views and I was astonished. While the content was good, it was my worst produced video by far. There was zero editing, awful lighting, no animations, no introduction music, and an overkill of PowerPoint slides, but still, people connected with the content. And I used this as a teachable moment to share about how you just need to take that first baby step and start, because who knows what that will lead to if you stick with it?
I’ve found the more that I share these tips with you, the more it motivates and inspires you. So, I thought about it and was like, what could I share from my past that will help this week and then it hit me. What if I talked about my 3 biggest mistakes as an instructional designer? I’m far from perfect and trust me, my career started off quite rocky. It was not smooth sailing and I questioned if this was the path for me entirely after a few of these mistakes. I wrote down my top 3 blunders and coupled them with life lessons to help you on your ID journey.
Not Showing the Value of Instructional Design
Connie Malamed from the eLearning Coach recently wrote a review for my new instructional design book. We were chatting back and forth via email about it and she asked me a great question. When I wrote about how I introduce myself as an instructional designer, one of my lines is that I say “I understand how people learn online.” She wanted to know why I specifically state the word “online” when instructional designers know how people learn period. It doesn’t matter the setting or the delivery. IDs know about learning. It’s the core function of our job.
At first, I didn’t have an answer. I’m sure there is a reason why I always mentioned online, but it took a bit of effort to find the answer. It wasn’t until I met up for dinner with my former supervisor and she was explaining about a situation with a difficult person to work with. Her story triggered my memory. When I was starting off as an instructional designer, I wasn’t confident in my abilities and that gave the impression to SMEs that I didn’t know what I was talking about. Given that my SMEs were well-known professors and deans, they challenged me on everything and I can’t blame them! Having some 20-year-old say that he’s the expert on learning when they’ve been teaching for 40 years was a recipe for disaster.
I was trying to find a way to give me an edge. Most of my SMEs never even heard of instructional design before, and now they think someone is put on a project to undermine them, so what on earth could I say to show my value? The answer was the online learning piece. Thinking back to the SMEs I worked with at the start of my career, they weren’t the online learning experts. Using Blackboard was a mystery and past attempts of them trying to put their course into an online version wasn’t received well by their students. So, I took a different approach. I began to say that “I understand how people learn online” and apparently, I never looked back as I still say that today.
However, this difficult start crushed my confidence at first. I don’t enjoy butting heads with people, let alone when I feel like I’m at an extreme disadvantage. I was too inexperienced to push back with my SMEs because I couldn’t think of the counterpoints. I could see the course outline and say, I know that this isn’t done right, but I couldn’t muster up the courage to go back to the SME and say here is what we should do instead. Of course, this didn’t showcase the value of an instructional designer. I was there as more of a course organizer rather than a contributor.
My big mistake here though was assuming that SMEs didn’t want feedback. An unfortunate circumstance was that my first SME wanted to fight about everything, but the second SME I worked with changed my perspective on feedback all together. One evening, we were working on a course mapping activity together. For those of you who have never done course mapping before, this is when you break down every component of what learners will be experiencing in the course. You will actually map out what goes where until you have a completed overview. I was working with him on this and following my usual routine of saying that everything looked great. Truthfully, he was actually doing great with this activity, but then he asked me if I had an idea for an activity he was stuck on. It was the first time that someone asked for my opinion and I didn’t give it a second thought to chime in with an answer. With having my opinion valued, I used this momentum to speak up more about other parts of the design.
This exact instance happened on another project too, but it was even more apparent that the SME wanted feedback. The SME and I were filming in Boston and after his first couple of takes, I realized that he had a fear of being recorded. He didn’t outright say it, but the second the red flashing light was visible on the camera, he froze up. He fumbled over easy words and just looked nervous. He asked how the recordings were going and I just gave him a thumbs up. After the 3rd take or so, he said, “Luke, I need more feedback. If it’s good, tell me why. If it’s not, tell me how I can improve.” I paused and had to give it some thought on how do I coach someone to not be afraid on camera?
