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Stanford's d.school is no ordinary design school. They boast that they do not teach "how to design" but rather "design thinking", which is a concept taking over creative disciplines nowadays. That being said, design is basically a process of creative problem solving, and it can be applied to a vast variety of fields. With an immense amount of challenges to be tackled, education is no exception.

For years, instructional design was discussed by scholars and professionals alike in terms of how it could be utilized for optimizing learning. At heart, it is a concept of programming instruction to achieve better learning outcomes. The concept has branched out to be a profession rather than being a sole methodology for in-class practices. Nowadays, when a person puts "instructional designer" as a line in their resume, the common perception is that they are somehow involved in e-learning authoring. Meanwhile, the fast pace of technology has caused e-learners to have new demands from the format of the content they are learning, the number one being immersion. With the appearance of new learning technologies, instructional design is now shifting towards learning experience design, which has design thinking at heart. As design thinking values interdisciplinarity above everything else for problem solving, fresh opportunities for driving educational change emerge.

Now that the diffusion of design thinking is underway, it's affecting the way learning designers approach their work. This chapter aims to focus on how instructional design (ID) is evolving into learning experience design (LXD), the underlying reasons, the place of Design Thinking during this process, and perspectives on the future of learning design.

"Instructional Design est. 1945": The evolution of Instructional Design

Instructional design (ID) has many meanings attached to it. Nowadays, within educational settings, it is usually the careful planning, regulation, and assessment of learning activities that comes to mind. On the other hand, in professional environments, the immediate connotation is related to building training modules, most probably with technological aids. While instructional design might sound like a recent phenomenon due to technology utilization, its roots actually date back to the times of World War II (Dick, 1987).

The psychologists called out to action during this time were assigned the task of carrying out research to develop trainings for the military. They were also responsible for skills assessment and conducting "needs analyses" to select participants for a particular training. Among the people who were influential on the characteristics of the trainings developed were the psychologists Briggs, Gagné, and Flanagan (Reiser, 2001). Their influence comes from the fact that they based these training characteristics on instructional principles shaped by instructional theories, and research on human learning and behavior.

Once the war ended, in an attempt to solve the problems in instructional design, American Institutes for Research were founded. It was during second half of the '40s that the researchers started considering a training as a system, and developing planning, development, and assessment procedures (Dick, 1987).

What came afterwards was the Programmed Instruction Movement (Skinner, 1954). In this work that spans until mid '60s, they argued that the instruction should be given in small chunks, and the frequent questions that require explicit answers should be addressed to learners. Due to the immediate feedback they would receive, the learning would be maximized due to reinforcement. Upon the careful evaluation of the materials used, they would be revised and refined according to learner needs, which would enable learner self-pacing.

As much as Ralph Tyler is known as the originator of behavioral objectives, Benjamin Bloom and colleagues came up with their famous "Taxonomy of Educational Objectives" in 1956, having an impact on instructional design as we know it forever. Additionally, in an attempt to aid those who would like to design materials for programmed instruction, Mager (1962) wrote a book called "Preparing Objectives for Programmed Instruction" (Reiser, 2001).

In 1962, Glaser and Klaus introduced criterion-referenced measures in order to define entry-level and post-instructional student behaviors. This piece was published in a book edited by Robert Gagné who introduced another canonical concept to instructional design in Conditions of Learning (1965). He categorized five domains of learning outcomes as intellectual skills, cognitive strategy, verbal information, motor skills, and attitude. His theory argued that there needs to be certain prerequisites met under each of these domains for learning to occur.

The 1970s were marked by rising interest in creating various models for instructional design. During this period, instruction began to be perceived as more of a system, and many principles were suggested for systemizing it (Gustafson & Bratton, 1984). It was also around this time that graduate programs on instructional design began to be established (Reiser, 2001) and that Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations (PLATO) was created, and it could be dubbed as the first computer-assisted instructional endeavor. Along with the innovative advances such as PLATO and invention of personal computers, this era could be named as the emergence of distance learning as we know it.

By 1990s, the line of research shifted through cognitive psychology to constructivism, in which Dewey, Montessori, Piaget, Vygotsky, and Bruner are among the influential names. This theory prioritized authenticity, real-life problem solving, and self-pacing. Regarding instructional design, constructivism led the way of computers being utilized in more interactive ways rather than solely incorporating drilling. With the rise of the Internet use in the mid-90's (Reiser, 2001), distance learning slowly started taking over, and it was instructional designers' job to create online learning environments that did not solely transfer textbooks into digital platforms.

The 2000s brought along technological advances one after another, and in a very fast pace at that. Especially towards the end of the decade, the computers and devices went smaller and cordless; the Internet went wireless with bigger bandwidth; and social networking and media began to take over. Right now, as we are approaching the second decade of the millennium, the only way to describe the current state of instructional design is "Imagine the possibilities!" with the immense number of tools available. Although designers are indeed imagining, the highlight here is that instructional design is evolving into LXD which lies heavily on personalization / customization of learning and empathy.

"LX Designer Wanted:" The Emergence of Learning Experience Design

LXD is actually not a brand-new phenomenon, and it has been around for over ten years now. The term was coined by Niels Floor, a Dutch LXD pioneer in 2007 (Floor, 2018a). While there are many definitions of LXD out there, let's look at the one that the originator created to offer a general understanding:

Learning experience design [...] is the process of creating learning experiences that enable the learner to achieve the desired learning outcome in a human centered and goal-oriented way. (Floor, 2018b, para#1).

Then, what makes LXD different from instructional design? Just looking at the terms from an etymological perspective, instructional design emphasizes the source of knowledge - in other words, the planning of the teaching activities. However, LXD concentrates more on the destination of the knowledge, or the learner. As Matthews et al. (2017) also conclude, there is a heavy emphasis on empathy in LXD. It is plausible to claim that LXD pays attention to emotional design as Floor (2018) describes the fundamentals of LXD as (Figure 1):

1. Human-centered

2. Goal-oriented

3. Theory of learning, i.e. familiarity with human cognition

4. Learning put into practice

5. Heavily interdisciplinary

Figure 1 - The Interdisciplinarity of Learning Experience Design Model (image from: http://www.learningexperiencedesign.com/learn-2.html).

A Universal LXD?

An internationally reputable architect, designer, and educator Ron Mace coined the term "universal design". In 1997, he formed a committee of ten people and established The Principles of Universal Design (Connell et al., 1997). While these principles are aimed at creating a universal design mainly for architectural and industrial products, they are still valid for educational contexts, especially learning design, as well (Connell et al., 1997):

Equitable use: The design is useful and marketable to people with diverse abilities.

Flexibility in use: The design accommodates a wide range of individual preferences and abilities.

Simple and intuitive use: Use of the design is easy to understand, regardless of the user's experience, knowledge, language skills, or current concentration level.

Perceptible information: The design communicates necessary information effectively to the user, regardless of ambient conditions or the user's sensory abilities.

Tolerance for error: The design minimizes hazards and the adverse consequences of accidental or unintended actions.

Low physical effort: The design can be used efficiently and comfortably and with a minimum of fatigue.

Size and space for appropriate use: Appropriate size and space is provided for approach, reach, manipulation, and use regardless of user's body size, posture, or mobility.

Combining these with the foundations of LXD should give us an idea about the universal design of learning experiences. Although universality might give off the impression that universal design hinders personalization, it is still possible to customize the experience.

There have been multiple attempts at creating universal design principles for education as well (Palmer & Caputo, 2002; Deaton, 2016; CAST, 2018). In particular Chapter 2 of this eBook, recommends Universal Design for Learning as a way to sustain learning.

CAST established a set of guidelines for the "universal design for learning" framework whose principles were set forth by Anne Meyer and David Rose in the 1990s (Meyer, Rose, Gordon, 2014). The purpose of this work is to enable educators to optimize learning experiences with the help of learning technologies. Figure 2 shows a version of these guidelines as of July 2018.

Figure 2 - Universal Design for Learning Guidelines Version 2.2 (CAST, 2018). Image source: http://udlguidelines.cast.org/binaries/content/assets/udlguidelines/udlg-v2-2/udlg_graphicorganizer_v2-2_numbers-yes.pdf

In her article, UX to LX: The Rise of Learner Experience Design, in which she focuses on the rise of LXD, Kilgore (2016) explains "User experience research methods and design thinking help us unpack the intangibles of the student experience" (Knott as cited in Kilgore, 2016, para#6). Then, what exactly is design thinking and why does it matter?

Design Thinking: An Approach for Diffusion of Innovation

A very explicit explanation of design thinking would be Wu's (2017) title to her article in UX Collective, Is Design Thinking a Method of Design? In a similar vein, Johansson-Sköldberg, Woodilla and Çetinkaya (2013) found that there are multiple definitions for what design(erly) thinking means through doing a discourse analysis. Below are the multiple meanings found in the literature. One meaning that is particularly relevant to this chapter is "design and designerly thinking as a problem- solving activity" since design thinking is approached as a way of solving problems. Others meanings are (Kimbell, 2009):

1. Design and designerly thinking as the creation of artifacts

2. Design and designerly thinking as a reflexive practice

3. Design and designerly thinking as a problem-solving activity

4. Design and designerly thinking as a way of reasoning/making sense of things

5. Design and designerly thinking as creation of meaning

As much as the definition of design thinking as a problem-solving activity goes back to early 1990s, the concept of design thinking has gone mainstream with the CEO of IDEO, Brown's book (2009) Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation (also Brown & Katz, 2011). In their work, Brown and Katz mention that design thinking's aim is to help people be as creative and innovative as possible in their problem-solving endeavors. So, rather than being a new way of designing for problem solving, it is a way to approach the problem itself. In order to get creative, the importance of interdisciplinarity is boldly emphasized much like LXD does.

That is not to say that design thinking is only contained within the frame of practitioners. The framework has made its way into educational research, as well, with the project Design Thinking for Educat ors (Riverdale Country School & IDEO, 2012) observing: "Design thinking [...] is a mindset. It's about being aware of the world around you, believing that you play a role in shaping that world and taking action toward a more desirable future. It is human-centered, collaborative, experimental, and optimistic" (Riverdale Country School & IDEO, 2012). Figure 3 shows what the design thinking process looks like.

Figure 3 - Design Thinking Process (Brown, 2009).

Utilizing this process, what a learner experience designer should do is, as repeated many times before, to empathize with the learners. Having open polls for potential learners or conducting interviews with them to learn about what kind of an experience they would want would surely help. In this phase, as the learners' emotional needs are prioritized for optimal engagement, this step can be dubbed as the "emotional needs analysis". The next step is naturally to define the problem. However, since we are talking about design thinking here, the approach should be out-of-the-box, approaching the problem with awareness and from many angles. After the problem is identified, the ideation, i.e. the brainstorming process, will begin preferably with the company of an interdisciplinary team. The next steps are prototyping, testing/piloting, and iterating this cycle until satisfactory results are achieved. Figure 4 depicts how design thinking can drive the LXD process.

Figure 4 - Design thinking in action in learning experience design (image from: https://www.edsurge.com/news/2016-06-20-ux-to-lx-the-rise-of-learner-experience-design). Image Credit: iDesign.

What's Next for Designing Learning?

With the prevalence of virtual and augmented reality nowadays, the talk of LXD will not go anywhere soon. As instructional designers are slowly being replaced by LX designers, and schools like Stanford's d.school claims that they are "not teaching design, but design thinking," the question of "How can this be leveraged for the sake of educational change?" comes to mind. d.school offers tools for action exactly for this purpose.

Then, what are some things a learning experience designer can do to meet the rising expectations of "a good learning experience"?
Designing just for the learner
Empathy and emotional design lies at the core of LXD. As long as the learner gets the feeling of personalization from the experience, it is plausible to assume that it would be deemed as a "good" one (Milam, El-Nasr & Wakkary, 2008). This is the reason that stories that have multiple endings are really popular (Tyndale & Ramsoomair, 2016). In order to customize the experience for the learner, data analytics, i. e. their digital footsteps, are the number one source to go to.
Distance learning still rules supreme
The platform of choice to consider for the end-design should be mostly mobile due to the prevalence of handheld devices and the speed of learning, but laptops are still relevant (Pandey, 2018).
"The book or the movie?"
Books are becoming a nostalgic object as much as we would like to argue that leaving things to imagination is the better option. The busyness of day-to-day life creates impatience and leads to not investing long periods of time for trainings. Thus, videos are preferred over plain text, and everything shrinks down to "pill-size" portions that are, of course, as interactive as possible to engage the learner. For example, Chapter 4 discusses microcredentials as an innovation in teachers' professional development. According to Trifecta Research (2015), 70% of Gen Z watches two hours of YouTube per day, which depicts the landscape of video consumption. At this point, it is up to the learning experience designers to rise to the challenge of not leaving out the vital details in the "book", i.e. text that they are integrating into an online module.
Iterate, iterate, iterate
The more the module (product, training...) is revised based on the feedback gathered, the better it will be. Most important of all, it is vital not to restrain creativity throughout the design process. The teamwork of an interdisciplinary team is essential here so that the experience is a product of various fresh perspectives.
"Design" the experience
The Learning Design Starter Kit, Interaction Design Foundation, and Stanford's Life Design Lab are good starting points to be familiarized with the idea of LXD and design thinking. The starter kit has been developed by the partnership of St. Petersburg College and Smart Sparrow, with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It serves as an introduction to the concept with tools to utilize in classroom, case studies as examples, and publications regarding learning design. Interaction Design Foundation functions as a guide for technical skills to possess for designing better learning experiences. Finally, Life Design Lab of Stanford serves as an illustration of what LXD looks like in action. Additionally, Arizona State University's Habitable Worlds is a good example regarding its leverage of adaptive technologies and aligning it with rich multimedia and hands-on experience.

It is plausible to assume that in the next five years or so, LXD will be more prevalent as both a profession and a line of research. Considering "two hands are better than one", the collaboration of various fields and the power of technology can certainly be leveraged to drive educational change. One recommendation to consider for higher education institutions is to offer design thinking courses in educational disciplines at large. The more the students collaborate to solve real-life problems with their peers from various fields, the more possible it is to tackle educational problems and bring about change. In the professional field, on the other hand, institutions and independent designers alike can shift their professional development towards design thinking and collaborating across disciplines as well as designing more emotional, thus immersive "experiences" for learners.

References

Bloom, B. S., Engelhart, M. D., Furst, E. J., Hill, W. H., Krathwohl, D. R. (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educational goals. Handbook I: Cognitive Domain. New York: David McKay.

Brown, T. (2009). Change by design: How design thinking transforms organizations and inspires innovation. New York: Harper.

Brown, T. & Katz, B. (2011). Change by design. The Journal of Product Innovation Management, 28(3), 381-383.

CAST (2018). The UDL Guidelines. Retrieved from http://udlguidelines.cast.org/binaries/content/assets/udlguidelines/udlg-v2-2/udlg_graphicorganizer_v2-2_numbers-yes.pdf

Deaton, P.J. (2016). Accessible learning experience design and implementation. In F. H. Nah & C. H. Tan (Eds.), HCI in business, government, and organizations: Information systems: Third international conference, HCIBGO 2016 (pp. 47-55). Springer, Cham.

Dick, W. (1987). A history of instructional design and its impact on educational psychology. In J. Glover & R. Roning (Eds.), Historical foundations of educational psychology (pp. 183-202). New York: Plenum.

Floor, N. (2018a). Learning Experience Design.com. Retrieved from http://www.learningexperiencedesign.com/index.html

Floor, N. (2018b). What is Experience Design? Retrieved from http://www.learningexperiencedesign.com/learn-1.html

Gagné, R. M. (1965). The conditions of learning and theory of instruction (1st ed.). New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Glaser, R., Klaus, D. J. (1962). Proficiency measurement: Assessing human performance. In R. Gagné, (Ed.), Psychological principles in system development (pp. 421-427). New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Gustafson, K., & Bratton, B. (1984). Instructional improvement centers in higher education: A status report. Journal of Instructional Development, 7(2), 2-7.

Johansson-Sköldberg, U., Woodilla, J., Çetinkaya, M. (2013). Design Thinking: Past, Present and Possible Futures. Creativity and Innovation Management, 22(2), 121-146.

Kilgore, W. (2016). UX to LX: The Rise of Learner Experience Design. Retrieved from https://www.edsurge.com/news/2016-06-20-ux-to-lx-the-rise-of-learner-experience-design

Kimbell, L. (2009). Design practices in design thinking. European Academy of Management, 2009. Retrieved from: http://www.lucykimbell.com/stuff/DesignPractices_Kimbell.pdf

Mager, R.F. (1962). Preparing objectives for programmed instruction. Belmont, CA: Fearon.

Matthews, M.T., Williams, G.S., Yanchar, S.C., McDonald, J.K. (2017). Empathy in Distance Learning Design Practice. TechTrends, 61(5), 486-493.

Meyer, A., Rose, D.H., & Gordon, D. (2014). Universal design for learning: Theory and Practice. Wakefield, MA: CAST Professional.

Milam, D., El-Nasr, M.S., & Wakkary, R., (2008). Looking at the Interactive Narrative Experience through the Eyes of the Participants. In Interactive Storytelling (pp. 96-107). Berlin: Springer.

