Feb 16

Feb 16 The Pros and Cons of Instructional Design

Back in 2018, my wife and I moved out of our condo in Goffstown, New Hampshire in search for a house. As first-time home owners, we had many questions and a list of items we were looking for: backyard for dog, close enough to a train station, 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, etc. After searching for what felt like an eternity, we came across a little ranch that both of us fell in love with. To make sure it was right for us, we made a pros and cons list about everything: the house, the neighborhood, the city, and the commute to work. With any major decision that impacts your life, it’s common to perform a pros and cons list to see if the pros outweigh the cons.

I was talking to an academic advisor who was thinking about making the same career change that I did. She asked me about the pros and cons of instructional design, and when I made this transition, I didn’t know enough to make this list. Since I was so biased about wanting to become an instructional designer, I only saw the pros and threw the cons to the wayside. I’m seeing this same mistake with many posts I see online nowadays. Everyone wants to be an instructional designer, and while I think that’s awesome, I also want you to be prepared for the reality of the role. After all, this is a job. Just like with any job, there are good things and bad things. Most days, I am ecstatic about what it is that I do. On some rare occasions, I need 2 cups of coffee and a motivational speech to get me out of bed. Now that I have been in this role for years, I have a good enough grasp on the position and this blog post is to give you a brain dump about what I’ve experienced in the field.

Let me start by saying that these are my experiences. You may have an entirely different perspective and that doesn’t surprise me one bit. Instructional design is one of these rare unicorn fields where someone in one organization could experience a different lifestyle compared to another person at a similar organization. Everything about your job will absolutely depend upon leadership, culture, the organization’s values, your working preferences, your coworkers, the size of your team, the organization’s expectations of the job responsibilities, your industry, your motivation, and other factors. An instructional designer working at a major research institution with a team of 10 designers is going to have a different experience of an ID working on a team of 2 at a local community college. Same thing can be said with someone working at Twitter vs working at a start-up. It’s important to acknowledge these facts especially for all of you considering this field for the first time and you are probably baffled at reading job postings that are entirely different despite the fact that the job postings have the same title of “instructional designer.” With all of that being said, below are my pros, cons, and a category I’m calling “in between.”

Pros

Your Creative Opportunities are Endless

Do you enjoy being creative? Do you enjoy critical thinking and problem solving? Would you describe yourself as innovative? If you said yes to any of these questions, you’ll love being an instructional designer. The cliché term of “thinking outside the box” applies to being an ID. You’ll have the opportunity to design the learning experience for students. This includes creating course outcomes, learning objectives, assessments, and content. You’ll create the problems that students will be practicing and trying to solve. It’s your responsibility to also map out the course with what students will be experiencing as far as for the sequences of learning.

Imagine designing a lesson plan for each week. What will students exactly be going through? For instance, let’s say you are designing a section of a week. You want students to experience a reading, a video, a practice question, a discussion board activity, and then a reflection assignment. You can visualize how this looks and make sure the content properly aligns to the learning objectives. You can see an example below:

I remember practicing this with a music course I taught years ago and thought that this was an interesting exercise. Now imagine having this be a part of your full-time job. I thoroughly enjoy designing complex problems with scenario-based learning and project-based learning to have assignments come alive, feel relevant, and equip students with real-world skills. When the world shut down in 2020, I was designing a course on critical thinking skills. I wanted students to have to solve a problem where there was no clear right or wrong answer. I created a scenario-based problem where the students imagined themselves in the shoes of a manager who had a say in the decision of when it was safe to bring employees back to the office. I created an elaborate back story and then asked them how they would ultimately come to their decision. Many of the students struggled with this because at the time, there wasn’t a unified answer and peoples’ emotions clouded their judgement. I conducted interviews with these students to ask them about the relevancy of the scenario-based assignments and the overwhelming feedback was that they never took a course that had such relevant problems before. This all came from the creativity.