We took a break for a bit and I mentioned how I was learning so much about the content from sitting in on the recording session. He then began to passionately speak about the subject matter and even made a few of us on the crew do some role-playing activities to reinforce his point. He stopped thinking about recording all together and started thinking about teaching. The minute he was done, the crew and I looked at each other and knew that he needed to speak in this manner on camera. I gently suggested for him to think about the camera as being another person on our crew. Talk to the camera the way you just talked to us. He was like a different person after that. The nerves went away and it was an awesome recording session. Once he finished his last take, he looked at me and smiled saying, “Why didn’t you explain it to me like this before?!” I laughed and then thought to myself that no one ever asked me for point blank feedback. No one had ever made me feel like the expert until that moment.
I will say, thank God for this SME, because he was who I needed at that point in time. My initial fear of SMEs not considering feedback went away and over the years, I learned how to be more strategic with how I approach feedback all together. Years ago, I could barely mutter a few words on how instructional designers are valuable on a project. Now, you can’t make me shut up about our value and what we can bring to the table.
2. Overthinking Literally Everything
When I say everything, I truly mean everything:
What if use the wrong word on a rubric?
What if I said define, but I meant explain?
The students will despise the course because the learning outcomes don’t make sense.
The faculty members will never work with my department again because the students will complain.
I’ll be the reason for why the online division and on campus faculty hate each other!
Welcome to my brain as a new instructional designer. This kind of extreme overthinking is simply not true. Instructional designers aren’t on the battlefield. They don’t work in life or death situations. I promise that no one is going to perish because your rubric isn’t perfect. Try telling that to me years ago and I wouldn’t believe you.
When I first started, it never really clicked with how much academic freedom there is in instructional design. I had a few examples of finished courses, rubrics, and blueprints, and I tried replicating them, but it never made complete sense to me. I had this idea that courses had to be perfect. The problem for me was that there wasn’t a guide to follow on how to make a “perfect” course. I didn’t understand how two instructional designers could be assigned to both work on an IT course and then design completely different experiences. The outcomes, objectives, and rubrics were developed in the same manner, but the assessments, activities, and content could be completely different. As someone who was trying to wrap his head around this process, it made me overthink absolutely everything.
It wasn’t until I had experience with designing a few different courses that I understood more about how instructional designers think. Instructional design is a combination of creativity and learning sciences. If one SME wants the final project to be a team-based presentation and the other SME wants it to be a summative assessment with using a simulation, neither of them are wrong. As long as we are aligned to the goals and the assessments lead to the same conclusion, the delivery method can be vastly different. There is an art and flexibility to how courses are designed and as a newbie, I couldn’t wrap my head around this.
The funniest thing about all of this is that now I full acknowledge that I won’t get my courses right on the first try and I need to incorporate student voice into the equation. I need feedback from students to understand exactly how, when, where, and why I can make improvements to the online learning experience. I’m not the target audience. I’ll never fully understand where they are coming from and I need to listen to their perspectives. While the former Luke would stress out about launching a course to the world that wasn’t perfect, the current Luke is excited to hear about feedback from pilot programs to make the learning experience better each time. It’s something that I love about my job.
3. Not Believing in the Power of “I’ll Figure It Out.”
Without a doubt, the best instructional designers that I’ve met all share one same ability. If they face a challenge they’ve never encountered before, they say, “I’ll figure it out.” Four little words that hold so much power, but it encompasses a well-known feeling in our field. If we don’t have the answers, we can find them. When I first started to work as an instructional designer, I was asked a ton of questions. Many people have never heard of instructional design before so naturally, they had several questions on the entire design process. As a newbie, I found myself saying many, many times that “I didn’t know.” I felt rather foolish and naïve because I should know the answers, but I never was exposed to them. I ended up developing a bad habit of relying so much on my supervisor that I began to feel annoying. Every time someone asked me a question, it’s like I forgot how to critically think. I immediately went to her with every single question instead of trying to solve the problem myself. After I found myself asking her questions for the fifth time in one day, I took a deep breath and thought to myself, what would I do if she wasn’t available to answer my questions? Hypothetically speaking, she goes on a vacation while I’m still new at the job, what would I do?
