The Disconnect Between Instructional Design Degrees, the Real World, and How to Fix It

Mar 21

Mar 21 The Disconnect Between Instructional Design Degrees, the Real World, and How to Fix It

I’m still trying to wrap my head around this so bear with me for a moment as I string together a few thoughts. Many, many instructional designers are accidental instructional designers. It’s so common to speak with long-time instructional designers and hear that they fell into the role by “accident.” Over recent years, everything about the instructional design field has grown: awareness, salary, competition, and education. What was once common with accidental has now turned into intentional and the age of the intentional instructional designer is upon us.

How does one become an instructional designer? While there are still quite a few ways of becoming an instructional designer, one path to take is to pursue a degree in instructional design. The theory behind this is that students will receive an education on best instructional design practices, which will translate into a higher percentage of finding a position they’ll enjoy. This isn’t always the case and some are students who are now going back to school to learn more, but I think it’s safe to say that the majority falls into the first category. Understandably so, I believe that faculty are trying to cover a vast area of knowledge that dates back several decades and to drive home the fundamentals and to advance from there.

So, what’s the problem?

Once a week, I hear from a student in an instructional design degree program who says that they do not feel equipped to become an instructional designer. Why, I ask, as they probably know more than I do at this point. And like clockwork, I hear the same answer: I don’t understand how what I learned connects with the real world. Ah, therein lies a significant issue. There is a disconnect between scholarly and academic lines of thinking pertaining to designing learning experiences and what happens in the real world.

There seems to be a fine line of wanting to teach students about every learning theory, strategy, and technique, which I completely understand, but educators must connect this to the real world. What makes this feel so surreal for me is that I had this same experience with my degree in graphic design. After going through 4 years of schooling on graphic design, I assumed that I would be ready for what comes next. I took on 2 internships just to really make sure I was going to be ready to take on my first role. After graduation, I realized this wasn’t the case and I wasn’t alone. Out of my graduating class, very few of us became full time graphic designers. When speaking with them, I heard the same sentiments that we weren’t ready and didn’t feel prepared for the actual real world challenges.

I can’t think of a better example than when I took on my first client as a free-lancer. I was bright eyed and bushy tailed because someone was willing to pay me $50 an hour for my design skills. They saw my portfolio and were impressed with what I created. They mentioned that they wanted something simple: a new logo for their non-profit organization. I thought that this was going to be so easy. I designed hundreds of logos and they wanted one that symbolized a Catholic non-profit organization. I went to Catholic school for 12 years so you can imagine my confidence when creating this design. I fired up a few mock designs, sent it over to my contact there, and eagerly waited to hear their feedback. And that’s when I learned about the real world.

My contact had to forward the designs over to her director who wanted more reasoning behind my designs.The mockup designs were all pretty normal religiously themed ideas. I want to say that I made a cross, a dove, rays of light, and something else that other religious organizations adopted. Upon hearing back from them, they asked me to keep on working on the designs and then, I would need to present them to a committee. A committee… I thought? What committee? Surprise! There were additional stakeholders I wasn’t aware of. What became working with 2 people, ended up working with 10. The best part was that none of them could decide on which logo to go with. I was shocked when they had incredibly opinionated feelings about one logo vs another, and I was too naive to know about office politics back then. This went on for months while I tweaked and tuned every little detail. I knew I was over my head and needed help. I reached back out to my favorite graphic design professor and asked if she would join this committee to weigh in on the decision. Having a professor and dean of a graphic design department should sway their opinions, right?

Well, it did, but my professor picked up on the fact that the problem wasn’t just their lack of decision making, but that they didn’t know what they truly wanted. She actually wanted to put this to a test to see how far off we were, and that’s when my head exploded. She said, let’s make a logo that has nothing to do with religious or non-profit ties. Give them something so completely out there that by default, they will be forced to select one of your original logos. It will naturally guide them towards the right path, she thought. She created a sailboat logo for me to present to the committee. What do sailboats have to do with religious non-profits? Nothing. So this should be the move that pushes them in the right direction and helps them to make a decision.

Ah, but no, that’s not how things go in the real-world. Since the logo was a clean and elegant design, half of the committee decided they wanted to pick the sailboat. “Are you kidding me?!” as I silently screamed into the void of my desolate mind. When asked to go around the room and explain why they voted for their particular logo, the committee members shared various fond memories of the calmness of water, swimming at a lake house, and other things that had nothing to do with their non-profit. Eventually, common sense prevailed and the original logo I created won the final vote. Afterwards, my professor pulled me aside and mentioned how this was one of the craziest situations she had seen as a graphic designer, and to this day, I still believe her.

What does this story have to do with instructional design degrees? This real world experience taught me more than any course in graphic design. What I learned through failure was relationship management, setting realistic expectations, negotiating, pricing my time correctly, and politics. It was a masterclass in falling on my face repeatedly, but still getting back up to try again. The whole time I was experiencing this, I was thinking about how I really, really, really wished that I could’ve had a course about the 101s of working with clients. Man y of the professors I had shared stories about design work with clients, but none went into how to find clients, how to price my time correctly, how to decide which ones to work with, etc.