Connell et al. (1997). The Principles of Universal Design. North Carolina State University's Center for Universal Design, College of Design. Retrieved from https://projects.ncsu.edu/design/cud/about_ud/udprinciplestext.htm

Palmer, J., Caputo, A. (2002). The Universal Instructional Design Implementation Guide. Retrieved from https://opened.uoguelph.ca/instructor-resources/resources/uid-implimentation-guide-v13.pdf

Pandey, A. (2018, April 17). 10 Mobile Learning Trends for 2018. Retrieved from https://elearningindustry.com/mobile-learning-trends-2018

Reiser, R.A. (2001). A history of instructional design and technology: Part II: A history of instructional design. Educational Technology Research & Development, 49(2), 57-67.

Riverdale Country School and IDEO (2012). Design Thinking for Educators (2nd ed). Retrieved from http://www.designthinkingforeducators.com

Skinner, B.F. (1954). The science of learning and the art of teaching. Harvard Educational Review, 24, 86-97.

Trifecta Research (2015). Generation Z Media Consumption Habits: True Digital Natives. Retrieved from: http://trifectaresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Generation-Z-Sample-Trifecta-Research-Deliverable.pdf

Tyndale, E.,and Ramsoomair, F. (2016). Keys to Successful Interactive Storytelling: A Study of the Booming "Choose-Your-Own-Adventure" Video Game Industry. Journal of Educational Technology, 13(3), 28-34.

Wu, S. (2017, December 14). Is Design Thinking a Method of Design? Retrieved from https://uxdesign.cc/is-design-thinking-a-method-of-design-no-7c7fca1ba7c6

Correspondence concerning this chapter should be addressed to Ceren Korkmaz at korkmaz.11@ osu.edu

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Driving Educational Change: Innovations in Action

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Stanford's d.school is no ordinary design school. They boast that they do not teach "how to design" but rather "design thinking", which is a concept taking over creative disciplines nowadays. That being said, design is basically a process of creative problem solving, and it can be applied to a vast variety of fields.

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Labels Do Matter - A Brief Survey of ID Job Posting Titles

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Labels Do Matter - A Brief Survey of ID Job Posting Titles

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Despite exponential growth in the development of learning technologies, there has been relatively little support in terms of professional development for engineers designing, building, and deploying new learning technologies.

Credit: whiteMocca / Shutterstock © 2018

What Is Learning Engineering?

It has been 50 years since Nobel laureate Herb Simon, a Carnegie Mellon University professor and expert in artificial intelligence, called for a new field of technical competence in the learning domain that he called learning engineering. Today, many disciplines within the learning domain need engineering and development expertise. At the same time, engineers working in the development of learning technologies increasingly benefit from a background in learning science and pedagogy. At the intersection of these needs and benefits sits the field of learning engineering.

Despite exponential growth in the development of learning technologies, there has been relatively little support specific to the professional development of the engineers designing, building, and deploying new learning technologies. These professionals require a unique skill set that merges engineering and systems thinking with learning science and theories of human development. The IEEE IC Industry Consortium on Learning Engineering ( ICICLE) was formed to define and support this burgeoning field and to advocate for the development of both the professional and academic disciplines of learning engineering. In addition to principles of engineering design and learning science, the Learning Engineer will need to understand:

Current and historical product trends and the strengths and weaknesses of a variety of learning technology implementations

Data standards and regulations around learning data and privacy

Best practices in technical project management and in the design of learning technologies and learning ecosystems

The factors contributing to success and failure in the design, development, deployment, and outcomes of learning technologies

What Is ICICLE?

Recognizing a need to support the development of learning engineering as a profession and an academic discipline, in December 2017 the Standards Association of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) approved the creation of a new program. They called it the IEEE IC Industry Consortium on Learning Engineering - otherwise known as ICICLE.

Planned as a two-year activity as part of the IEEE's Industry Connections (IC) program, the consortium is an open forum and community-driven platform that currently comprises more than 50 organizations in industry, academia, and government with a common goal of supporting the development of learning engineering.

The consortium currently supports nine special interest groups (SIGs) and is working toward the launch of an ICICLE conference in 2019. The event will highlight the latest developments in the profession and academic discipline of learning engineering with topics including:

Artificial Intelligence and Adaptive Learning Technologies

xAPI and Learning Analytics

Competency Frameworks and Certification

Learning Technology Data Standards

Learning Engineering as a Profession

An Academic Curriculum for Learning Engineering

Data Governance and Privacy in Learning Contexts

Learning Experience Design

Augmented, Virtual, and Mixed Realities from the Learning Perspective

Who Should Attend the ICICLE Conference?

Learning engineers including software and product developers; educational publishers; systems integrators; and individuals who design, develop, and deploy learning technology in schools, colleges and universities, corporations, and government should all attend because a major goal of the conference is the exchange of ideas and best practices among working learning engineers.

Learning practitioners should attend because there will be much of interest to learning and development professionals, trainers, instructional and learning experience designers, and educators at all levels, especially those who are responsible for introducing new learning technologies and for initiating competency-based training, mastery-based education, automated certificate programs, and other innovations. This will be an opportunity to see the range of successful applications of learning engineering as well as the kinds of problems that need to be solved.

Learning researchers should attend, especially professional researchers in the field of learning science who are developing new learning paradigms and who are implementing new technologies within the context of learning. This includes faculty and administrators responsible for academic programs related to learning engineering. A major goal of the consortium is cross-fertilization between researchers and practitioners and the exchange of information among established and nascent academic programs and curricula related to learning engineering.

In addition to launching the conference, ICICLE will publish a white paper on learning engineering and will collect papers and conference presentations to publish as conference proceedings. Also, with the support of the IEEE Standards Association, the consortium is opening a series of open-source resources and code repositories as a place for working learning engineers to share learning technology prototypes and projects.

How Can You Get Involved?

Participation in ICICLE activities is free and open to all. The consortium's activities are directed by its participants, and a wide variety of opportunities are available, both for organizational members and for individual volunteers. ICICLE's SIG program is growing, with much room for meaningful involvement.

See ICICLE for information about joining, and be sure to participate in the monthly community calls. You may also contact the chair directly at [email protected] with questions and comments.

Shelly Blake-Plock is Co-Founder, President, and CEO of Yet Analytics; Chair of the IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee Technical Advisory Group on xAPI (TAGxAPI); and Chair and Managing Editor of the IEEE IC Industry Consortium on Learning Engineering.

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icicle: a consortium for learning engineering

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ICICLE: A Consortium for Learning Engineering

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Despite exponential growth in the development of learning technologies, there has been relatively little support in terms of professional development for engineers designing, building, and deploying new learning technologies. It has been 50 years since Nobel laureate Herb Simon, a Carnegie Mellon University professor and expert in artificial intelligence, called for a new field of technical competence in the learning domain that he called learning engineering.

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The resurgence of learning engineering as a concept and professional role in higher education has exacerbated tensions within the field of instructional design related to job titles, responsibilities, and position within academic institutions.

Credit: Allies Interactive / Shutterstock.com © 2019

Although instructional design has been a part of higher education for over 75 years, it is still an emerging field that is influencing and is influenced by the driving forces of the institutional landscape. A 2016 report on the role, workflow, and experience of instructional designers indicates that the number of instructional designers working in US colleges and universities continues to grow, a phenomenon that is related to the continued expansion of online education programs and course offerings in instructional design. As Kyle Bowen, director of innovation at Penn State, observed, "World-class instructional designers can help one institution differentiate itself from others in the online learning market. I think that realization is driving the conversation on instructional design in many institutions."

The third annual Changing Landscape of Higher Education (CHLOE 3) report suggests that many university chief online officers are more confident in the quality of online programming when instructional design input is mandated as compared to when it is absent or optional. As recognition of the potential of instructional design to influence student experience and success grows, so do expectations placed on instructional designers themselves. "Today, we need instructional designers who are equally fluent in learning design, faculty professional development, research methods, and technology," Bowen elaborated. "They must be able to partner with faculty to create, experiment, and publish innovative approaches to teaching and learning. Unfortunately, this looks a lot different than what we have in many instructional design units right now."

The Impact of Learning Engineering

The external pressure for instructional designers to innovate, investigate, and publish on digital learning and technologies provides a backdrop for what is also an internal struggle for a field still trying to find its voice. Conversations about appropriate instructional design job titles, roles, and institutional positioning have trended on and off for years, but the recent debate about learning engineering-as a concept and as a professional role-feels less like an existential crisis and more like an opportunity for growth.

Despite a lengthy history and numerous associated publications, the particulars of learning engineering are still being explored, including whether the term reflects a person, a team, or a process. Nevertheless, many instructional designers and others adjacent to the field have responded swiftly with critiques that range from outright rejection of the term, to general skepticism about the concept, to distrust for its advocates and their support of learning analytics and outcomes-based learning.

While all sides of the learning engineering debate have made valid points, the ways in which advocates have captured the attention of the field should be examined. Their arguments for why the learning engineering concept has reemerged and warrants consideration speak to pivotal issues that the instructional design field must address as it continues to mature.

#1. The Nature of Professionalism

Ellen Wagner, chair of the ICICLE special interest group on learning engineering among the professions, identified enhanced professionalism for educational fields as a priority for learning engineers. Advocates for professionalism argue that performance standards, certification opportunities, and increased clarity on professional roles and career paths signal expertise to external stakeholders and aid in the internal regulation and advancement of the field.

Historically, instructional designers have resisted professionalization processes because of concerns that such activities may diminish inclusivity, diversity, and design thinking within the field. Sundi Richard, assistant director for digital learning at Davidson College, argued, "I think we would be doing a disservice to the field if an instructional design degree were required. Instructional designers with diverse educational backgrounds such as sociology or chemistry really add to the field, and I would hate to see us lose that."

However, the current lack of clarity related to titles, roles, and responsibilities has very real consequences for instructional designers, particularly in the United States. According to Angela Gunder, director of instructional design and curriculum development at the University of Arizona, "People in higher education tend to respect certain titles. Job titles can also impact salaries more than actual job roles and responsibilities. We need to position instructional designers so they are receiving equitable pay for the expertise and efforts that they bring to the table. Finally, we need more transparent job descriptions so that potential employers and employees can assess whether it will be a good fit before the instructional designer is hired. Right now, I'm seeing a lot of people falling out of positions quickly just because the skill sets, job responsibilities, and expectations just didn't line up."

Like other fields, instructional design needs to address the evolving need for professional development. Donna Kidwell, chief technology officer of EdPlus at Arizona State University, elaborated. "There is a lot of discussion now about just-in-time learning, lifelong learning, and the general changing nature of work," she says. "That's completely true for my own teams! As an emerging field, instructional design needs more graduate-level programs with interdisciplinary input from the fields of education, educational psychology, information science, and design methodologies."

Bottom line: Use this opportunity to discuss multiple paths to career development and training, including but not limited to career preparation and formal professional development opportunities.

#2. Research Agendas

An EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative report about learning engineering suggests that learning engineers will leverage their understanding of learning, data, and computer science to develop and test complex models for learning experiences and environments that may lead to better outcomes for more students.

While the value of evidence-based practice is not in question, many instructional designers object to the suggestion that learning can be predicted, measured, and manipulated in its entirety through learning analytics and machine learning. Historically, the field has prioritized humanities-driven, contextual, qualitative research methodologies. Kristen Eshleman, director of digital innovation and learning at Davidson College, argued, "Learning is complex and deeply human. As such, it cannot be engineered. To imply that it can would mean endorsing a reductionist and linear view in the work. That won't result in good learning designs. Worse, it works against a necessary inefficiency in the 'business' model of higher ed."

However, the current higher education landscape, particularly in the United States, requires at least some attention to quantification and outcomes-driven learning. Kidwell explained it like this: "I need to make a valid business case if I want to accomplish what we need to do and wrangle the technologies we need in order to do it. We need to tackle some pretty hairy beasts, including developing a learner data model that spans marketing technologies, student information systems, and learning management systems while also being respectful of the individual learner experience inside and beyond the classroom. My first thought always goes to who is going to do that work, and I know that people with all sorts of research-focused skill sets are useful."

Bottom line: Use this opportunity to discuss an inclusive, cohesive, and rigorous research agenda around teaching and learning that will embrace a nuanced picture of learner experience, environments, and outcomes.

#3: The Complexity of Instructional Design

Some learning engineering publications fail to address the relationship between learning engineering and instructional design, thereby suggesting that learning engineers may intend to replace or appropriate instructional design roles or responsibilities. However, Wagner describes learning engineering and design as complementary practices, and Richard said, "the learning engineering role may be a useful addition to our current vocabulary and understanding when we consider the digital learning ecosystem."

That ecosystem is becoming more complex in ways that Bowen likens to the early days of the internet. "There was a time when a webmaster ran all aspects of a website. Imagine having one person run a website today. It's not even possible. There are teams of people, each of whom specializes in a different aspect of the job. That's essentially what we are experiencing in instructional design now. We need teams of people with skill sets in different aspects of production, technology, research, and design."

Kidwell agrees. "Our expectations for instructional design are shifting. We are asking for more skill sets than we were 10 years ago. The new instructional design department looks more like a studio model from the filming or gaming industries than anything we have seen in higher education before."

Bottom line: Use this opportunity to discuss how institutions can better facilitate flexible, cross-functional, interdisciplinary teams for improved leadership, research, and course development.

It is too early to predict the impact of learning engineering on the instructional design field. However, its addition to the conversation provides us with an opportunity to do the real work of crafting a dynamic, vital, and responsive contribution to the higher education landscape.

Notes

1. Intentional Futures, Instructional Design in Higher Education, April 2016. ↩

2. Kyle Bowen, interviewed by Whitney Kilgore, October 30, 2018, Denver, CO. ↩

3. Richard Garrett, Ron Legon, and Eric Fredericksen, CHLOE 3, Behind the Numbers: The Changing Landscape of Online Education, 2019 (Annapolis, MD: Quality Matters, March 2019). ↩

4. The term "learning engineer" was first described by Herbert A. Simon in "The Job of a College President," Educational Record 48, no. 284 (Winter 1967): 68-78. ↩

5. Mary Grush, "Learning Engineering: Making Education More 'Professional,'" Campus Technology, January 14, 2019. ↩

6. Sundi Richard, email interview with Patrice Torcivia, January 4, 2019. ↩

7. Angela Gunder, interviewed by Patrice Torcivia, November 1, 2018 Denver, CO. ↩

8. Donna Kidwell, video interview with Whitney Kilgore, November 21, 2018. ↩

9. Ellen Wagner, Avron Barr, Shelly Blake-Plock, and Robby Robson, "7 Things You Should Know About Learning Engineering" (EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, May 12, 2018). ↩

10. Karen E. Wilcox, Sanjay Sarma, and Philip H. Lippel, "Online Education: A Catalyst for Higher Education Reforms," Massachusetts Institute of Technology Online Education Policy Initiative, April 2016. ↩

11. Ellen Wagner, "Learning Engineering: A Primer," The eLearning Guild, May 23, 2019; Richard, interview. ↩

Whitney Kilgore is the Co-Founder and Chief Academic Officer at iDesign.

Patrice Torcivia is the Assistant Director of Learning Design in the Teaching and Learning Lab at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education.

Laura Gogia is a Senior Design Strategist at iDesign.

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a snapshot of instructional design: talking points for a field in transition

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A Snapshot of Instructional Design: Talking Points for a Field in Transition

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The resurgence of learning engineering as a concept and professional role in higher education has exacerbated tensions within the field of instructional design related to job titles, responsibilities, and position within academic institutions. Although instructional design has been a part of higher education for over 75 years, it is still an emerging field that is influencing and is influenced by the driving forces of the institutional landscape.

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What Does Learning Engineering Mean for Instructional Design and EdTech?

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Learning engineering has the potential to create new opportunities for learning and technology stakeholders that drive greater value and results, ultimately improving student success. The ubiquity of learning technologies in education and training has created a need for new disciplines, strategies, and skills for colleges and universities to achieve value from investments of money, time, and talent.

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Keeping up with the changes in learning can be a full-time job. New digital skills are in demand, IDs are creating eLearning on new and emerging platforms, and tools proliferate at an impossible pace. Amid all of this flux, the new field of learning engineering seeks a niche.

Within L&D, practitioners are increasingly asked to perform technical duties, wrangle data, and even develop apps. Their solid foundation in learning science and pedagogy notwithstanding, many IDs are racing to master science- and technology-focused skills that some see as part of the learning engineer role.

Learning Engineering: A Primer by Ellen Wagner, a recent research report from The eLearning Guild, digs into the origins and goals of this evolving discipline. One area of focus is the intersection of instructional design and learning engineering-what each brings to the table, how the roles overlap, and how they complement one another.

As learning integrates more closely with technology platforms to deliver eLearning, Wagner positions learning engineering as "a strategy to help learning stakeholders of all kinds-students, workers, instructors, designers, managers-realize more benefits from these learning technology tools, platforms, and solutions."

What's the difference?

Writing for the website Inside Higher Ed, Mark Lieberman identifies three key differences that he envisions between the learning engineer role and the instructional designer or eLearning developer role:

Collaboration partners: The learning engineer works closely with administrators, while the ID collaborates with instructors.

Qualitative or quantitative: A learning engineer studies quantitative data to make decisions, whereas an ID focuses on individual needs to make qualitative judgments.

The forest or the trees: Learning engineers' impact is more often at the program level, while the ID is focused on shaping individual courses.

Lieberman admits, though, that this is far from a clear-cut division of labor and cites examples of IDs doing all of the things he ascribes to learning engineers.

The ID role is evolving

Even those not on board with defining the learning engineering skill set as a new or emerging role are likely to acknowledge how the ID role is changing as the role of learning within organizations, and the approach to designing and presenting eLearning, have adjusted to the digital age.

