What I wish I’d known when I started as an Instructional Designer.
Concurrent Session 4
Brief Abstract
Instructional designers do what? Have you ever said this to yourself? There are specific knowledge, skills, and attributes that can help you be a successful designer. Come join us to learn what we wish we’d known a collective 40+ years ago when we started working as instructional designers.
Presenters
Extended Abstract
Extended Abstract
You’ve graduated, you’ve got your Gagne and Maslow down, you’re ready to engage those students and already have ideas for a set of instructional elements based on Campbell’s Hero’s Journey … and then reality hits: budgets, timelines, strategy, errors, accessibility, copyright, LMS details, production systems, team coordination, user experience, project management, product management – but wait … there’s more. You’re lucky to spend 50% of your time on actual design. Here’s where some intentional work up front can help you handle all the other stuff so that you can do what you love.
In this presentation, we’ll dig into methods for getting organized, orienting yourself and your work into the broader context of your department/school/business, and making helpful connections with colleagues from across the wide spectrum of specialties and organizations.
We’ll suggest tools, resources, information, and techniques, that we wish we would have know when we started working as designers, which will make your real-world instructional-design experience more effective and enjoyable.
See you in the session!
Level of Participation
Bring your questions, experiences, favorite pro tips, horror stories, and tales of triumph to share! We’ll have a great classroom-style exchange, with the speakers' presenting ideas and everyone else chipping in with ideas and explorations. Warning! Small groups will be used.
Session Goals
You will gain insight into the wide variety of aspects and duties that come with instructional design in the real world. You will discover a variety of tools, resources, information, and techniques that you can use to create a style and system that works for you, so you can reduce the cognitive load of the administrivia you handle and increase the amount of time you spend on actual design work!