This kind of thinking shifted my mentality to say that I don’t have the answers, but I can find them. Someone, somewhere must have the answers I’m looking for and I just need to find that person to help me. I had to put this theory to the test. I was working on a project and had a question about Blackboard. For those of you who don’t know what that is, it’s a popular learning management system (LMS). At the time, I was using an older version and I felt like I was a member on a bomb squad where if I cut the wrong wire, the course was going to explode. Blackboard had this tendency with formatting where if I push the wrong button, everything looked different. Think of how you try to resize an image in Word and then everything shifts incorrectly. It’s like that. So, here I was, trying to build this new course on a system that I didn’t understand and boy, did I need help. Instead of immediately pinging my supervisor, I went over an introduced myself to the LMS administrator asked if I could borrow a few minutes of her time. Sure enough, she knew the answer.
I began to practice this a bit more. If I didn’t have the answer, I would go find someone within the building or on Slack who could help me. Before long, I had a new mentality and it was that I’ll figure it out. Through trial and error and networking, I managed to solve any problem that I faced. I used to hate admitting that I didn’t have the answers because I wanted to be viewed as the expert, but after some time, it felt right to be transparent. It felt far more genuine to say to a SME, “That’s a fantastic question and no one has ever asked me that before. Let me look into this for you and I’ll reach back out.” The SME is satisfied that you’ll get them the answer and you buy yourself some time to go figure it out.
I’ve built on this mentality for everything I have done in my career. I don’t have all the answers, but I can figure it out. Even take my podcast as an example. Do you think I knew how to make a podcast a few years ago? No! I didn’t have a clue. I didn’t know what an RSS feed was. I didn’t know what microphone to buy or how to edit in Garageband. However, someone out there had to know how to do these things. I connected with a friend who had his own podcast and he told me what microphone he used and what YouTube video he followed to set up his RSS feed. All of a sudden, I had a podcast. I did the same thing with my YouTube channel, the same thing with writing my book, and the same thing with starting Instructional Design Institute. The answers are out there, you just need to connect with the right people and resources and you’ll figure it out.
So, what are my main lessons here I want you to know:
Be able to explain the value an instructional designer can bring to a project. Don’t assume that everyone knows what you do and how it can benefit them. If you are in a position like me where you work with well-respected professors, you need to find the right wording to help them visualize what you’ll do to make the learning experience better compared to someone doing this on their own. If you work in corporate, you may face the opposite problem of people knowing you are the expert, but don’t understand why they need to put so much effort into training. Learning is a process of change and it doesn’t happen in a 20 minute session with some interactive materials. Real research, proof, and ROI will need to be shown to make others see the light.
Overthinking will cripple you. There isn’t a magical way to flip a switch and to stop overthinking, but over time, slow and steady steps can be taken to help ease your mind. For me, I assumed that every single detail was being scrutinized by everyone at all times, when in reality, no one was blaming me for using an incorrect word or a small mistake. By far, I was my toughest critic. I want you to start thinking about embracing and welcoming student feedback. This will only help you to grow as a designer.
Lastly, give yourself more credit! You’re a smart person. If you couldn’t find an answer to a problem under any normal circumstance, you would figure it out. You wouldn’t say “woe is me” and give it up entirely. Instructional design isn’t any different. Try to figure things out on your own through trial and error. If that doesn’t work, reach out to your network for help. If that doesn’t’ work, join one of the several instructional design communities on Facebook or LinkedIn. Pay it forward and help out others. You’ll eventually learn to just figure it out.