Once focused on skills like "writing learning objectives" and "performing needs analysis," job ads for IDs increasingly demand technical know-how in things like app design and expertise in social and collaboration tools.

Complementary skills; overlapping roles

Wagner wrote that learning engineering skills draw heavily on "data science, computer science, and the learning sciences, focusing on technical standards, technology-based tool and platform solutions, and instrumentation." On the other hand, she wrote, ID is strong on cognition and communication skills.

Future opportunities lie in blending these competencies into an integrated whole. "This will connect scientific competencies with those demonstrating competencies coming from learning experience design, from instructional design and instructional systems design, and from educational psychology and cognition," Wagner wrote.

This can be accomplished by identifying current core competencies of each-as well as identifying and filling any gaps; articulating skills that are becoming essential; and creating paths for professional development for eLearning designers and developers that embrace science and technology skills and disciplines.

Dig into learning engineering

Curious about how learning engineering is taking shape? Dig deeply into this evolving field with Learning Engineering: A Primer. It's a free download for all eLearning Guild members.

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ID Meets Engineering and Learning Engineer Role Takes Shape

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Keeping up with the changes in learning can be a full-time job. New digital skills are in demand, IDs are creating eLearning on new and emerging platforms, and tools proliferate at an impossible pace. Amid all of this flux, the new field of learning engineering seeks a niche.

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The (coming) new normal: Instructional designers may find themselves gaining new roles as partners in learning engineering efforts.

Since formalized training came into being, instructional designers designed instruction. They created classroom courses, and people signed in on paper. With eLearning and computer systems, including LMSs, we found new ways of creating and offering courses and keeping up with who took them. Some stayed attached to the classroom, some moved to online-based approaches, and some did both, but otherwise the basic work itself didn't change much.

What's changed?

Things have changed significantly, especially over the last decade. Workers are accessing learning opportunities through many in-house and external avenues, including electronic performance support tools, Google searches, YouTube videos, infographics, and virtual reality lab experiences. We can gather and parse data in ways and in volumes unimaginable to those working in the field even 10 years ago. No longer just responsible for building courses, the ID is now called on to help create apps, build dashboards, track informal learning, link sensor data to training data, and embed analytics in the workflow. For a while we-or, at least I-managed this by juggling relationships with IT, HR, and a gifted data-wizard coworker. But the juggling is starting to require too many balls in the air.

What's next?

Enter learning engineering. It's basically meshing an understanding of learning theory, learning science, and learning ecosystems with expertise in engineering design. (Think both/and.) While the specifics are evolving, a typical learning engineer would have expertise across a number of areas including AI and machine learning, systems, user experience design, product testing, data and analytics, and development of policies, regulations, and standards. The juggling of teams and relationships is also required.

Who and how?

The field of learning engineering is evolving quickly, and specifics are not yet carved in stone. IEEE has special interest groups looking at standards for learning engineers in both academic and workplace settings. We've started to see organizations recruiting for learning engineer positions and Carnegie Mellon is offering a master's degree in educational technology and applied learning science designed to prepare graduates for a number of roles-including learning engineer. For now, the idea of learning engineering offers the ID practitioner a chance to stretch into some new areas across learning science, data science, and computer science. There's room, for instance, for those who want to build apps, learn to tell stories with data, or become more involved with product testing. It may involve working on micro-level projects, as well as working to build systems and architectures. It may involve more time devoted exclusively to researching and working with emerging technologies.

Want more?

Educause offers this primer on learning engineering, including some comments on downsides and implications for teaching and learning. Also, see recent Learning Solutions articles from Ellen Wagner and others: "Learning Engineering and the Future of eLearning" and "Learning Engineering: The Next Wave of eLearning". The idea of learning engineering is opening up exciting new conversations and opportunities for instructional designers.

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Nuts and Bolts: Learning Engineering? Instructional Design?

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The (coming) new normal: Instructional designers may find themselves gaining new roles as partners in learning engineering efforts. Since formalized training came into being, instructional designers designed instruction. They created classroom courses, and people signed in on paper. With eLearning and computer systems, including LMSs, we found new ways of creating and offering courses and keeping up with who took them.

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A couple of years ago, MIT released a report titled " Online Education: A Catalyst for Higher Education Reforms." Among its recommendations were to "support the expanding profession of the 'learning engineer'" - a person who possesses "knowledge base in the learning sciences, familiarity with modern education technology, and an understanding of and practice with design principles," but who also has a deep background in a specific academic discipline. The learning engineer would be a "new breed of professional."

The report prompted a flurry of articles about the current breed, if you will, of professional - those whose job titles include "instructional designer" and "instructional technologist" and whose degrees are in "education technology," "curriculum and instruction," and the like. Was "learning engineer" simply a rebranding? A way to rename one's profession into power and prestige by associating it with the broader field - the lucrative field - of engineering? Or by associating it with elite, engineering-oriented institutions like MIT, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon?

The MIT report credited Herbert Simon with coining the phrase "learning engineer," citing an excerpt from his 1967 article "The Job of a College President" which appeared in the American Council on Education's The Educational Record.

The learning engineers would have several responsibilities. The most important is that, working in collaboration with members of the faculty whose interest they can excite, they design and redesign learning experiences in particular disciplines. [...] In particular, concrete demonstrations of increased learning effectiveness, on however small a scale initially, will be the most powerful means of persuading a faculty that a professional approach to their students' learning can be an exciting and challenging part of their lives.

Simon was not, as the title of his article might suggest, a college president; he was a professor at Carnegie Mellon. But "like most faculty members," he wrote in its opening sentence, "I have a vast experience of offering advice to college presidents - advice usually unsolicited, and often unheeded." The advice in the article centered on making the operation of colleges more "professional," as Simon accused them of being run by amateurs - by administrators who knew nothing about management and by professors who knew nothing about teaching or learning. "There is no simple path that will take us immediately from the contemporary amateurism of the college to the professional design of learning environments and learning experiences," Simon wrote. "There are some obvious first steps along the way. The most important step is to find a place on the campus for a team of of individuals who are professionals in the design of learning environments - learning engineers, if you will." Learning engineers would, he hoped, transform higher education. "Perhaps the discipline-oriented professor will prove as obsolete as the horse and buggy," he suggested, giving way to faculty members versed in learning processes and "learning machines."

Simon would not have seen himself as a "discipline oriented professor." He worked across (even founding) a number of departments at Carnegie Mellon, conducting research in economics, public administration, computer science, artificial intelligence, and cognitive psychology. The latter areas certainly informed his conception of the learning engineer. Simon rejected constructivism and behaviorism as simplistic and scientifically inaccurate. For a glimpse, perhaps, of what Simon saw the learning engineer as building, one might look at the "intelligent" drill-and-kill math software he helped develop, later spun out of the university and into the company Carnegie Learning.

I've never been convinced that cognitive-informed ed-tech was as big of a break from behaviorism as its proponents would have you believe. But that's another story. Nevertheless, it should be no surprise that, despite being hailed as "first," Herbert Simon was not the only person to have argued that education needed to be better engineered. If nothing else, "behavioral engineering" was precisely how B. F. Skinner described his whole damn project, teaching machines and otherwise.

What does it mean for the future of education technology to tell a story about its past that centers on Herbert Simon (and by extension, Carnegie Mellon, artificial intelligence, and cognitive psychology)?

The use of the word "engineering" with some sort of educational adjective has a long history, one that certainly predates the "cognitive turn" - which is about as much history as folks in ed-tech seem to want to learn. John Dewey wrote about "education as engineering" in 1922, for crying out loud, although in fairness, in his short essay on the subject, Dewey admitted that "there is at present no art of educational engineering." "There will be will not be any such art until considerable progress has been made in creating new modes of education in the home and school," Dewey argued, because one can't actually have an art of engineering until after one has sufficiently experimented and built something. As such, demanding that new educational practices adhere to an orthodoxy of science - "premature science" - "does endless harm."

Others throughout the twentieth century have been much more jubilant about engineering's potential to reshape education.

In 1945, W. W. Charters, the head of the Bureau of Educational Research at Ohio State University, asked "Is There a Field of Educational Engineering?" Charters contended that curriculum design was a form of engineering, and he argued that the phrase "educational engineers" could describe those knowledgable about statistics, psychology, and administration who were engaged in scientific exploration and problem-solving. (Statistics, psychology, and human capital management are the disciplinary features of educational engineering - to Herbert Simon as well.)

In 1957, Simon Ramo ("the father of the intercontinental ballistic missile") called for the transformation of school into "a center run by administrators and clerks," with only a very small number of highly skilled and intelligent teachers. Technological advancements would bring about a new profession, Ramo argued, the "teaching engineer," "concerned with the educational process and with the design of the machines."

Henry A. Bern, a psychologist for the Office of Naval Research, wrote about educational engineers in 1967, the same year as Simon's article was published, observing the emergence of "powerful combines of industrial and publishing giants" - General Electric, IBM, Xerox, RCA, Raytheon, Random House, and Litton Industries - working to design teaching materials and teaching machines. "Whatever questions may exist about the consequences of these transactions," Bern wrote, "there is little question about one consequence - the infusion of an engineering orientation and of engineers themselves into vital operations of education."

Engineering is a social production not merely a scientific or technological one. And educational engineering is not just a profession; it is an explicitly commercial endeavor. For engineers, as David Noble has pointed out, are not only "the foremost agents of modern technology," but also "the agents of corporate capital."

"Learning engineers," largely untethered from history and purposefully severed from the kind of commitment to democratic practices urged by Dewey, are poised to be the agents of surveillance capital.

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The History of the Future of the 'Learning Engineer'

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A couple of years ago, MIT released a report titled " Online Education: A Catalyst for Higher Education Reforms." Among its recommendations were to "support the expanding profession of the 'learning engineer'" - a person who possesses "knowledge base in the learning sciences, familiarity with modern education technology, and an understanding of and practice with design principles," but who also has a deep background in a specific academic discipline.

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7 Things You Should Know about Learning Engineering

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7 Things You Should Know about Learning Engineering

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musings about instructional design and related

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I've resisted commenting on the flurry of posts on social media about the call for relabeling and redefining of professionals in my field as "learning engineers". Why? Because it's ridiculous - on so many levels. However, I will address the elephant in the room.

From the best I can tell, the loudest call for the name shift is coming from those outside our field - See MIT's Online Education: A Catalyst for Higher Education Reforms. This externally funded (e.g., Carnegie Corporation and National Science Foundation) report is authored by an MIT task force "to explore potential future models of teaching and learning on campus and around the world, especially in light of recent advances in online education." The report lightly and selectively touches on various threads of research and practice related to online learning, but largely omits the decades of existing distance and online learning research and practice conducted in the educational technology field.

I've skimmed through the report a few times and have no clear understanding of why the authors arrived at one of the four conclusions (e.g., Recommendation 3: Support the Expanding Profession of the "Learning Engineer")

The design and implementation of these experiences, based on science, will in our view be best carried out by a new breed of professional-the learning engineer. We use this phrase as a shorthand to describe a person who might more comprehensively be described as a Learning Designer and Engineer ... How does this differ from the modern-day
profession of an instructional designer?

Unfortunately, the authors don't answer their own question but instead talk about the rebranding done at a few prestigious institutions. My hunch is the perceived need is less about a name change than (FINALLY) a recognition of the importance of the role, but this call for an elevation in the role is lost in the arrogance of those outside our field ignoring our history and taking it upon themselves to recast our future direction. As one of my colleagues noted on Twitter, "I'm excited for when astronautics professors will create a health engineering program to solve all the complex medical problems that physicians, nurses, bacteriologists, healthcare administrators, medical researchers, and pharmacists obviously have not been able to solve."

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I've resisted commenting on the flurry of posts on social media about the call for relabeling and redefining of professionals in my field as "learning engineers". Why? Because it's ridiculous - on so many levels. However, I will address the elephant in the room.

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Supporting different learning needs with emerging technologies

and community engagement.

The DIAGRAM Center is a Benetech initiative supported by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs (Cooperative Agreement #H327B150001). Opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the position of the U.S. Department of Education.

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Supporting different learning needs with emerging technologies and community engagement. The DIAGRAM Center is a Benetech initiative supported by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs (Cooperative Agreement #H327B150001). Opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the position of the U.S.

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A major force in the higher education technology and learning space has quietly begun working with a major corporate force in -- well, in almost everything else.

Candace Thille, a pioneer in learning science and open educational delivery, has taken a leave of absence from Stanford University for a position at Amazon, the massive (and getting bigger by the day) retailer.

Thille's title, as confirmed by an Amazon spokeswoman: director of learning science and engineering. In that capacity, the spokeswoman said, Thille will work "with our Global Learning Development Team to scale and innovate workplace learning at Amazon."

No further details were forthcoming, and Thille herself said she was "taking time away" from Stanford to work on a project she was "not really at liberty to discuss."

Because so little information is available about what Thille will be doing, it's dangerous to speculate too much about what she and Amazon are up to. But her move is noteworthy for several reasons.

First, Thille is extremely influential. As founding director of the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University (part of which shifted to Stanford when she went to the left coast in 2013, a move Inside Higher Ed profiled), she has done groundbreaking work on using cognitive science and rich data on how students learn to try to transform the teaching and learning process.

In her vision, as laid out in a chapter she co-wrote in Educause's 2012 book Game Changers, transforming instruction and instructional technology development from a "solo sport to a community-based research activity" (a concept she attributes to her late colleague Herbert Simon) has the potential not just to improve learning, but also to improve colleges' productivity and drive down costs.

The Open Learning Initiative has used its existing open courses to help liberal arts colleges better educate academically underprepared students or free up classroom time for other purposes, and is developing a set of courses specifically for use by community colleges.
Amazon's Goals
For those who know Thille primarily from her work in higher education and open learning, her decision to take a job at Amazon may seem like a major transition.

But Thille is just as comfortable in a corporate setting as an academic one; she spent the first 18 years of her career at a consulting firm focused on "collaborative change" and workplace learning.

She also is not an academic (no Ph.D., and the assistant professor role she gained at Stanford was her first-ever faculty appointment) and has been known to bristle at the slow pace of change inherent at institutions (like Carnegie Mellon and Stanford) where tenured professors largely run the show.

Several observers of the education-technology landscape said they were unsurprised that a company like Amazon, whose business depends heavily on data analytics and near-constant experimentation, would turn to a high-profile learning scientist to help it improve how it trains employees.

"Amazon is experimenting with new ways to offer products and services five times a day in different places around the world," said Louis Soares, vice president for policy research and strategy at the American Council on Education. "You need learning [for employees] that keeps up with it, almost in real time." It's hard to imagine anybody better than Thille to attack a problem like that, he said.

Less clear to some observers was what drew Thille to Amazon, other than the obvious: the chance to get an inside look at what's happening in one of the world's most dynamic organizations.

Some interpreted her move as a signal that corporate learning is where most of the action is right now in the ed-tech and digital learning space, and that Thille may feel she can more readily achieve her goals of building out new models for learning in a sector not constrained by shared governance and what many feel is a fair bit of complacency.

Amazon has a history of investing heavily to produce its own top-notch internal technologies, and if Thille can in 18 months help Amazon create a path-setting adaptive system for employee learning, say, the implications could extend far beyond the company.

(And while working for a single company might seem like a narrowing of Thille's focus, Amazon's work force soared over the half million mark last fall -- not a paltry number.)
Promise and Peril
There is one more interesting aspect to Thille's move.

In recent years she has expressed increasing concern about the growing influence of the commercial sector in owning the data around student learning.

In a speech to alumni at Stanford's homecoming last fall, Thille gave a 101-level description of her work and vision, and added what has become a cautionary note amid her overall excitement about the promise of what she calls "technology-mediated learning environments," in which "every interaction the student makes is a piece of evidence about their learning."

This is a realm in which higher education is following in the lead, Thille said, of big corporate players -- like Google, Netflix and, yes, Amazon -- that have created interfaces that capture lots of data about us so they can "understand us better as consumers" and "know better what to target to us," individually and collectively.

She and other educators have much to learn from those companies about how to gather important data, which can be used, she said, to understand students not as consumers, but as learners. "We can use that data we collect and model it to give really important feedback ... to the human actors in the educational system" -- just-in-time targeted feedback to learners themselves, information about students' strengths and weaknesses for faculty members, and data about where students stumble for the design teams that build these environments.

And the data can give scholars what they need to "feed our science" as learning researchers, Thille said.
The Downsides
She acknowledged, though, that many faculty members and others "fear" this vision -- "with good reason," she said.

"Because right now, many of the systems and coursewares that are being developed to support learning, we're outsourcing to the commercial sector," Thille said, referring to the many textbook publishers and adaptive learning companies that are building platforms colleges are using to deliver instruction.

"All of those decisions that are being made every time we collect a piece of evidence and use that to make a recommendation to a learner or make a recommendation to the instructor. If we don't know how the recommendations are being built, and the systems are just saying, 'Trust us, it works,' I would posit to you that that's alchemy -- it's no longer science."

Educators must insist, Thille continued, "that as we're building this new model of education, the algorithms, the features, the representations [made to students and instructors] be open, be peer reviewable, be challengeable."

Her skepticism about higher education's outsourcing of technology to the corporate sector is not necessarily in conflict with Thille's decision to work at Amazon, of course. Amazon isn't (currently, at least) producing the kind of proprietary educational software that Thille warns about, so the knowledge and expertise she brings to the company won't contribute to the problem she cites.

A stint at Amazon -- building, presumably, internal software to help the company train its own workers -- could, though, conceivably give her the kind of insights about using data to understand behavior that she described in her Stanford speech.