SMEs are Valuable Allies

SMEs have a bad reputation out there. Any instructional designer has a horror story or two of working with a SME who made their life miserable. It happens because some people are just downright awful. I won’t sugarcoat that in any way, however, 99% of my experiences with SMEs have been incredibly positive. When forming relationships with SMEs, it’s important to have a stance of genuine curiosity with the course’s content. If you view designing a course as a boring task because you aren’t a fan of the subject matter, this will absolutely be transparent to the SME. The SME is on the project because of their passion for this subject matter and more often than not, they are thrilled to talk about their experiences. This doesn’t matter about the sector. You would think this makes sense with higher education because your SMEs are typically faculty members, but I’ve also designed courses for some of the most prominent organizations in the United States and their SMEs were just as excited about sharing their knowledge.

This excitement leads to your own professional growth. You have access to someone teaching you their life lessons on a particular subject that may help you. I’ve designed several courses on leadership and I’ve taken away many practical tips from these SMEs and applied them to my life. This isn’t always the case with every subject matter, but it can surprise you. I’ve had colleagues design courses on accounting and found themselves shocked with how much they learned about come tax season. It all depends upon how you view working with SMEs and your openness to learning. These folks can essentially become your instructor for the content.

This is a long way of leading me to my point about how SMEs can become your allies. Like it or not, we live in a political world. Your network can directly influence others and change their perception of how they view you. Let’s say your SME has a great experience with designing a course with you. The course is well received by students, it’s generating revenue, and creating a buzz around the organization. That SME is then going to tell all of their colleagues and peers about the course, the design process, and YOU. Your network will grow with these influences and when you need them to ask a favor, they’ll be there for you. I’ve had SMEs offer me other job opportunities, given free advice about a difficult problem, and be willing to be the bridge to connect me with another important figure within the organization. These SMEs can become your champions. This a pro I never considered until I started to form great relationships with SMEs and saw firsthand, how this can change your career growth.

You are Always Learning

If you consider yourself a life-long learner, welcome to your career. You are always learning as an instructional designer. You are obviously learning new skills when it comes to being a professional such as:

Project management
Networking
Multimedia Skills
Research
Leadership
Training
Budgeting

The fun part about this job though is that you will learn new skills in different subject matters and then it’s your job to design the curriculum to instruct others. It’s actually quite an amazing experience to see your own learning process as you are designing a course. I’ve designed courses that I had literally no experience in at the time, and then once the course is done, I’m able to carry on a conversation about tiny details. For instance, I’ve developed courses on supply chains, manufacturing, big data, cybersecurity, and more. I had to immerse myself in these topics to understand them a bit better every day. If you find yourself watching the History Channel or an educational YouTube Channel or reading up on bitcoin for fun, instructional design is right for you.

These are the most significant pros that come to mind. Are there more? Absolutely. These are the major points though that I want you to consider. Some of the other pros just to list them are remote opportunities, decent pay, and a clear path towards growth in your career. So, now I want to mention the cons, and please, don’t be dissuaded from looking into becoming an instructional designer if you are thinking about this career change. The cons are here to provide you with a real-world perspective on what you are going to face.

Cons

Your Schedule and Stability

Whenever someone asks me a question about what the day in the life as an instructional designer looks like, I never know how to answer. No two days are ever the same. I actually made a video called the day in the life of an instructional designer at MIT and it took me forever to create the script for it. My work/life balance is dictated by the progress of my courses’ development and where I’m at for deadlines. If I’m working on the early stages of the design process with creating the project scope, the course’s description, figuring out who the SME is going to be, etc. this means that I’m not in crunch time yet. This is usually a slower process to make sure everything is in order before the next steps. If I were to describe the week or days before the course launch date, my schedule is completely full. I don’t have time to do anything, but focus on making sure the course is perfect before students enter it. With creating several courses at a time, this means that my schedule is all over the place.

One common myth I keep hearing is that the summer is a “down time” for instructional designers. IDs are educators, but this doesn’t come with having slower months in the summer. If anything, it’s actually the opposite. I’m usually preparing for course launches in the fall. What is true though is that the summer is more available when working with SMEs, who are generally faculty members for higher ed IDs. Since they have more of a relaxed schedule during these months, it means that instructional designers take advantage of this and work harder.

I’ve heard from some people about how their roles create a great work/life balance approach by being able to close down the laptop at 5 PM and then not have to think about work until 9 AM the next day. I’ve never experienced this unless if the project has stalled for some reason. I forced myself to delete my Outlook app on my phone and turn off all Slack notifications because there is always something to do. At times, it drives me bonkers to know that I have to mentally shut down for the day or else I’ll burn myself out.