In 2024, the same thing that happened to me as a graphic design student is the same thing that’s happening to instructional design students. They are taking courses that are heavy in theories, and not being given the opportunity to learn about what is used in the real world. Now this breaks my heart for several reasons, but the most significant reason is that if there is anyone on the planet who understands the purpose of creating a learning experience that addresses a real need, it’s us! We focus on performance, results, outcomes, and measurables so that we can confidently align our designs around our goals. And a huge portion of this should be spent on analysis, getting to the root of the problem, and then designing the learning experience to address this problem. If we have students who are applying for an instructional design degree and on the application, they call out that they are pursuing this degree to help them land a position, then guess what, we better be addressing that need.

Instead, what I keep on hearing from students is that their curriculum is only centered around learning theories and models. Wonderful. They should know about these and how to use them appropriately, but that is not all. We need to listen to the job market, what employers are seeking in instructional designers, and meet them in the middle. And it seems like the majority of the degree websites are marketing themselves as the pathway to become an instructional designer. I’ve seen sites call out statistics about the rising nature of the field and how employers are favoring those with degrees. However, it seems to be this game of tug of war where the academics say I’m going to teach these students about Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development while employers are like, why don’t you have a portfolio?

And of course, who are the ones to suffer from this? Obviously, it’s the students. And that’s not okay.

Now, to be crystal clear, I deeply value the time, energy, and resources spent on further advancing our field and this is done with research. Learning theories, models, frameworks, and approaches that are grounded and based on learning sciences are absolutely essential to what we do. How learning works should be the fundamental of any instructional design degree. And while you just heard my massive rant about degree programs, I am all for them. I know of professors teaching in these programs who are truly doing the lord’s work with educating these students to the best of their abilities and these students hit the ground running when they graduate. For example, I’m participating in mock interviews for the students at Quinnipiac University to help them prepare for a real interviewer. You can also go back to an earlier episode where I interviewed Dr. Karl Kapp from Commonwealth University about the value of instructional design degrees and he made several great points!

I also know about how hard it is to create an approved degree program and how you have to jump through several hoops to get these approved of by a higher education committee, the school (as a whole), and the state. The accreditation process is no joke and I’m positive these folks spent countless days and nights getting their degree plans aligned with all of these voices. And I hope you are not taking away from this message that I hate instructional design degrees. Far from it. I have 3 degrees and work at 2 universities. I love the value of higher education, but higher ed as a whole is a mess, and of all the areas where there is a real possibility to turn things around, it is with instructional design.

So, how do we fix this?

The simple answer is with custom learning tracks. The curriculum will have core courses where students learn about the essentials like how learning works, universal design for learning, ID models, learning theories, research (quan and qual), project management, and technology (LMSs, and authoring tools). Once going through the core, students could then select the electives to meet their needs. Those students who already have instructional design jobs and are there to further pursue knowledge, can dive deeper into learning sciences, VR/XR, AI, and additional approaches. Those who want to explore a degree to help with finding a job could take courses on how to collaborate with subject matter experts (influencing, negotiating, stakeholder management, etc.), creating a portfolio, career guidance (resumes, branding, interviewing, negotiating salaries), and more.

The idea is to give students the flexibility and autonomy to decide the right path for them because that’s what instructional designers do. They can identify their strengths and weaknesses and can decide for themselves what they need more help with. Of course, the students could have the options of picking from either elective track and can mix and match. Now, I can absolutely make an argument for why project management and collaborating with SMEs is truly essential to this job and should be in the required learning track, but for now, I just wanted to paint in broad brush strokes to give you guidelines. The point is that we know for an absolute fact that the one size fits all approach does not work, so why would we do this to our instructional design students?

The other item I’ve heard repeatedly from students is that their professors do not have industry experience and that is alarming. I’m not sure how you can teach about the real world if you’ve never had real world experience? At the very least, I would hope that these folks have been researching the latest in trends and issues and are having these conversations with their students. For example, last year, my students were asking how Generative AI is going to impact instructional design. Since I threw myself into Gen AI, I could answer their questions. If I did not know, I would go find an industry expert and ask for their opinions or better yet, ask if they want to speak to my class. The best way to bring the industry into the classroom is to hire these folks as subject matter experts or instructors. Industry experience and academia need to come together to develop these students.

So much of instructional design is listening, and from what I can gather, these students are not being heard. I want to pave the way for the next generation of instructional designers to be ready for what the real world has in store for them. I do not want them to go through what I did with falling on my face repeatedly and having to learn the hard way.

So, because I have this platform, I’m using this as an opportunity to try and make a difference and God, I hope it works. If it doesn’t, that’s fine. I am determined to serve our community and to make things better. There are degree programs that are doing things right and I know they exist. Maybe I’ll create my own instructional design degree program? I don’t know. To be determined. For now, I’ll do what I can through my content and through Instructional Design Institute. Let’s see what conversations come from this story.

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