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Amazon's high-profile hire from higher education: Candace Thille

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A major force in the higher education technology and learning space has quietly begun working with a major corporate force in -- well, in almost everything else. Candace Thille, a pioneer in learning science and open educational delivery, has taken a leave of absence from Stanford University for a position at Amazon, the massive (and getting bigger by the day) retailer.

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Instructional Design - The Chronicle of Higher Education

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You may have seen a story late last year originating from George Washington University. It's a story that any college would hope to avoid when trying to build online courses and programs: graduate students filed a lawsuit against the school alleging inferior quality of the online educational experience. The students listed issues from poor user experience online to nonresponsive professors.

Stories like this illustrate the need for schools to invest in quality instructional design, but they can also stoke the fears of faculty considering teaching an online course. Who wants to be the professor who gets the university sued due to inadequate knowledge or training?

However, a lot of the concerns surrounding the building of online programs can be alleviated if proper attention is giving to fostering a collegial and collaborative work environment for instructional designers and faculty.

Such work environments can be developed with an integrated approach toward online education: clearly defining and communicating roles in the course development process; encouraging instructional designers to engage in online teaching; and providing faculty with training and resources geared toward online pedagogy.

In other words, don't just define separate roles in the course production process. Additionally, provide opportunity for faculty and instructional designers alike to experience one another's worlds.
Subject-Matter Expert and Applied Technology Expert
The easiest way of defining roles in the online course development process is to view the faculty member as a subject-matter expert and the instructional designer as a learning technology expert. In other words, the faculty member is primarily responsible for the course content and assignments. They define what students consume and interact with in the course. The ID is primarily responsible for how students interact with and consume that content in an online setting. This means the ID needs to be thoroughly familiar with the online learning tools and platforms the school is using.

Defining roles and clearly communicating them is easily the most common, practical and helpful advice in the area of ID-faculty relations. In fact, you can look at some of the helpful tips Inside Higher Ed has supplied on this topic here and here. So we know this is a crucial step to take, but assigning roles is not the first and last step. It's important for the ID and the faculty member to understand why these roles exist.

As IDs, one way we explain these roles to faculty members at Biola University is to say, "Our job is to take the burden of making the technology work off your shoulders so you can focus on your content and your students."

This achieves the goal of not just establishing clear roles, but emphasizing the deeply collaborative nature of the work. One cannot do without the other. Additionally, and most importantly, it keeps the focus on the primary target audience -- students. If the subject-matter expert is focused on content for students and the ID is focused on the user experience for students, then both are working shoulder to shoulder toward the same goal. However, that primary audience can be a blind spot for IDs who may be used to working only on the development side of an online course.
Instructional Designer as Instructor
When building online programs, many colleges provide the necessary digital tools and initial training but implicitly expect faculty members to somehow transform into effective online educators. This approach requires faculty to become instructional designers, but the cautionary tale of George Washington University indicates this to be an inadequate approach.

At Biola, we flip this equation. Rather than expecting faculty to be instructional designers, we encourage our instructional designers to be instructors. Several of our instructional designers teach online classes in a variety of disciplines at several institutions.

This front-end classroom experience provides hands-on experience that shapes discussions with faculty and provides more than just an empathetic ear. It provides a common set of language and experiences that deepen the relationship between IDs and faculty from mere team members to colleagues. It also provides opportunity for professional development and diversification for IDs in a maturing field that can lack clear career direction.

However, in the trust building that must occur in order for effective teamwork to happen, it's not just the ID who must know something about the faculty experience. Faculty, too, should learn something about the ID's world.
Faculty Member as Technologist
For some faculty, the idea of rolling out new learning technology is an exciting part of their lifelong learning process. They're ready to dive right in. For many others, the water needs to be warm enough.

Here, schools can encourage faculty to develop their technological prowess by providing more than introductory training in learning technology.

I recently spoke with a department chair at another institution about her program's use of learning technology. She noted that the university's frequent introduction of new learning technology without any ongoing support contributes to faculty ambivalence and lack of adoption.

This doesn't have to be the case, but it often is. When faculty are overwhelmed with having to learn new technology (in addition to all their other duties) without proper support and training, the resulting sense of frustration and inadequacy can feed antipathy toward online education.

A faculty member comfortable with the necessary learning technology is a robust collaborator in the instructional design process. That confidence carries over into the delivery of the course to students.
Building Meaningful Collaboration
In the rapidly advancing world of online learning, teamwork is a necessity, but it's more than mere collaboration between IDs and faculty. Developing online courses and programs is also an ongoing learning process that all parties need to be engaged in as learners. For IDs, this means learning the art of teaching online. For faculty, it means learning effective technology use and online pedagogy.

This integrated approach does more than build mere empathy or cooperation. Effective collaboration in the world of online education means pulling equally toward the same goal: a high-quality education for students.

Universities looking to build high-quality online programs (and avoid lawsuits) would do well to encourage IDs and faculty members to not just work together, but to learn from one another, too.

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You may have seen a story late last year originating from George Washington University. It's a story that any college would hope to avoid when trying to build online courses and programs: graduate students filed a lawsuit against the school alleging inferior quality of the online educational experience.

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Reginald Jackson had worked for three years as an academic technology analyst at the University of Chicago when administrators at Northwestern University came to him with an intriguing offer.

They had in mind for Jackson a new position that tapped into his experience collaborating with faculty members and program heads alike on creating innovative learning experiences.

"They were looking for a new role, and they didn't want to call it an instructional designer," Jackson said.

Thus began Jackson's career as a learning engineer -- now one of three at the institution. Jackson is embedded in the Medill School of Journalism, aiming to provide "curriculum design and course development services for faculty-driven initiatives" for online students, from orientation to discussion forums in courses to evaluations. He reports to the institution's central office of information technology, and to the head of the journalism department.

"There's so much in this job that it brings together all that I've done already into one space," said Jackson, who impressed his Northwestern colleagues with his experience in instructional design, faculty development and project management.

The "learning engineer" job title has started cropping up at several institutions, spurred in part by leadership from Carnegie Mellon University, which has a one-year master's program in learning engineering and has hired five of its own. Other institutions are in the process of developing job descriptions for those positions.

But learning engineers and instructional designers alike worry that the distinction between them isn't clear enough, if it exists at all. Some instructional designers who feel they've only just recently helped people understand their role now believe that their field is becoming unnecessarily complicated.

Supporters of learning engineering as a discipline, meanwhile, believe the role extends the instructional designer's mission of using all the available tools to enhance teaching and improve learning. Further complicating matters, Jackson says he also identifies as an instructional designer, in part to avoid confusion among colleagues. "As soon as you say [learning engineer], they say, 'What is that?'" Jackson said.

Learning engineering has become a topic of increasingly vigorous discussion among digital learning thinkers, according to Bill Jerome, a senior product manager at Acrobatiq who previously worked at Carnegie Mellon's Open Learning Initiative for online courses. Jerome's 2013 E-Literate blog post summarizing the emerging narrative around learning engineers preceded much of the existing debate.

"It almost in a way felt a little bit clearer back then than it does now, but in a good way, because there are more people thinking and talking about it," Jerome said in an interview.
What Do Learning Engineers Do?
Perspectives vary widely on exactly how much overlap exists between instructional designers and learning engineers. Some distinguishing characteristics have started to emerge:

Learning engineers work more closely with administrators, while instructional designers collaborate directly with instructors.

Learning engineers develop research on learning and data science and make decisions based on quantitative analysis, while instructional designers make qualitative judgments based on individual needs and, in some cases, existing learning science research.

Learning engineers make changes and drive initiatives at the program level, while instructional designers help conceive and reshape individual courses.

Even these distinguishing features aren't clear cut, though. A recent survey from Oregon State University Ecampus, for instance, indicates instructional designers want more opportunities to conduct research. Northwestern's learning engineers work on individual classes as well as broader initiatives.

Jackson's job began with helping the institution transition from the Blackboard LMS to Canvas. Over time, Jackson has collaborated with faculty and staff members and students to enhance experiences with his department's online programs -- particularly the integrated marketing communications master's.

The university's previous model for supporting online instructors didn't lend itself to lasting change, according to Jackson.

"It'd be like, somebody would be assigned to a new class, they would work on it, they would disappear," Jackson said. Now he surveys students about their experiences in classes where he contributed ideas and uses those results to inform additional efforts.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is among the institutions that has committed most aggressively to learning engineering as a profession. Several positions there involve learning engineering, including Digital Learning Lab scientists and fellows. While their work varies depending on department, according to Krishna Rajagopal, the institution's dean for digital learning, responsibilities typically include producing publishable research and helping numerous instructors "build new innovative digital tools that are helping catalyze improvements in how students are on campus, and also helping faculty to use those same tools to reach learners around the world." At MIT, those duties apply equally to face-to-face and online classes, Rajagopal said.

As institutions continue to wrestle with the best model for creating high-quality online courses, the learning engineer role evolves to keep up. At Loyola University Chicago, a four-person learning engineer team used to answer "how-to" questions, but it's now shifted to helping define "how we can work," according to Sarah Kentner, who's been on the team since 2014.

She urges instructors to think more deeply about how their actions affect students. If an instructor wants to increase student engagement by creating a discussion forum, Kentner asks questions like, "What's the purpose of the forum? How will you engage the discussion? Would it have been better to have a synchronous online class discussion for 20 minutes?"

Kentner's efforts span many departments at the university. Some of those departments also employ instructional designers, who work on crafting individual learning experiences. For departments without instructional designers, Kentner helps instructors choose between design templates, but she emphasizes that she lacks the essential "artistic eye."

In some cases, Kentner said, instructional designers at her institution urge faculty members toward technology solutions because they "look really cool," but Kentner prefers to emphasize tools that function well and that she can explain to others.

While she works primarily with instructors of online and hybrid courses, she's willing to offer guidance to face-to-face instructors as well. Often, though, she finds online and hybrid instructors are more open to constructive feedback.

Kentner mostly offers advice to instructors who seek it out, often in the two or three weeks before a new semester begins. She also works on learning management system support and faculty development initiatives throughout the school year. Eventually she hopes her team can take initiative to contact instructors and help them improve.

"We can look at what they are doing, and we can use the data to prove where the success is already happening, as well as where there's opportunities for growth, and how we can make that growth possible," Kentner said.
Where Does the Term Come From?
The "learning engineer" job might be still emerging, but the title dates back more than half a century. In a 1967 essay on advice for college presidents, Carnegie Mellon University scholar Herbert Simon urged institutions to "find a place on the campus for a team of individuals who are professionals in the design of learning environments -- learning engineers, if you will." (The next sentence suggests paying for those new roles by increasing class sizes, suggesting some of Simon's insights have aged more gracefully than others.)

Carnegie Mellon has invested heavily in Simon's learning engineer concept, with its master's of educational technology and applied learning science ( METALS) program heading into its sixth year. According to Norman Bier, executive director of Carnegie Mellon's Open Learning Initiative for online courses, the university sees itself as a standard-bearer for the learning engineer profession.

"We really feel like we've got a specialized attachment to the concept and the term," Bier said.

METALS has grown from just six students in the first cohort to more than 25 in the current ones, according to Ken Koedinger, the program's director.

During the summer, students tackle a real-life problem from an industry client -- a university or company. One group this summer worked with Western Governors University to streamline its course development process so that centralized expertise from instructional designers doesn't conflict with discipline-specific guidance from fellow instructors. According to Koedinger, the students conducted interviews for qualitative analysis and requested student performance data from instructors and designers. The final product was a platform for instructors to share student assessment results so that instructors and designers don't duplicate work.

Courses include elearning design principles; tools for online learning; interaction design overview; and educational goals, instruction and assessment. Koedinger wants students to emerge from the program ready to approach problems with an eye toward using data and evidence to support recommendations. Many of those techniques apply outside the higher ed context, he said.

"I think it's totally nuts what we do now -- we design it, we develop it, we assume it's great, we keep on doing it the same old way. At a university, of all places?" Koedinger said. "It's hard sometimes to admit where things aren't working, where you're failing, but that's the only way you get to the best."

Graduates of METALS have moved on to jobs at companies like Pearson, Cengage, LinkedIn and Quora. Several others have become learning engineers and Ph.D. students at Carnegie Mellon, and one alum landed a learning experience designer position at Western Governors University.

Bier identifies a learning engineer as someone with "deep engagement with data and instrumentation," as well as a commitment to monitoring that the ideas they implement and changes they suggest are successful.

Learning engineers benefit from experience in project management and educational data mining, as well as more technical skills than would be expected of an instructional designer, according to Bier.

He recognizes that the term has a clinical feel that might alienate some proponents of maintaining "humanity" in the learning experience.

"I think that in a world where we're seeing such heavy promotion of the use of data and the use of analytics and AI and adaptive, this can leave a sense of, 'We're just looking to take human beings one step further from the process,'" Bier said. Part of his responsibility going forward, he said, is to improve messaging around the profession.
What Do Instructional Designers Think?
Instructional designers' job responsibilities vary depending on the institution, and many believe their roles are evolving or will evolve into something closer to what learning engineers currently claim as unique to their profession.

After observing this job posting for a learning engineer role at Carnegie Mellon, Trey Martindale, an instructional design expert who heads the instructional systems and work-force development department at Mississippi State University, replied, "In my view that's an instructional designer with some experience in data analytics."

Martindale does admit that many instructional designers don't focus on research. He doesn't outright reject the possibility that learning engineers play a different role than instructional designers do. But he's wary of attaching the "engineer" label, which sounds to him like a superficial effort to sound more sophisticated.
Further Reading (and Watching)
Inside Higher Ed blogger Josh Kim in 2016 prompted a vigorous debate over learning engineering in the comments of a post.

Educause recently published " 7 Things You Need to Know About Learning Engineering."

Bror Saxberg of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in March offered an hourlong lecture on learning engineering and its potential to "transform" education.

Elliott Masie, who coined the term "elearning," now thinks "instructional designer" should be replaced with " learning producer."

"If you are an instructional designer, but you're trying to avoid the word 'instruction,' because instruction somehow has become pejorative, [some have] started to call themselves learning designers. There's a small leap from learning designer to learning architect to what might be learning engineer," Martindale said. "You can call yourself whatever you want, but if the job description is the same as instructional designer, then you're the same."

Instructional designers worry that introducing a new term for a similar job will only further confuse higher ed colleagues about what they do, according to Penny Ralston-Berg, an instructional designer for Penn State World Campus. She pointed "Inside Digital Learning" to instructional design standards published by the International Board of Standards for Training, Performance and Instruction. Upon close inspection, items like "apply data collection and analysis skills in instructional design projects" indicate overlap with the learning engineer role.

The confusion around the term strikes Paxton Riter, CEO of the instructional design company iDesign, as evidence that online learning is maturing. His colleague Whitney Kilgore, the company's co-founder and chief academic officer, sympathizes with instructional designers who reject the possibility of a new term complicating their field.

"Having been in the instructional design field for 17 years, my personal identity is tied to that term," Kilgore said. "Am I a learning engineer now because there's a new term for it?"

Alyssa Dyar, a learning engineer in Northwestern's law school, said she's had an easier time explaining the learning engineering concept to people who ask because, in most cases, they don't have any preconceived notions about the term. She admits instructional designers do most of what she does, but she thinks "learning engineer" more clearly summarizes her role.

"I found that a little bit when my title had 'technologist' in it, professors would assume it's tech support," Dyar said. "Having this different title has given me an opportunity to sell myself and what I do to people I'm working with."
What's the Future of Learning Engineering?
Most institutions haven't yet reached the point of investing significantly in learning engineering. Virginia Tech collaborated with Carnegie Mellon on a project called the Data Informed Learning and Teaching Initiative, which was designed to introduce some of Carnegie Mellon's technology-enhanced learning solutions to improve Virginia Tech courses, both face-to-face and online.

Several Virginia Tech staffers attended a Carnegie Mellon summer symposium on learning engineering. But graduates from Carnegie Mellon's master's degree program appeared on first glance more qualified for corporate environments than for higher ed, according to Dale Pike, executive director and associate provost for technology-enhanced learning and online strategies at Virginia Tech.

"We specifically sought to recruit learning engineers as part of this project we were working on, and we were not successful," Pike said. "As a result of that, we took a longer view." The university also had changes in leadership around the same time that made hiring for a new position more cumbersome, according to Pike.

Technical skills alone aren't enough for a qualified candidate to make an impact at the university, he said. Though Pike hasn't yet found qualified learning engineers who make sense for his institution, the process did help him tweak the expectations for new instructional designers to include more expertise around data.

Meanwhile, the Institute of Electronic and Electric Engineers has tasked a working group with sorting out the parameters of the learning engineer role. Ellen Wagner, a visiting professor at George Mason University with joint appointments in the Virginia Serious Games Institute and the university's Division of Learning Technologies, has since 2017 chaired the Learning Engineering as a Profession special interest group within the institute's Industry Consortium of Learning Engineers (ICICLE).

Wagner's group has consulted with organizations like Educause and the E-Learning Guild and attended conferences around the world. Efforts will culminate next year in a conference on learning engineering.

"The cool thing in our world is figuring out what we need to make technology really reach its potential with people who are not just hacking their way into what they think should work for learning," Wagner said.

Other fields like defense and military training, as well as the corporate business sector, have moved more quickly to incorporate principles of engineering. Wagner believes her group's efforts to create standards around engineers in education marks one step on a long road to improving institutions' ability to navigate the technology landscape. "I want institutions to feel like they have more agency in the conversations that they can have" with technology vendors, Wagner said.

Consensus might be elusive, but Jerome thinks all parties want the same thing.