Constantly Adapting to Change

I’ve already mentioned that trying to describe a typical day in the life of an ID is challenging. The main factor for this is change. As an instructional designer, you wear many, many hats. One day you feel like a researcher. The next, you are trying to create a peace treaty between an upset SME and your supervisor. The next, you are in the studio working with the multimedia team for video shoots. The next, you are conducting QA checks on the course builds in the LMS. While this is exciting in a sense, I’ve found it difficult to try and carve out time for my other priorities. Since I’m the most creative in the mornings, I like to draft exercises and problems before anyone else logs on for the day. I’ve had to learn how to adapt to my schedule.

Speaking of adapting, when creating courses, instructional designers are one cog in the machine. There are other stakeholders involved with SMEs, faculty, the multimedia team, customer support, marketing, accounting, engineering, third party vendors, academic advisors, TAs, learning facilitators, etc. Whenever a change happens within a course, you’ll have to communicate with the right department to make sure everyone is aware. For most cases, these changes are planned in advance and everyone is kept in the loop. Other times, you’ll be thrown a curve ball and have to think about what to do on the fly.

For instance, let’s say that the software you are running in a live course suddenly goes down. You are made aware of it when tickets start to come in from IT and customer support. Students are calling their academic advisors and are creating discussion board posts asking about what to do. Something like this can happen and has happened to me before. Since you are the glue that holds everything together, you are responsible for communicating to all of the right stakeholders and making a backup plan and creating a backup plan for the backup plan. This scenario is more of an emergency plan, but more common changes are being assigned to work with a new SME, having due dates changed, forming relationships with new colleagues because of turnover, etc.

Being the “Middleperson”

No one likes feeling stuck in the middle. Maybe you’ve encountered this before with two close friends arguing or trying to stop a lovers’ quarrel. Simply put, it’s not fun and is a delicate process to make sure both sides come to an agreement and then you pray that this argument never comes up again. One part of my job that I was not prepared for was how many times I was going to be thrown into this type of situation. As the instructional designer, you’re the representative of the institution. You follow the organization’s guidelines, policies, and procedures. At the end of the day, you need to consider what’s best for students and what’s best for the organization. Now, imagine having two other parties both believing that they are doing what’s right for the organization and don’t want to backdown. Who is going to facilitate this conversation to make both parties see one another’s views? Hint: it could be you.

I’ve found myself in these situations where my senior level leadership has a disagreement with a professor, a dean, a SME, or a vendor, and I’m there to pick up the pieces and make them whole again. The tricky part of this situation is that both sides usually have the right idea in mind. They are doing what’s best for the learning experience (in their opinion) and don’t want to give in to the other side. This greatly depends upon your organization and the structure of your departments, but no matter the organization, I keep having these experiences happen.

Let’s say that you are developing a new Business Administration course. You are working with a professor as your SME who has taught this course for 20 years on campus. They have seen first-hand the benefits of using one particular simulation and feels that in order to achieve the same results as the in-person course, the new online course you are developing must have the same simulation. You tried out the simulation for yourself and concur that it would be a valuable tool for students. After working with the vendor, they give you a price of $50 dollars per student and the professor confirms that the price tag is reasonable. You bring this back to your supervisor and they have several concerns about the price and mentions that this would far exceed the budget. They ask if there are alternatives that are less expensive, but still deliver the same learning experience. You then go back to your SME with this information, and they say no, it has to be this simulation or else they don’t want their name associated with the course.

Is this an extreme circumstance? Yes. Did this actually happen to me in a similar situation? Yes. I constantly talk about negotiating, persuading, influencing, and handling conflict because of these scenarios. In this case, both parties were doing what’s right for the students with wanting the best simulation and wanting the most affordable price, but there has to be a compromise.

In Between

That’s Not in my Job Description?

I would like to consider this last bullet point a pro, but I also see how it could be perceived as a con. I’ll let you decide though as every instructional designer will tell you about this final point. As you continue to grow in your career, more opportunities present themselves. Sometimes, these are obvious signs for you take advantage of the opportunity as it closely relates to your work and passions. Other times, it’s outside of your comfort zone and you assume that there has to be someone else more fitting for the job. Then you realize, you are technically the most qualified to handle the task.