"Fundamentally a learning engineer ought to be fulfilling the creation of courseware that's better serving students," Jerome said. "That's hard to argue it's not a good thing."

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Learning engineers pose challenges and opportunities for improving digital learning

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Reginald Jackson had worked for three years as an academic technology analyst at the University of Chicago when administrators at Northwestern University came to him with an intriguing offer. They had in mind for Jackson a new position that tapped into his experience collaborating with faculty members and program heads alike on creating innovative learning experiences.

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Learning Experience Design: The Last Days of Instructional Design

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Learning Experience Design (LXD) is a new field of practice which is slowly replacing Instructional Design (ID) in corporate learning. LXD proponents often describe it as everything ID is missing or generally criticized for lacking learner-centered qualities.

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UX designers know better than anyone - it's what's inside that counts. As in, the user's thoughts and feelings, and how those affect what they say and do.

That's where the empathy map comes in. When created correctly, empathy maps serve as the perfect lean user persona:

They quickly visualize user needs (especially to non-designers)

They fit perfectly into a Lean UX workflow as a starting point for user knowledge (you'll build more as you prototype and test)

Because they're quick to create, they're easy to iterate as you revise assumptions based on real data

They prime stakeholders for your design ideas since they've thought beyond their own experiences

That's what this article is about: a clear-cut, all-inclusive guide on empathy maps, answering why, when, and how to use them.

Let's get started.

When to Use Empathy Maps

Empathy maps are most useful at the beginning of the design process.

Try to complete empathy maps before the product requirements, but after the initial user research. Product strategy is about solving problems, and empathy maps shed light on which problems to solve, and how. This also makes them a great tool for redesigns as well.

When done well, empathy maps create a "UX domino effect" that affects the entire project. Empathy maps affect the product requirements, which affects the product strategy, which affects the wireframes, mockups, prototypes, etc.

However, empathy maps work better if they're drawn from real data, so they should be made after user research like user interviews. But in a pinch, empathy maps can still be built on your existing knowledge and stakeholder feedback. Quick basic empathy maps offer valuable insight in any meeting - hence the "10-minute persona" nickname.

Empathy Map Format

A common UX empathy map is divided into four quadrants, outlining notes on four different aspects of the user's internal experience. The quadrants can vary based on needs and preferences, but almost always contain:

Feelings - The user's emotional state, i.e. "is confused by the navigation and blames themselves ."

Some common variants include:

In addition, at the bottom in some empty space, it's always a good idea to include:

Alternatively, you can summarize the above two areas by filling in the simple statement, "The user needs a way to ________________ because ________________." Pay attention to the second blank, since user motivation is the real raw material for feature ideas.

Last, you may want to leave a space for general notes, such as the type of device the user is accessing your product from.

Optionally, it may help to include a picture of the user to make the document feel more real.

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The Process for Creating Empathy Maps

It's important to note that empathy maps can be created for a general understanding, or for specific tasks and situations. Broad empathy maps are more useful as quick user personas because they are not based on a single user scenario. If you can spare the time, you could create several task-based empathy maps to feed into more detailed personas.

For example, if you're working on a web app redesign and notice users having difficulty logging in, you can center around the user's mind as they complete (or ignore) this task. But this information is most relevant to this particular context (logging in). You won't understand why a user would want to use your web app in the first place.

Let's examine how to create a broad empathy map as a 10-minute user persona. Before you start the exercise, you will need at least basic understanding of your user segments (e.g. Sally the College Student, Sean the Young Professional).

1. Find a whiteboard, a large flip chart , or print out this free template .

2. Set aside 30 minutes to 1 hour for the session.

3. Invite the core product team members: product manager, developers, marketers, and of course other designers.

4. Ask a broad question to help unpack everyone's thoughts and assumptions, e.g. "Why would somebody buy a new iPhone?"

5. Set aside sheets of paper or space on the whiteboard according to the user segments (e.g. one for Sally, one for Sean).

6. Hand out sticky notes and encourage everyone to write down their thoughts regarding each of the empathy map's four quadrants.

7. Review the completed empathy map and discuss any patterns and outliers.

As you might expect, sometimes it's difficult to get the creative juices flowing and/or really pinpoint the issues at hand. If your team is stuck, Demian Farnworth of the Copyblogger recommends a moderator posing questions like these to help team members better visualize their users:

What environment are the users in when using your product?

Are they having fun, or do they want to get it over with?

What's their life like outside of using the product?

What kind of day are they having?

If all else fails, try a bit of role-playing, where one person "plays" the user, and ask them questions or play the role of the product, eliciting responses.

At the end of the session, wrap up what was learned. Did anyone's opinions change? Is there a better direction to go with the product design? Were any of the responses based on data, or pure assumption? These answers are partly why you made an empathy map in the first place.

Remember that the benefit of empathy maps are their convenience. They're designed to be a quick collaborative exercise rather than exhaustively thorough. You'll gather more important insights once you've started prototyping and testing your designs with at least 5 users.

What to Do With Finished Empathy Maps

While a large part of empathy maps' utility are the process of making them, they are still quite useful as documentation.

Share the results of the empathy map with anyone on the product team who wasn't able to join the exercise. Executive stakeholders, too, might be interested in the more actionable takeaways from the exercise - although you should explain the bottom line upfront, and the reasoning afterwards.

If you happen to be using UXPin , you can also upload a picture of the empathy map into your UX project so that others can comment on it as needed.

Next Steps

While broad empathy maps aren't the most thorough personas, they certainly help everyone think more like a user while checking their own assumptions. Certainly not a bad result for a single 30-60 minute workshop.

For additional advice, we highly recommend reading these resources on empathy maps and the overall user-centered design process:
Feature Photo credit: Event Model Generation

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The Guide to Empathy Maps: Creating 10-Minute User Persona

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UX designers know better than anyone - it's what's inside that counts. As in, the user's thoughts and feelings, and how those affect what they say and do. That's where the empathy map comes in.

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This report profiles six key trends, six significant challenges, and six important developments in educational technology as ranked by an expert panel of leaders from across the higher education landscape.

Read full report: PDF | Other materials

Continuing to Look to the Horizon

EDUCAUSE is proud to continue the tradition of excellence begun by the New Media Consortium's (NMC) work on the Horizon Report. The report serves as a reference and technology planning guide for educators, higher education leaders, administrators, policy makers, and technologists.

Key Trends Accelerating Technology Adoption in Higher Education

This section of the report describes the trends expected to have a significant impact on the ways in which colleges and universities approach their core mission of teaching, learning, and creative inquiry.

Short-Term- Driving technology adoption in higher education for the next one to two years

Redesigning Learning Spaces

Blended Learning Designs

Mid-Term- Driving technology adoption in higher education for the next three to five years

Advancing Cultures of Innovation

Growing Focus on Measuring Learning

Long-Term- Driving technology adoption in higher education for five or more years

Rethinking How Institutions Work

Modularized and Disaggregated Degrees

Read more on these key trends >
Significant Challenges Impeding Technology Adoption in Higher Education

Significant challenges are those that are expected to impede innovation, adoption, or scale. The significant challenges are organized into three difficulty-related categories based on expert panel assessment of the degree to which each could be solved at the institutional level.

Solvable- Those that we understand and know how to solve

Improving Digital Fluency

Increasing Demand for Digital Learning Experience and Instructional Design Expertise

Difficult- Those that we understand but for which solutions are elusive

The Evolving Roles of Faculty with Edtech Strategies

Bridging the Achievement Gap

Wicked- Those that are complex to even define, much less address

Advancing Digital Equity

Rethinking the Practice of Teaching

Discover more on the significant challenges >
Important Developments in Educational Technology for Higher Education

The development section includes six technologies forecast to be important to teaching, learning, and creative inquiry in the future. These forecasts are arranged along three time horizons over which the developments are expected to achieve widespread adoption. This section also includes featured exemplar projects.

Time to Adoption: One Year or Less

Mobile Learning

Analytics Technologies

Time to Adoption: Two to Three Years

Mixed Reality

Artificial Intelligence

Time to Adoption: Four to Five Years
Explore the important developments more >
Fail or Scale

This year's report also looks back to previous forecasts, specifically in the technology developments section, from four years prior or beyond. We sought the expertise and experience of Horizon Project panelists who were part of the panel at that time or had a depth of experience with the history, adoption, or scale of the technology development topic to provide insights on their actual effect.

Gaming and Gamification: The Expectations and the Realities

Augmented and Mixed Reality: The Why, When, and How of Situating Learning in Authentic Contexts

Adaptive Learning: Understanding Its Progress and Potential

Read the essay reflections >
Horizon Report: The Evolution Continues

This year's Horizon Report has been updated with new features and improvements including Fail or Scale essays revisiting past forecasts to see where we are now, companion data points providing connections to other data that support the expert panel determinations for 2019, and new quotes from expert panel members highlighting their insights and engagement on the issues. Updated topic summaries throughout the report provide a fresh overview of new and old trends.

The 2019 Horizon panel was the largest panel to date, with 98 global experts. Participation rates of those actively joining in conversation throughout the four stages of the process were noticeably higher than in previous years and provided a rich dialogue around the trends, challenges, and developments noted by the panel this year. To view the panel dialogue, visit the Horizon Tool.

The Horizon Report will continue to evolve in 2020. Learn more >

Related Resources

Issues, Technologies, and Trends Resources

Higher education leaders and decision makers use the annual Issues, Technologies, and Trends resources-the Top 10 IT Issues, the Strategic Technologies and Trends, the ELI Key Issues in Teaching and Learning, and the Horizon Report-to know what's important and where to focus in their IT planning and management activities. When viewed together these resources provide more complete and nuanced guidance on institutional IT priorities.

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This report profiles six key trends, six significant challenges, and six important developments in educational technology as ranked by an expert panel of leaders from across the higher education landscape. Read full report: PDF | Other materials EDUCAUSE is proud to continue the tradition of excellence begun by the New Media Consortium's (NMC) work on the Horizon Report.

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We are having a debate on my campus about job titles and I'm losing.

My institution is in the process of strengthening our educational technology team. We are recruiting for someone to: " Provide leadership and support for the development of innovative and effective teaching and learning practices using information technology."

The title for this position is "Instructional Designer".

I've been arguing that "Learning Designer" is a better title, but I'd like your opinion.

The reason that I like "Learning" rather than "Instructional" is that "learning" feels like a more inclusive term. We strive to be a learning organization, and we understand that learning occurs for everyone involved in the teaching process and can happen during non-teaching times.

What do you think? What would you rather be called, and why?

What you call the profession, be it instructional designer or learning designer (or some other title), what is inarguable it that these are some of the most amazing gigs in higher ed. Working at the intersection of learning and technology is fascinating because both fields are changing so rapidly.

The demands on institutions to address issues of quality, cost and access are relentless.

Increasingly, the mechanism that school's look to improve productivity run through learning technology.

The growth of blended and online learning has greatly accelerated the demand for instructional / learning designers.

I don't know of any institution that is not looking at ways to improve the efficacy of traditional courses, particularly those larger introductory classes that have traditionally relied on lectures and high-stakes testing.

The transformation of the traditional large enrollment lecture class to a more blended, flexible, and personalized learning experience is one of the most under-appreciated and under-reported trends in higher ed.

And of course, if any school wishes to introduce fully online or low-residency courses or programs then instructional / learning designers are a key asset to have in place.

The growth of blended and online learning has meant that it has gotten more difficult to find qualified instructional / learning designers, professionals with strong academic backgrounds in pedagogy and learning theory.

The number of people with formal training in how people learn, and who can demonstrate both expertise in translating learning goals to digital platforms or physical classroom settings, is actually pretty small.

Add that demand into a desire to find folks with strong presentation, collaborative, and planning skills and you can see why the best instructional / learning designers are hot commodities.

Do you see the demand for instructional / learning designers growing on your campus?

Are the people who are moving into these roles folks with degrees in these disciplines?

Or do they more closely follow my path to the profession, coming from an academic discipline and then embracing learning theory with the passion of the converted?

And who is right in this debate we are having on campus?
Instructional Designer or Learning Designer (or something else entirely)?

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"Instructional Designer" vs. "Learning Designer" | Inside Higher Ed

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We are having a debate on my campus about job titles and I'm losing. My institution is in the process of strengthening our educational technology team. We are recruiting for someone to: " Provide leadership and support for the development of innovative and effective teaching and learning practices using information technology."

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Leadership in online learning in higher education: Why instructional designers for online learning should lead the way

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Leadership in online learning in higher education: Why instructional designers for online learning should lead the way

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Please check your email for instructions on resetting your password. If you do not receive an email within 10 minutes, your email address may not be registered, and you may need to create a new Wiley Online Library account.

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The Competencies and Goals of Instructional Designers: A Survey Study

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The Competencies and Goals of Instructional Designers: A Survey Study

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Importance of Instructional Designers in Online Higher Education

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Importance of Instructional Designers in Online Higher Education

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I'm an instructional design newbie looking to help other newbies like me. We hear from ID thought leaders in a variety of places. Their voices are important, but can still leave questions and frustrations. What is the life of an instructional designer really like?

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We crowdsource the design and development of open educational resources to help adults improve their literacy skills for career & college readiness. Participating in service-learning courses and other professional development projects, volunteers design educational solutions that are customized to the needs of those with literacy-related knowledge and skills gaps. Since 2014, over 4,000 people have volunteered with us to gain instructional design experience and develop free educational resources for underserved and underfunded adult basic education programs.

Designers for Learning is organized as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation in the State of Illinois. We were founded in August of 2014 with a charitable purpose to provide instructional design support to underserved social needs, and we devoted our first three years after incorporation to adult basic education. Our mission is to provide educational resources and service-learning experiences designed to promote all aspects of literacy. We promote service-learning opportunities through collaboration with students, volunteers, schools, and other social enterprises.

With millions struggling to attain basic literacy skills, there is an enormous opportunity for the instructional design community to offer our expertise to help this underserved need. A parallel opportunity exists to offer real-world experience to instructional design students and others.

1. To provide educational resources to promote all aspects of literacy.

2. To provide instructional design students and others with service-learning experiences to develop their skills.

Design in the Open Challenge

Self-Paced Professional Development: Start today!

Mobile Learning Strategies Design Sprint

Self-Paced Professional Development: Start today!

Instructional Evaluation Service-Learning Course

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In September of 2017, we joined the Chicago Literacy Alliance (CLA), a coalition of nonprofits helping to meet the literacy needs of people of all ages and backgrounds. Designers for Learning joined to partner with CLA members on curriculum design efforts to support adult basic education and vocational training, and we welcome the opportunity to collaborate on new literacy-related initiatives both inside and outside of adult education.

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We crowdsource the design and development of open educational resources to help adults improve their literacy skills for career & college readiness. Participating in service-learning courses and other professional development projects, volunteers design educational solutions that are customized to the needs of those with literacy-related knowledge and skills gaps.

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musings about instructional design and related

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Teaching and Learning

3 Keys to Engaging Faculty in Instructional Design

Most instructional designers will tell you their work begins with getting a foot in the door with faculty and building rapport from there. Here are three ways to make that relationship a success.

With the growth in hybrid and online courses and the introduction of open educational resources, active learning concepts and new learning spaces, it is an exciting time to be an instructional designer in higher education. More faculty members need help rethinking course activities, materials and assessments.

Yet like campus librarians, instructional designers still struggle at times to raise awareness about the variety of services they can offer and to form meaningful partnerships with other stakeholders on campus - in part because some faculty members see them as IT support staff. That misconception gets magnified if the instructional design team resides in the IT department and reports to the CIO (which tends to be the case about half the time, instructional designers say).

"I learned early on in my career not to install printers, because that can be the thing that puts a particular perspective in people's minds," said Erin DeSilva, assistant director of Learning Design and Technology at Dartmouth College (NH). Yet DeSilva and other instructional designers interviewed for this article agreed that helping faculty with their immediate tech issues is a way to get their foot in the door, especially with faculty who aren't teaching online and so don't have an impetus to seek out instructional design help. "They may come to talk to you about setting up a Canvas site," she said, "but end up speaking with you about assignment design.

Like many colleges and universities, Dartmouth has people who work on instructional design located in individual colleges as well as a small centralized organization with four instructional designers who work mostly with undergraduate programs. Also, DeSilva noted, you won't find people at Dartmouth with the actual title of instructional designer. "We call ourselves learning designers here," she said. There is a connotation to instructional design that comes from the corporate world, while a learning designer is more focused on the user experience, she explained. "We really wanted to indicate that the student was the center of our focus and not the material development. We have some learning experience design training, but we also have training in motivational interviewing, which is a therapy technique and which is probably used in our work as much as the design stuff."

Build a Network

A former middle school science teacher, Sara Davis has been an instructional designer in the Teaching and Learning with Technology Department at Pennsylvania State University for three years.

When she first started at Penn State, her job was to help faculty migrate from the old learning management system to Canvas. "Because we were migrating to a new platform, it opened up the door to have conversations about the way the course was designed - because we had to restructure them anyway," she explained.

Davis said she realized early on that it would be important to network to develop relationships with people whose expertise she could draw upon.

"There is so much technology in use now that it is impossible to be an expert on all of it, so you need to find people who are experts and build a network," she said. "One of the first things I did as an instructional designer was to seek out professional development in project management. That helped me make a lot of connections with people who were project managers in IT and other areas. I am fortunate that our department is full of people who are not just instructional designers, they also have expertise in OER, research and multimedia. Those colleagues have helped me improve projects I am working on because of their knowledge and expertise."

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3 Keys to Engaging Faculty in Instructional Design -- Campus Technology

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Teaching and Learning Most instructional designers will tell you their work begins with getting a foot in the door with faculty and building rapport from there. Here are three ways to make that relationship a success.

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Campus Location

Dallas Campus

ORCID

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2089-1248

Document Type

Dissertation

Department

School of Educational Leadership

Degree Name

Doctor of Education

Committee Chair

Leah Wickersham-Fish

Second Committee Member

Jennifer Duffy

Third Committee Member

Simone Elias

Abstract

This study investigated how organizational structures influence leadership over online learning initiatives for dedicated instructional designers in higher education. A qualitative research method was used for within-case analyses for 3 individual universities and a comparative case analysis of all 3 studied institutions. Purposive sampling was used to identify each university that participated and operated within 1 of 3 organizational structure profiles. Data were collected through document analysis and semistructured interviews with participants in 3 key roles at each institution: dedicated instructional designer, online faculty member, and online learning administrator. The organizational structure that most positively influenced the ability for dedicated instructional designers to lead online learning initiatives was a centralized instructional design team with academic reporting lines. The results showed that decentralized dedicated instructional designers experienced significant disempowerment, role misperception, and challenges in advocacy and leadership, while dedicated instructional designers with administrative reporting lines experienced a high level of role misperception specifically related to technology support. Positional parity between dedicated instructional designers and faculty, in conjunction with implementation of the recommended organizational structure, was found to be critical to empowering designers to be partners and leaders. Several recommendations were produced: (a) instructional design teams should proportionally match the size of the university to ensure that they have time and opportunity to act as leaders in online learning initiatives, (b) dedicated instructional designers should participate or lead online program design initiatives, and (c) leaders of instructional design teams should have direct knowledge or experience with instructional design and online learning.

Keywords: instructional design, organizational structure, leadership, qualitative methods, higher education, online learning

Recommended Citation

Drysdale, Jason, "The Organizational Structures of Instructional Design Teams in Higher Education: A Multiple Case Study" (2018). Digital Commons @ ACU, Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 115.
https://digitalcommons.acu.edu/etd/115

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The Organizational Structures of Instructional Design Teams in Higher Education: A Multiple Case Study

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This study investigated how organizational structures influence leadership over online learning initiatives for dedicated instructional designers in higher education. A qualitative research method was used for within-case analyses for 3 individual universities and a comparative case analysis of all 3 studied institutions.

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As online enrollments grow and many colleges ramp up their digital course and program offerings, the role of instructional designers -- staff members who work with instructors to adapt or build new digital courses -- is growing in importance.

But new data from Inside Higher Ed's just-released 2018 Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology suggest that instructional designers -- and colleges and universities that want them to play a central role helping instructors create high-quality, well-built courses -- have a lot of work to do in building awareness of their role.

Inside Higher Ed and Gallup, its survey partner, asked an expanded set of questions about instructional designers in this year's iteration of the annual faculty technology survey, in recognition of the profession's increasingly important role.

As was the case last year, the 2,000-plus faculty respondents were asked whether they had worked with an instructional designer to create or revise an online or blended course (or a face-to-face course), and whether they had received professional development about designing an online or blended course.

The answers this year were virtually identical to last year's: about a quarter of respondents (25 percent) said they had worked with a designer on an online or blended course, and about 45 percent said they had received professional development about course design.

Forty-four percent of all survey respondents reported having taught online, and those who had done so were, not surprisingly, far likelier than their peers who haven't (44 percent versus 9 percent) to say they had worked with an instructional designer.

Still, the fact that fewer than half of those who had taught online said they had worked an instructional designer -- even though 87 percent said they were involved in designing their online courses -- troubled some experts.

"The fact that only a quarter of instructors worked with an instructional designer on online courses (about the same as the share who worked with an instructional designer on face-to-face courses) suggests that many of those working in online teaching are still more or less experimenting on their own," said Martin Kurzweil, director of the educational transformation program at Ithaka S+R.

The expanded set of questions sought to dig deeper into the relationship between instructors and designers -- and the reasons why they may not be forming those relationships in the first place.

Instructors who had worked with instructional designers overwhelmingly appreciated the experience, with 37 percent describing it as "very positive" and 56 percent as "positive." More than two-thirds agreed that the designers had helped them "understand the available educational technology tools" and integrate them into their courses (75 percent), that designers "improved the quality" of their courses (70 percent) and that they "shared helpful tips and effective practices for fostering student engagement" (70 percent).

They were less inclined to say that the designers "worked with me on a wide range of aspects of my course, from defining learning outcomes to creating assessments" and "helped me with specific areas in which I lacked expertise" (50 percent agreed with each statement).

Faculty members who had not worked with instructional designers were asked why. About a quarter (26 percent) said they did not believe they needed a designer's help, and 16 percent said they had "no interest" in one.

But significant numbers of instructors cited reasons that should concern instructional designers and those who believe they should play a more important role. The top explanation chosen was that "my college has not shared information about the availability of instructional designers and how to go about working with them" (29 percent), while 25 percent said they were not familiar with what instructional designers do and 20 percent said their institution does not have any, or enough, designers.

Professors who had taught online were significantly less likely than their peers who had not to say they didn't know what instructional designers do (17 percent versus 30 percent) or that they have no interest in working with designers (10 percent versus 21 percent).

But they were only slightly less likely to say their college had not shared information on working with designers (26 percent versus 31 percent) and were more likely than professors who had not taught online (25 percent to 17 percent) to say their university did not have enough designers.

Steve Kaufman, senior instructional designer at the University of Akron and vice chair of Quality Matters' Instructional Designer Association, said the data "speak to the lack of information about the value an instructional designer brings to the course-development process."

"Whenever I meet new people, and they ask about what I do for a living, they give me curious and puzzled looks when I tell them that I'm an ID," he said. His definition: "I help faculty translate their face-to-face course into an online course in a way that's intuitive, deliberate and objectives driven."

Beyond that, "the art of teaching is exclusively a faculty space, and understandably, anyone who may be seen as stepping into that space can and will on occasion receive pushback," he said. "The importance for IDs to frame the narrative as, 'I can help you with the design of your course, so that your learners will know where to click, how to reach you, and can see the alignment between your lessons, interactions and your assessments' cannot be understated. We don't judge faculty's teaching ability; we merely want to help build meaningful online experiences where the technology can 'get out of the way.'" Kurzweil of Ithaka S+R said the results revealing lack of awareness about how instructional designers can help professors create better digital experiences for their students reflect a larger pattern in the faculty technology survey.

Other data in the study show a majority of faculty respondents don't believe their institutions provide enough professional support or appropriately incentivize online teaching and course development. All those data indicate that "we have a long way to go before teaching with technology is really systematized at most institutions," Kurzweil said. "This is important because real impacts on student outcomes and productivity at scale have only been achieved in the context of systematic, institution-supported efforts (with significant faculty buy-in and engagement).

"Grassroots faculty efforts without institutional support tend to remain at the margins."

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Survey of professors shows surprising lack of awareness of instructional designers

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As online enrollments grow and many colleges ramp up their digital course and program offerings, the role of instructional designers -- staff members who work with instructors to adapt or build new digital courses -- is growing in importance.

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Learning Engineering among the Professions SIG

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IEEE IC Industry Consortium on Learning Engineering

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Learning Engineers (2018) Inside Higher Ed

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Learning Engineers (2018) Inside Higher Ed

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Reginald Jackson had worked for three years as an academic technology analyst at the University of Chicago when administrators at Northwestern University came to him with an intriguing offer.

They had in mind for Jackson a new position that tapped into his experience collaborating with faculty members and program heads alike on creating innovative learning experiences.

"They were looking for a new role, and they didn't want to call it an instructional designer," Jackson said.

Thus began Jackson's career as a learning engineer -- now one of three at the institution. Jackson is embedded in the Medill School of Journalism, aiming to provide "curriculum design and course development services for faculty-driven initiatives" for online students, from orientation to discussion forums in courses to evaluations. He reports to the institution's central office of information technology, and to the head of the journalism department.

"There's so much in this job that it brings together all that I've done already into one space," said Jackson, who impressed his Northwestern colleagues with his experience in instructional design, faculty development and project management.

The "learning engineer" job title has started cropping up at several institutions, spurred in part by leadership from Carnegie Mellon University, which has a one-year master's program in learning engineering and has hired five of its own. Other institutions are in the process of developing job descriptions for those positions.

But learning engineers and instructional designers alike worry that the distinction between them isn't clear enough, if it exists at all. Some instructional designers who feel they've only just recently helped people understand their role now believe that their field is becoming unnecessarily complicated.

Supporters of learning engineering as a discipline, meanwhile, believe the role extends the instructional designer's mission of using all the available tools to enhance teaching and improve learning. Further complicating matters, Jackson says he also identifies as an instructional designer, in part to avoid confusion among colleagues. "As soon as you say [learning engineer], they say, 'What is that?'" Jackson said.

Learning engineering has become a topic of increasingly vigorous discussion among digital learning thinkers, according to Bill Jerome, a senior product manager at Acrobatiq who previously worked at Carnegie Mellon's Open Learning Initiative for online courses. Jerome's 2013 E-Literate blog post summarizing the emerging narrative around learning engineers preceded much of the existing debate.

"It almost in a way felt a little bit clearer back then than it does now, but in a good way, because there are more people thinking and talking about it," Jerome said in an interview.
What Do Learning Engineers Do?
Perspectives vary widely on exactly how much overlap exists between instructional designers and learning engineers. Some distinguishing characteristics have started to emerge:

Learning engineers work more closely with administrators, while instructional designers collaborate directly with instructors.

Learning engineers develop research on learning and data science and make decisions based on quantitative analysis, while instructional designers make qualitative judgments based on individual needs and, in some cases, existing learning science research.

Learning engineers make changes and drive initiatives at the program level, while instructional designers help conceive and reshape individual courses.

Even these distinguishing features aren't clear cut, though. A recent survey from Oregon State University Ecampus, for instance, indicates instructional designers want more opportunities to conduct research. Northwestern's learning engineers work on individual classes as well as broader initiatives.

Jackson's job began with helping the institution transition from the Blackboard LMS to Canvas. Over time, Jackson has collaborated with faculty and staff members and students to enhance experiences with his department's online programs -- particularly the integrated marketing communications master's.

The university's previous model for supporting online instructors didn't lend itself to lasting change, according to Jackson.

"It'd be like, somebody would be assigned to a new class, they would work on it, they would disappear," Jackson said. Now he surveys students about their experiences in classes where he contributed ideas and uses those results to inform additional efforts.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is among the institutions that has committed most aggressively to learning engineering as a profession. Several positions there involve learning engineering, including Digital Learning Lab scientists and fellows. While their work varies depending on department, according to Krishna Rajagopal, the institution's dean for digital learning, responsibilities typically include producing publishable research and helping numerous instructors "build new innovative digital tools that are helping catalyze improvements in how students are on campus, and also helping faculty to use those same tools to reach learners around the world." At MIT, those duties apply equally to face-to-face and online classes, Rajagopal said.

As institutions continue to wrestle with the best model for creating high-quality online courses, the learning engineer role evolves to keep up. At Loyola University Chicago, a four-person learning engineer team used to answer "how-to" questions, but it's now shifted to helping define "how we can work," according to Sarah Kentner, who's been on the team since 2014.

She urges instructors to think more deeply about how their actions affect students. If an instructor wants to increase student engagement by creating a discussion forum, Kentner asks questions like, "What's the purpose of the forum? How will you engage the discussion? Would it have been better to have a synchronous online class discussion for 20 minutes?"

Kentner's efforts span many departments at the university. Some of those departments also employ instructional designers, who work on crafting individual learning experiences. For departments without instructional designers, Kentner helps instructors choose between design templates, but she emphasizes that she lacks the essential "artistic eye."

In some cases, Kentner said, instructional designers at her institution urge faculty members toward technology solutions because they "look really cool," but Kentner prefers to emphasize tools that function well and that she can explain to others.

While she works primarily with instructors of online and hybrid courses, she's willing to offer guidance to face-to-face instructors as well. Often, though, she finds online and hybrid instructors are more open to constructive feedback.

Kentner mostly offers advice to instructors who seek it out, often in the two or three weeks before a new semester begins. She also works on learning management system support and faculty development initiatives throughout the school year. Eventually she hopes her team can take initiative to contact instructors and help them improve.

"We can look at what they are doing, and we can use the data to prove where the success is already happening, as well as where there's opportunities for growth, and how we can make that growth possible," Kentner said.
Where Does the Term Come From?
The "learning engineer" job might be still emerging, but the title dates back more than half a century. In a 1967 essay on advice for college presidents, Carnegie Mellon University scholar Herbert Simon urged institutions to "find a place on the campus for a team of individuals who are professionals in the design of learning environments -- learning engineers, if you will." (The next sentence suggests paying for those new roles by increasing class sizes, suggesting some of Simon's insights have aged more gracefully than others.)

Carnegie Mellon has invested heavily in Simon's learning engineer concept, with its master's of educational technology and applied learning science ( METALS) program heading into its sixth year. According to Norman Bier, executive director of Carnegie Mellon's Open Learning Initiative for online courses, the university sees itself as a standard-bearer for the learning engineer profession.

"We really feel like we've got a specialized attachment to the concept and the term," Bier said.

METALS has grown from just six students in the first cohort to more than 25 in the current ones, according to Ken Koedinger, the program's director.

During the summer, students tackle a real-life problem from an industry client -- a university or company. One group this summer worked with Western Governors University to streamline its course development process so that centralized expertise from instructional designers doesn't conflict with discipline-specific guidance from fellow instructors. According to Koedinger, the students conducted interviews for qualitative analysis and requested student performance data from instructors and designers. The final product was a platform for instructors to share student assessment results so that instructors and designers don't duplicate work.

Courses include elearning design principles; tools for online learning; interaction design overview; and educational goals, instruction and assessment. Koedinger wants students to emerge from the program ready to approach problems with an eye toward using data and evidence to support recommendations. Many of those techniques apply outside the higher ed context, he said.

"I think it's totally nuts what we do now -- we design it, we develop it, we assume it's great, we keep on doing it the same old way. At a university, of all places?" Koedinger said. "It's hard sometimes to admit where things aren't working, where you're failing, but that's the only way you get to the best."

Graduates of METALS have moved on to jobs at companies like Pearson, Cengage, LinkedIn and Quora. Several others have become learning engineers and Ph.D. students at Carnegie Mellon, and one alum landed a learning experience designer position at Western Governors University.

Bier identifies a learning engineer as someone with "deep engagement with data and instrumentation," as well as a commitment to monitoring that the ideas they implement and changes they suggest are successful.

Learning engineers benefit from experience in project management and educational data mining, as well as more technical skills than would be expected of an instructional designer, according to Bier.

He recognizes that the term has a clinical feel that might alienate some proponents of maintaining "humanity" in the learning experience.

"I think that in a world where we're seeing such heavy promotion of the use of data and the use of analytics and AI and adaptive, this can leave a sense of, 'We're just looking to take human beings one step further from the process,'" Bier said. Part of his responsibility going forward, he said, is to improve messaging around the profession.
What Do Instructional Designers Think?
Instructional designers' job responsibilities vary depending on the institution, and many believe their roles are evolving or will evolve into something closer to what learning engineers currently claim as unique to their profession.

After observing this job posting for a learning engineer role at Carnegie Mellon, Trey Martindale, an instructional design expert who heads the instructional systems and work-force development department at Mississippi State University, replied, "In my view that's an instructional designer with some experience in data analytics."

Martindale does admit that many instructional designers don't focus on research. He doesn't outright reject the possibility that learning engineers play a different role than instructional designers do. But he's wary of attaching the "engineer" label, which sounds to him like a superficial effort to sound more sophisticated.
Further Reading (and Watching)
Inside Higher Ed blogger Josh Kim in 2016 prompted a vigorous debate over learning engineering in the comments of a post.

Educause recently published " 7 Things You Need to Know About Learning Engineering."

Bror Saxberg of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in March offered an hourlong lecture on learning engineering and its potential to "transform" education.

Elliott Masie, who coined the term "elearning," now thinks "instructional designer" should be replaced with " learning producer."

"If you are an instructional designer, but you're trying to avoid the word 'instruction,' because instruction somehow has become pejorative, [some have] started to call themselves learning designers. There's a small leap from learning designer to learning architect to what might be learning engineer," Martindale said. "You can call yourself whatever you want, but if the job description is the same as instructional designer, then you're the same."

Instructional designers worry that introducing a new term for a similar job will only further confuse higher ed colleagues about what they do, according to Penny Ralston-Berg, an instructional designer for Penn State World Campus. She pointed "Inside Digital Learning" to instructional design standards published by the International Board of Standards for Training, Performance and Instruction. Upon close inspection, items like "apply data collection and analysis skills in instructional design projects" indicate overlap with the learning engineer role.

The confusion around the term strikes Paxton Riter, CEO of the instructional design company iDesign, as evidence that online learning is maturing. His colleague Whitney Kilgore, the company's co-founder and chief academic officer, sympathizes with instructional designers who reject the possibility of a new term complicating their field.

"Having been in the instructional design field for 17 years, my personal identity is tied to that term," Kilgore said. "Am I a learning engineer now because there's a new term for it?"

Alyssa Dyer, a learning engineer in Northwestern's law school, said she's had an easier time explaining the learning engineering concept to people who ask because, in most cases, they don't have any preconceived notions about the term. She admits instructional designers do most of what she does, but she thinks "learning engineer" more clearly summarizes her role.