In order for instructional designers to make the career transition from ID to Senior ID or Manager, more responsibilities will be asked of you. If you are looking to advance to a more senior level role or leadership, it’s a natural transition. The con about all of this is that this doesn’t mean that anything else comes off your plate. You just continue to stack more work on top of your existing duties.

If you are working in academia, this sounds all too familiar. What’s a nice change of pace though is being asked to conduct research, write a white paper on it, and having it be reviewed for publication. This typically then is followed by presentations at conferences or being invited to speak at universities and other organizations. With every paper and presentation, you are building your brand and credibility. What about beyond this though? That’s where things start to get interesting.

When I first started working at MIT, I volunteered to run the webinars with our faculty. These webinars could be to support our learners or to talk to potential learners about our programs. Since I designed the courses with these faculty, it only made sense for me to host these webinars. What I wasn’t expecting though was that after doing this for a bit, the marketing and sales team asked if I would like to do more of these opportunities. Since I love public speaking and talking about nerdy content, I didn’t think much of it until one day when I was doing a presentation for a massive organization and I had a bit of an identity crisis. Is it normal for an instructional designer to be the demo guy for products? And the answer to that question is no, but my public speaking skills have opened more doors for me instead of just being behind a laptop screen.

This type of thing seems to keep on happening to me in my career. I’ll mention an idea and look around the room to see who is the best suited to do it and sure enough, it ends up being me. Another time, I was preparing for a marketing webinar to talk about one of our new programs. The professor and I had done this webinar once before and I were preparing for the same type of presentation. Unfortunately, something urgent popped up for the professor and he couldn’t make it. My backup person didn’t feel ready to handle this either and asked not to host the event. After the team and I got together to figure out a plan C, the best option ended up being me since I designed the program with the professor. It also helps that I love public speaking and talking to students so I volunteered. A few days later, I’m scrolling through Facebook and see a targeted ad with my face on it. I was like, wait, what is this? It was actually an advertisement for the marketing webinar and wow, that was a different feeling! I was filled with both excitement and anxiousness all in one swoop. I ended up really enjoying the webinar and offered to do these more despite the fact that I knew I didn’t have time to make this a part of my regular day-to-day tasks, which is why I put this item in this category.

My last example about this comes from speaking with learners and collecting feedback. At the end of each week, I ask for student feedback with a survey and at the end of the program, I host focus groups to understand more about their comments. One comment that I couldn’t wrap my head around was that many learners wanted more information, but they didn’t have extra time to dedicate to the class. Absolutely baffled, I asked several questions to try and unearth what I could do, and eventually, I made the connection that they did have time, but it wasn’t in front of a laptop. The majority of learners had time in their daily commute to work, so if I made something for this commute, they would listen. Without having the slightest clue of how this was going to end up, I put together MITxPRO’s first podcast. The content came from recorded interviews of industry experts that didn’t make the cut to the program because it was too much content. I decided to act as a narrator and weave together the stories of these experts and match the content to their appropriate courses in the program. I nervously released these to the public because I wanted learners to take this content with them anywhere on the go. I knew it was doing well when learners were asking for more episodes despite the fact that it wasn’t supposed to have more than a handful of them. While I can sit back now and think of how much fun this was, at the time, it was madness. I did my research in talking with multiple teams on what content to use, finding other podcasts that were used for academic purposes, experimenting with my own style, and more. To me, it was certainly worth it in the end, but it was quite a journey to make this happen.

In my opinion, the pros outweigh the cons for being an instructional designer. These absolutely depend upon the sector, the organization, the size of the team, the leadership, the culture, and other factors, but if I had to speak in general terms, yeah, I think being an ID is worth it. While the cons were tricky to navigate and figure out, they did make me a wiser human being. I also think I became an instructional designer at the right point in my life. I was ready for a change and I was prepared to just roll with the punches even if I had no clue of what was going to come next. Overall, I found a career that allows me to be creative, work with knowledgeable people, and care about the learning experience. If any of those things sound good to you, I’d consider looking into the instructional design field.

If you enjoyed this blog post, this was taken directly out of my book, What I Wish I Knew Before Becoming an Instructional Designer.

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