"I found that a little bit when my title had 'technologist' in it, professors would assume it's tech support," Dyer said. "Having this different title has given me an opportunity to sell myself and what I do to people I'm working with."
What's the Future of Learning Engineering?
Most institutions haven't yet reached the point of investing significantly in learning engineering. Virginia Tech collaborated with Carnegie Mellon on a project called the Data Informed Learning and Teaching Initiative, which was designed to introduce some of Carnegie Mellon's technology-enhanced learning solutions to improve Virginia Tech courses, both face-to-face and online.

Several Virginia Tech staffers attended a Carnegie Mellon summer symposium on learning engineering. But graduates from Carnegie Mellon's master's degree program appeared on first glance more qualified for corporate environments than for higher ed, according to Dale Pike, executive director and associate provost for technology-enhanced learning and online strategies at Virginia Tech.

"We specifically sought to recruit learning engineers as part of this project we were working on, and we were not successful," Pike said. "As a result of that, we took a longer view." The university also had changes in leadership around the same time that made hiring for a new position more cumbersome, according to Pike.

Technical skills alone aren't enough for a qualified candidate to make an impact at the university, he said. Though Pike hasn't yet found qualified learning engineers who make sense for his institution, the process did help him tweak the expectations for new instructional designers to include more expertise around data.

Meanwhile, the Institute of Electronic and Electric Engineers has tasked a working group with sorting out the parameters of the learning engineer role. Ellen Wagner, a visiting professor at George Mason University with joint appointments in the Virginia Serious Games Institute and the university's Division of Learning Technologies, has since 2017 chaired the Learning Engineering as a Profession special interest group within the institute's Industry Consortium of Learning Engineers (ICICLE).

Wagner's group has consulted with organizations like Educause and the E-Learning Guild and attended conferences around the world. Efforts will culminate next year in a conference on learning engineering.

"The cool thing in our world is figuring out what we need to make technology really reach its potential with people who are not just hacking their way into what they think should work for learning," Wagner said.

Other fields like defense and military training, as well as the corporate business sector, have moved more quickly to incorporate principles of engineering. Wagner believes her group's efforts to create standards around engineers in education marks one step on a long road to improving institutions' ability to navigate the technology landscape. "I want institutions to feel like they have more agency in the conversations that they can have" with technology vendors, Wagner said.

Consensus might be elusive, but Jerome thinks all parties want the same thing.

"Fundamentally a learning engineer ought to be fulfilling the creation of courseware that's better serving students," Jerome said. "That's hard to argue it's not a good thing."

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Learning engineers pose challenges and opportunities for improving digital learning

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Reginald Jackson had worked for three years as an academic technology analyst at the University of Chicago when administrators at Northwestern University came to him with an intriguing offer. They had in mind for Jackson a new position that tapped into his experience collaborating with faculty members and program heads alike on creating innovative learning experiences.

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Las Competencias del

Diseñador Instruccional (2008)

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Look at you! You made it to 2017! Why not celebrate another trip around the sun by going away on a week's vacation? Before you start packing, be sure you check the weather forecast. After all, you're going to the Caribbean and those two giant wool sweaters are taking up precious suitcase space.

I asked a select group of Instructional Design "Al Rokers" to plug into their industry Doppler radar to share any high-pressure systems or microbursts we might see in the coming year.

It's one thing to know which way the wind is blowing, and it's quite another to have your umbrella readily at hand. We want you to be well prepared for whatever weather comes your way, so I've also given you suggestions for further reading for each highlighted trend.

Here's your 365-day outlook for 2017 Instructional Design trends.

1. A Warm Front Featuring Personalization In Instructional Design

Across the globe, the time we spend on mobile phones continues to rise. Now more than ever, when we want to retreat to a familiar place, the apps on our smartphones are often our home away from home. Clare Dygert, Manager of Instructional Design at SweetRush, compares the traditional, page-turner-type eLearning that is surprisingly still around to a lumbering dinosaur struggling to catch up with everything else in our technological landscape.

Citing Facebook as a prime example, Clare notes, "It [Facebook] knows what I like, who I am, what I've done, and what I'd be interested in. Then I come to work and take an eLearning course that's nothing like Facebook, on a system that doesn't know who I am, doesn't understand what I want to know about, and doesn't have any information about me."

The personalization that makes social media apps so "sticky" is largely missing from eLearning and Learning Management Systems. Larger organizations will likely be at the forefront of rolling out next-gen Learning Management Systems and learning portals, integrating intelligent content curation and Amazon-like recommendation engines.

Not quite there yet? Take heart: There's some low-hanging fruit here. According to Annie Dickerson, Creative Director at SweetRush, "Visual IQ is rising faster than any other type of IQ. People can tell when a visual asset is authentic or quality and when it is not-and they'll respond to that."

Think about incorporating imagery from your real work environment instead of stock photos. Or add a little company- or industry-specific humor in a multiple-choice question. These small details can go a long way toward creating a more personalized "feel" within learning programs.

2. Strong Convergence Of Millennials And Values-Based Corporate Culture

There's so much written about Millennials-and for good reason! There are 92 million of them in the US workforce, and they represent the largest generation in our history.

Apart from being the generation that grew up on the Internet, Millennials have values and behaviors that are different from those of older generations. They're interested in devoting their working hours to companies that reflect their own values and that offer opportunities for training and advancement.

As a result, employers who wish to attract and retain Millennials are challenged with not only creating an admirable culture but also communicating it well. Look for companies to attract and retain Millennial talent with training and communication about corporate values and culture.

SweetRush CEO Andrei Hedstrom has this to say about this self-aware generation: "Millennials are positioned to offer a significant tipping point for human consciousness, as they challenge the world to practice values that ultimately lead us into a more abundance-minded place. A place in which we see our organizations as unique human parts within a larger and dynamic single planetary community."

While defining an organization's culture may be the role of leadership, training and Instructional Design will play a role in reflecting those values authentically within learning programs. This may be through referencing those values as you clearly express the "why" behind taking the training (in other words, harnessing intrinsic motivation). Or it may be modeling those values within scenarios or role-plays that are part of the training program.

3. Consistent Periods Of Culturally Enlightened Instructional Design

Our world is getting smaller, and organizations looking to leverage training dollars are rolling out learning programs to global audiences. This puts high pressure on Instructional Designers to ensure they serve up content that all learners can identify with.

As a UK-based Lead Instructional Designer at SweetRush, Emma Klosson designs eLearning for multinational clients. She notes, "Learning has to not only be globally accessible and understandable but also authentic and culturally sensitive".

Regarding treatment of graphic elements in her courses, Emma shares this example: "I've got an avatar that's holding up three fingers, and we have to check that gesture against the cultural norms of our learners."

Language and cultural considerations can become challenges to rapid delivery. An up-front cultural analysis phase can help make future development more efficient by identifying the overall tone for training that works for your global audience and flagging potential trouble spots to avoid in language and imagery.

4. Ideal Climate For Behavioral Change And Advances In Blended And Social Learning

The business problems that training is asked to solve nearly always involve some sort of behavioral change. Hernán Muñoz, Creative Director at SweetRush, says, "We can't teach behavioral change unless there is contact with another human being. It's one thing to train someone on how to use an ATM machine, but the kinds of problems clients are coming to us for are behavioral in nature. There is only so much we can do without the connection to another human being."

It used to be that a "good" blended learning solution meant eLearning pre-work followed by an instructor-led deep dive. These days, the blend is getting richer and more complex. Expect a learning solution to incorporate social, mobile, and gaming elements as well as promotional/motivational videos, marketing communications, and even custom learning portals for learning programs.

Gail Eisenstein, Lead Instructional Designer for SweetRush, is noticing this metamorphosis when she speaks to clients. More often than not, a learning deployment consists of a combination of eLearning, instructor-led content, and a social learning component. Gail says:

So we've arrived at a place of universal acceptance that, as learners, we need a debrief or processing opportunity, a way to apply what we've learned, or just to have a conversation about it. Gail suggests that this next step could be a webinar, VILT, structured learning, facilitated conversation, or a traditional classroom experience.

Sounds like a sunny outlook, but is a cold front coming in? Gail notes the barriers to entry for social learning: "Companies love the idea of having a place to respond to questions and post ideas, but if there's no in-house sanctioned platform that happens to feature a social piece, it's difficult to implement." From a security standpoint, a public platform isn't an option. And closed environments are costly.

To complicate matters, companies don't generally issue smartphones or computers to hourly employees. Some companies are starting to invest in tablets so that everyone can learn on a company-issued device, which is often the only option in light of new labor laws.

Creating space for and encouraging human connection within a virtual learning program is a challenge, yet many of us do this every day in our personal and professional lives through social media tools. The success of these platforms, along with a greater recognition of the role human connection plays in learning, is driving-and will continue to drive-demand for social collaborative learning in training programs.

5. A Low-Pressure System Bringing Some New(ish) Technologies Into The Region

Tech literacy continues to rise. And as Creative Director, Hernán points out, "The really good experiences people have on their phones puts pressure on eLearning developers to get onto the same playing field as the best-designed app". Augmented reality, virtual reality, and beacon technology continue to be technologies to watch on our list of 2017 Instructional Design trends.

Augmented Reality

For the better half of last year, it was nearly impossible to go anywhere without seeing clusters of people hunting Pokémon characters with their smartphones. Pokémon Go fits into a category of technology called "augmented reality" or simply "AR". In the game, users position their phone (or device) in front of something in their environment and the device displays information that can't be seen in real life - as the name implies, "augmenting" reality.

AR's been hovering on trends lists for years, but the success of Pokémon Go made everyone sit up and take notice - and put some deeper thought into how it could be applied in training. Early adopters like museums see a natural fit. Now we're seeing retail organizations jump on board with, for example, in-store product training. However, budget can be a barrier to entry; app-based training remains on the high end of the budget spectrum.

Virtual Reality

With a vast array of devices exploding in the consumer market, virtual reality, or VR, is also maturing, though the "killer app" that Pokémon Go has been for AR has yet to surface. Even so, Learning and Development organizations are starting to pilot VR training, from immersive simulations for high-risk environments to buzz-building games to augment live events. This year will be an important year for VR in the consumer market, so keep an eye on device and game sales to see how far and how fast this trend is taking off.

Beacon Technology

College campuses have been using beacon technology for a few years as a way of pushing nonacademic content to students and staff. The beacons themselves are small wireless transmitters that emit a signal and can connect to mobile devices in close proximity (about 30 feet or nine meters).

When they connect, they can do a variety of fun things, such as push messages and trigger certain functions on nearby phones. This technology is comparatively less expensive and less immersive than AR and VR, but it holds great potential for effective, fun, just-in-time learning experiences.

6. Extended Periods Of Responsive Design

Designing for computers and designing for smartphones are very different. If you design for one, you abandon the other. Responsive design is the solution to the problem. Born in the web design industry, responsive design, simply put, is designing once and deploying on different platforms; the underlying code then optimizes the page content for the screen dimensions of the device you are using.

We have a coding language called HTML5 to thank. HTML5 is universal, and it is easier to find developers for. It features cross-browser rendering, and content written in it can be viewed on a phone, tablet, or computer.

Acknowledging that the same challenge facing web designers also faces eLearning authors, we're starting to see authoring tools that offer responsive design features.

Yet, as Clare Dygert points out, "Taking a compliance course while riding the subway just doesn't happen". Instructional Designers will need to decide which learning solutions need this feature, depending on the audience, objectives, and content.

In the right circumstances, platform-agnostic eLearning development does cater to the learner, and it makes the curation of content easier for developers. Yet we need to be clear about when and how learners will actually take the training and what will be most effective for learning. Everything has to be on the learner's terms.

Pack Your Suitcase For An Exciting 2017!

2017 will undoubtedly show us an increasingly blurred line between learning, entertainment, and collaboration. Development and deployment tools are getting better than ever and less expensive.

Like the good meteorologist who keeps her eye on wind, jet stream, tides, sunrise, and air pressure, we must keep constant watch on personalization opportunities, cultural sensitivity, learning modalities, new technologies, design methodologies, and other Instructional Design trends that have the potential to contribute to engaging and effective learning solutions.

Check out the highlights from this article in our 2017 Instructional Design Trends infographic. Enjoy!

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2017 Instructional Design Trends Compass: Your Accu-Learningcast - eLearning Industry

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Look at you! You made it to 2017! Why not celebrate another trip around the sun by going away on a week's vacation? Before you start packing, be sure you check the weather forecast. After all, you're going to the Caribbean and those two giant wool sweaters are taking up precious suitcase space.

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Rather than focus on industry trends, I thought it might be valuable to stop and take a look at the trending changes in how learning experience practitioners work and think. Changes in these practices and mindsets tend to build up through the years until they reach a tipping point and become the new standard.

Multiple factors are affecting how we now work and think about our roles, such as:

ubiquitous technology (personal and professional),

reduced importance of memorizing information when it can be looked up,

acknowledgement that traditional one-time interventions are not effective,

increased sharing and conversation about research and new techniques,

and a workforce that is overburdened with lengthy training.

Here are the trends I've been seeing, reading and hearing about. What about you? Please add to this list in Comments.

1. Integrating Learning with Work

Many practitioners are trying to bring the designed learning experience as close to the job as possible. There is a growing consensus that isolated training interventions are not as effective as integrated ones. There are many kinds of integration strategies-from traditional mentoring to mobile apps and augmented learning experiences. Integration is a logical approach for organizations that want to decrease the time employees spend in isolated training away from work. Work-learning integration is also more attuned to human cognitive characteristics, as it appears to decrease cognitive load. See this research on complex learning (van Merrienboer & Sweller, 2005) and the book, Ten Steps to Complex Learning.

2. From Instructional Designer to Learning Experience Designer

Does a name matter? I think it does. Learning experience designer, rather than instructional designer, is creeping into the vocabulary of practitioners. This is not just a change in title, but a change in how we perceive our mission, responsibility and practices. LX Design implies a user-centric and holistic approach to solutions. It is a focus on experience and context more than materials. Read more about the meaning of the name change. Many others are writing about learning experience design too, such as these articles from the worlds of Educational Technology and UX Design.

3. ADDIE Who?

There is a greater interest in contemporary instructional design models over waterfall models, like ADDIE. Designers and developers in other fields have been using Agile approaches for years and it looks like learning experience design is reaching the tipping point. Why? In the modern workplace, situations and content may change rapidly. Agile models meet the needs of the modern workplace using prototyping, short cycles of iterative development and a focus on performance. To learn more about other models, see: the Successive Approximation Model and Leaving ADDIE for SAM, Applying Agile Principles to eLearning Projects and the strategies in Map It!

4. Embracing Design Thinking

Design Thinking shares a lot with Agile models, but it's focus is on empathizing with users and generating creative solutions. Since creativity is a mystery and often a mental block, Design Thinking is a method that can assist the Design Phase of any model. It's gaining in popularity among learning professionals. FYI: I'm facilitating a full day certificate workshop in Design Thinking at the Learning Solutions Conference 2018.

5. Increased Awareness of Universal Design

No, we're not there yet but the conversation has started. Practitioners are becoming more aware of the value and moral imperative of inclusive design. Not only is this an important principle for any society, but accessible design results in improvements for everyone (think of how wheelchair curb cuts are also good for baby strollers).

As consumers in our professional life, we need to let vendors know that this is a deciding factor in our choice of commercial tools. Listen to this podcast (or read the transcript) on accessibility. Also, see Selecting and Using Authoring Tools for Web Accessibility.

6. Working Out Loud Circles

Learning and Development professionals are forming Working Out Loud Circles. This is a practice that's growing out of the Working Out Loud phenomenon. WOL Circles, as they are called, are small support groups of peers that build relationships and help each other learn to work out loud to reach a personal goal. For 12-weeks, they participate in structured activities that many say is transformational in building a collaborative culture, new habits and changed mindsets. Read more in John Steppers book, Working Out Loud and online, Working Out Loud Circles. Also, you may find these WOL Circle diary entries interesting. For some context, listen to this interview with Jane Bozarth on Why You Should Show Your Work.

7. Seeing the Value in Metrics

Now, more than ever, LX designers are thinking about ways to measure and evaluate performance in the workplace using data analytics. There is new interest in revealing valuable data about: activities that can be tracked, the best approaches for changing behavior, preventable errors, and so much more. This increased focus on analytics follows the growth and acceptance of the xAPI standard. Once xAPI is implemented and analyzed, learning professionals can get data-based feedback and insight into the effectiveness of their solutions. For a comprehensive book on using xAPI, see Investigating Performance. For an intro to xAPI, listen to The Limitless Possibilities of xAPI.

8. Openness to All Types of Learning Experiences

At this point in time, you can probably rattle off ten types of learning experiences that may not have existed or had been little known a decade ago. This phenomenon allows people in the L&D community to think more broadly and to design solutions that better meet the needs of the 21st century workforce. Blended learning is now a multi-layered solution that results from a holistic look at a performance problem. In addition to classroom and online learning, a few of the experiences that can now be part of the blend include: augmented reality, blogging, chats and forums, chatbots, collaborative learning, communities of practice, digital curation, games, gamification, interactive video, learning portals, mobile apps, mobile learning, personalized learning, podcasts, social media learning, text messages, working out loud and virtual reality.

Download the Learning Experience Design Trends 2018 Infographic.

Get the latest articles, resources and freebies once a month plus my free eBook, Writing for Instructional Design.

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Learning Experience Design Trends For 2018

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Rather than focus on industry trends, I thought it might be valuable to stop and take a look at the trending changes in how learning experience practitioners work and think. Changes in these practices and mindsets tend to build up through the years until they reach a tipping point and become the new standard.

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They say traveling is the most basic form of learning, but learning can be a journey as well. Here at SweetRush, we don't see learning as a one-time event, but as a continuous process that happens over time, through different means.

As John Cleave, PhD, one of our eLearning Technologists, says, "Learning as a journey goes beyond pushing out a linear sequence of modules. It means creating a tapestry of experiences [...] to understand where people are and where they would like to go."

In this infographic, you'll learn about the instructional design and learning trends that you'll be hearing about during 2018-be sure to pack them all in your bags! The journey is about to start, so be sure to check out the full article, 2018 Instructional Design Trends And Learning Trends: The Journey Of Learning for a much more in-depth look at the trends for the year.

Now, buckle up and take a trip with us.

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Infographic: 2018 Instructional Design Trends and Learning Trends

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They say traveling is the most basic form of learning, but learning can be a journey as well. Here at SweetRush, we don't see learning as a one-time event, but as a continuous process that happens over time, through different means.

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ID Trends 2018

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8 Instructional Design Trends And Learning Trends For 2018

What is a learning trend? A new shiny object that is the current buzz? Something that's been around for a while but is now gaining adoption? Something born from technology innovation or a shift in learner demographics?

The answer is all of these things, and more. As we all gear up for another exciting year in the world of Learning and Development, let's take a look at the Instructional Design trends and learning trends that will be shaping the industry in 2018. View our infographic featuring 2018 instructional design trends.

1. Learning Personalized For You

Welcome to the age of personalization. For years, Amazon's been offering up products you may like based on your past purchases. We're not as shocked when ads appear on websites and social media based on our recent searches. Your news app delivers stories based on your topic preferences. Netflix recommends new shows-and even gives you a percentage "match" based on your viewing habits.

So much of what we see, hear, and read is tailored specifically to us. Why? The reason is simple-we're more likely to consume information (and buy a product) that is relevant and timely to our needs.

It's no surprise that personalized learning is coming into focus. Competing for employee mindshare is tough. Offering personally tailored learning programs that are relevant and timely seems to hold promise.

So, where are we with this learning trend?

"I'm seeing a huge demand for adaptive learning," says SweetRush Solution Architect Annie Hodson. "Learners expect content that is personalized and strongly prefer to learn from teaching methods that are also personalized."

This year, expect to hear more about technology-enabled personalization as Artificial Intelligence (AI) shifts from science fiction to household word, thanks to chatbots such as Siri and Alexa.

Annie Hodson says that AI is great for recommending the best learning resources for each learner, which benefits learners and addresses a major pain point in Learning and Development. "Organizations are frustrated that their learning materials are difficult to access or hard to find, so adaptive learning platforms make it easy for the best, most applicable materials to rise to the top."

Technology also enables curation of learning resources-again, they are personalized to the individual learner's interests and what he or she needs to learn to do the job better.

Think about it. Where do you go to learn new stuff? Google? YouTube? Organizations must compete with all the articles and videos available at your fingertips-and that content may not align with how they'd really like you to do your job.

This year, we're betting you'll hear more about curation platforms, such as EdCast, that serve up learning resources from trusted sources and that use AI to find and rank that content.

Many of these strategies support the shift from entirely push-based learning cultures-in which management decides what employees need to learn and "pushes" it to them-to integration of pull-based learning, another trend on the rise.

Stephen J. Gill, author of Minds at Work: Managing for Success in the Knowledge Economy, describes pull-based learning [1] as a "decentralized, bottoms-up approach in which employees access the information they need when it is needed."

In other words, you, the learner, decide what you need to know to do your job better, and your organization offers the tools and resources to help you learn. You're acting on your own desire to learn, your internal motivation, which helps you pay attention and retain the information better.

All of this may leave you with one burning question: Do I need to spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to build or buy technology to support personalization?

Not necessarily, our experts say.

"The trend is the personalization of learning, not the specific way to do that, which could be a lot of things," says Clare Dygert, SweetRush's Director of Instructional Design.

Sure, technology-enabled personalization will come into focus for some organizations (Clare Dygert cites examples of "recommended content, interactive video, responsive design, analytics, or adaptive learning"), but low-tech methods of personalization will be just as important. She predicts L&D will explore the use of "learning paths, affinity groups, learner-contributed content, and coaching instead of facilitation at ILT and vILT events."

John Cleave, Ph.D., an eLearning Technologist at SweetRush, agrees: "One example is to periodically assess a learner's knowledge within an eLearning module and provide additional resources or tutoring only when it's needed. So if someone is clearly proficient, you don't waste their time. This doesn't take new technology. It's simply a different way to design."

2. Meeting Learners Where They Are

Let's circle back to one of the key challenges for learning professionals: competing for employee mindshare. The demands of the job, information coming from all directions, not to mention our busy personal lives, leave us little time to focus on learning. Research from Bersin by Deloitte [2] suggests that "in a given week, employees take less than 25 minutes of time to actually slow down and learn."

When and where do we have time? On the bus or plane. In the car. Right before that meeting with a new client.

It seems we are all best friends with our phone and tablets, and we're stealing a few minutes here and there, wherever we can, to better ourselves and increase our knowledge. "With increasingly flexible schedules, the need for learning that isn't tethered to a desk is much greater," says Chris Nelson, a SweetRush Creative Director.

No surprise then that in the past few years, we've seen a steady, significant rise in demand for mobile learning and microlearning. Sure, these are no longer the new kids on the block. But within these areas, we're starting to see new trends emerge.

Mobile learning design is shifting to mobile-first learning design. "It used to be that we would design for a desktop and think about how that would convert to a mobile experience," says Emma Klosson, a SweetRush Instructional Designer. "But we really need to be thinking about things the other way around."

Driving this transition are changing demographics in the workplace and the proliferation of devices, says Andy LaPage, an Instructional Designer at SweetRush. "Millennials have growing influence over how learning in consumed. Phones and tablets are everywhere, and people turn to them more than they do a traditional desktop."

The key for Instructional Designers is really a shift in mindset-and an extreme focus on the learning experience and user experience. Emma Klosson says, "We have to rethink what is possible, and rather than see [mobile] as a limiting modality, we need to think of it as the primary way that most people acquire learning these days."

Transforming heaps of content into microlearning is a challenge for any Instructional Designer, but the just-in-time nature of bite-sized training makes this Instructional Design trend a hit with learners.

And organizations are getting the message. "There is recognition among employers that lengthy eLearning makes learners 'drink from a fire hose,'" says Gail Eisenstein, a SweetRush Instructional Designer.

Microlearning and personalization walk hand in hand in the curation platforms discussed earlier. "The idea is, in a rapidly changing and increasingly learner-centric world, how do you offer relevant information to people on an ongoing basis that they can consume as a buffet or vending machine, rather than sitting down at a dinner table?" John Cleave asks.

Research published last year by Bersin by Deloitte suggests there's a time and place for both macrolearning and microlearning [2]: Macro when you want to learn a "whole new domain," or you're at a career milestone (new job, promotion); micro when you "need help now" and consume information that takes "10 minutes or less."

So while the trend may shift us toward microlearning, savvy learning and development professionals will know when just-in-time, on-demand training is the right solution, and when to go deep to support career growth and transition.

3. Oh, The Places You'll Go-In New Realities

If we start rating these learning trends on a heat scale, immersive experiences, Virtual Reality (VR), and Augmented Reality (AR) are pretty much on fire.

Nearly all our experts predicted that we'll start to see learning programs enabled by emerging technology this year. "There will likely be plenty of companies wanting to test the water," Chris Nelson says.

While both VR and AR cleared the gate within the past few years, AR may pull ahead with greater adoption this year. "[AR is] still new, but more and more devices support it, and it's simpler to use than VR," says Andrew Kubay, a Lead Engineer at SweetRush.

We already mentioned applying artificial intelligence to further personalization. Another application of AI that's trending is using the technology to create better learning experiences.

Adrian Soto, Director of Future Technologies at SweetRush Spark (our division dedicated to emerging technologies), says that AI holds tremendous potential to "develop automated learning instructors and more realistic learning simulations."

4. Video Killed The Textbook

"The statistics tell us video usage is growing rapidly," says Pablo Barrantes, a SweetRush Creative Director. He cites research indicating that "more video content is uploaded in 30 days than the major U.S. television networks have created in 30 years." [3]

Social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, which started with written content and static images, saw their real-time video distribution features explode in popularity.

When it comes to video as a learning modality, is this a case of what's old is new again? The more mature (ahem, in age) among us will remember sitting in a sad conference room, watching an onboarding or safety video on VHS.

These days, CreativeLive and others offer full-length, lecture-style videos for learning. What's changed?

The answer is simple. We're seeing video evolve as we combine it with other trends.

Video + microlearning = bite-sized video segments that, put together, add up to a more comprehensive course. On-demand video libraries allow learners to search and find specific topics and how-to videos that meet their just-in-time needs.

Video + social learning = filming and live-streaming the classroom in real time and allowing learners in other locations to contribute comments and questions, making for a richer and more inclusive classroom experience.

Video + storytelling = live video and animation that tells a story, which, for learners, increases engagement and deepens the connection with the material. Low-cost animation can also help with marketing learning programs-in this case, making the case for WIIFMs.

All of us now have a video camera in our pocket, and distribution is free and easy, so these leanring trends will surely stay in focus.

5. Data: Collected, Analyzed, And Visualized

Do you truly care about making people smarter? If you do, our experts suggest that you should make applying data science to learning your focus in 2018.

"Instead of simply devising training, rolling it out, and hoping it works-that is, a first-best-guess at what a learner needs-use the training to gather data on how people think, believe, and act, for example, in simulated situations. Then use that data to drive further training decisions," says John Cleave.

Andrew Kubay agrees, calling data "a very, very powerful tool for analysis that can help improve eLearning in any company."

Custom tracking systems using Experience API (xAPI) can help collect data about learning experiences and build more flexible solutions. Andrew Kubay acknowledges adoption is moving slow but predicts we'll hear more about them this year.

And in the what's-old-is-new-again category, we return to the brilliant work of Edward Tufte [4], because data in a spreadsheet doesn't really help anyone, does it? If we're going to use and apply data effectively-either to improve training or in the actual instruction- data visualization comes into focus as a learning trend.

6. The New Classroom

With all the options for digital and online learning, are we seeing a decline in instructor-led training? Our experts say no. But learning trends are continuing-and emerging-that will shape the "new classroom" for years to come.

"Given widespread use of virtual meeting technology and ability to connect easily with colleagues across geographies, more and more instructor-led, live classroom courses will convert to virtual instructor-led training," says Gail Eisenstein.

Virtual instructor-led training (vILT) also offers cost savings while retaining the live connection to instructors and peers.

But the downside of vILT is that the audience is no longer captive in your physical classroom, which leaves them exposed to attention-grabbing devices, email, and pinging chat requests.

To combat this, a trend on the rise is integrating mobile devices in the virtual classroom. We recently developed a custom application for a client that allows facilitators to push games and networking activities to learners via their phones. And-just like that-you regain their attention.

Another trend that we're starting to see in the new classroom is " instructors as coaches vs. facilitators," Clare Dygert says.

In blended learning, we often see a flipped classroom in which eLearning prework includes knowledge-based content and the classroom portions focus on skills and practice. This shifts the role of the instructor from delivering a lecture to supporting and coaching learners as they practice new skills.

Emma Klosson says this approach is really impactful, "not only from a participant's point of view but also from the instructor's." She says instructors "are reporting that the discussions and activities carried out within the classroom portion of the course are at a much higher level."

7. Closing The Creativity Gap In Instructional Design

With these new modalities and technologies, the demand for creativity is at a fever pitch. Shifting away from slide-based eLearning toward techniques such as storytelling and gamification, and designing for mobile learning, microlearning, video, and VR/AR, means rapid change in the day-to-day work of an Instructional Designer.

"Companies are asking us to help them be more like us-having us coach them on how to develop highly creative teams," says Clare Dygert. "They want to understand not just what we do, but how we do it."

Where does creativity come from? And how can we help upskill Instructional Designers and eLearning teams?

An Instructional Design trend on the rise is applying the creative strategies of design thinking to building more engaging and impactful learning experiences. Rosa Ramos, a SweetRush Creative Director, suggests design thinking can "help us with creativity and confidence when we develop learning courses or experiences."

"Design thinking is all about centering on the learner's experience in your ideation," says John Cleave. At SweetRush, we distilled the principles that create a foundation for creativity in our work. The first one, "Step into their shoes," is meant to encourage learner-centric design through empathy, an important tenet of design thinking.

8. Reimagine, Redesign, Redeploy

We can all agree that we're living in a time of rapid change-and for many companies, that's driving a rising need for reimagining learning and program redesign. Many organizations are taking the time to look at their culture of learning as a whole, as well as the efficacy of their existing programs.

"This work involves going back to basics and looking at roles and responsibilities and the associated knowledge, skills, and behaviors needed to be successful and thinking about the change in learning modalities and the learners' and organizations' preferences," Emma Klosson says.

An article in Chief Learning Officer magazine highlighting 2017 Learning Elite winner Deloitte [5] suggests the company looks favorably on program redesign. Their take is that "looking critically at a program that's been in place a few years to consider how technology can bring the program to life and what is the best way to drive performance, is the right thing to do."

How These Trends Come Together: Learning As A Journey

Our goal with this article is to highlight specific Instructional Design trends, and generally, learning trends, for which we'll likely see growing demand or interest this year. But none of these trends exist in a vacuum, and the most successful organizations will consider how to best use them in an integrated, holistic way.

Rather than viewing learning as a one-time event, "learning is a process that happens over time, through formal, informal and self-perpetuated means," John Cleave says. "Learning as a journey goes beyond pushing out a linear sequence of modules. It means creating a tapestry of experiences: training modules, curation, social media and feedback, events, and continuous data analytics to understand where people are at and where they would like to go."

That's a strategic vision that we predict Chief Learning Officers worldwide will begin to embrace.

From our team at SweetRush, wishing you all a creative, productive, and fabulous 2018!
Footnotes:

1. Pull, Don't Push, Employee Learning

2. The Disruption of Digital Learning: Ten Things We Have Learned

3. More video is uploaded every 30 days than total amount created by top 3 U.S. TV networks in the past 30 years

4. Edward Tufte

5. Chief Learning Officer - June 2017

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2018 Instructional Design Trends And Learning Trends: The Journey Of Learning - eLearning Industry

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What is a learning trend? A new shiny object that is the current buzz? Something that's been around for a while but is now gaining adoption? Something born from technology innovation or a shift in learner demographics? The answer is all of these things, and more.

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Instructional Design Definitions

What is Instructional Design?

What is instructional design? In short, instructional design is the process by which learning products and experiences are designed, developed, and delivered. These learning products include online courses, instructional manuals, video tutorials, learning simulations, etc. Instructional designers are the 'architects' of the learning experience and the 'directors' of the Instructional Systems Design ISD process. The terms instructional design, instructional technology, learning experience (LX) design, curriculum design, and instructional systems design (ISD), are sometimes used interchangeably. Below are a few instructional design definitions from various sources:

Instructional Design Definitions

"Instructional Design is defined as "a systematic process that is employed to develop education and training programs in a consistent and reliable fashion" (Reiser, Dempsey, 2007). In addition, it may be thought of as a framework for developing modules or lessons that (Merrill, Drake, Lacy, Pratt, 1996)"

"Instructional Design is the systematic development of instructional specifications using learning and instructional theory to ensure the quality of instruction. It is the entire process of analysis of learning needs and goals and the development of a delivery system to meet those needs. It includes development of instructional materials and activities; and tryout and evaluation of all instruction and learner activities."

What is an Instructional Designer?

What exactly is an instructional designer and what do they do? Instructional designers create and deliver learning products for business, K-12, higher education, and government organizations. Instructional designers are the 'architects' of the learning experience and the 'directors' of the Instructional Systems Design (ISD) process. Instructional designers are in high demand worldwide (particularly in North America, Asia and Europe), as organizations are turning towards instructional designers to solve business performance problems through the delivery of effective learning experiences. Below are a few instructional designer definitions from various sources:

"Educational technology is the study and ethical practice of facilitating learning and improving performance by creating, using and managing appropriate technological processes and resources."

"Educational technology, sometimes termed EdTech, is the study and ethical practice of facilitating e-learning, which is the learning and improving performance by creating, using and managing appropriate technological processes and resources. The term educational technology is often associated with, and encompasses, instructional theory and learning theory. While instructional technology is 'the theory and practice of design, development, utilization, management, and evaluation of processes and resources for learning,' according to the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) Definitions and Terminology Committee, educational technology includes other systems used in the process of developing human capability."
Source: www.edtech.wikia.com

Instructional Design

Educational Technology

Learning Experience (LX)

"An emerging discipline, learning experience design (LX) draws from other disciplines including experiential learning, cognitive psychology, interaction design, user experience design, instructional design and design thinking." Source: www.learningexperiencedesign.com

Instructional Designer

"An instructional designer is somebody who applies a systematic methodology based on instructional theory to create content for learning events." Source: www.eng.wayne.edu

Instructional Technologist

"What does an instructional technologist do...

Evaluate new technologies to discover new and better ways to enhance instruction

Assist faculty in discovering methods of improving their instruction with and without technology

Conduct training sessions teaching faculty and staff how to use new technologies

Conduct research studies evaluating the use of technologies and their impact on student learning outcomes

Create training materials to accommodate the self-learners and provide resources for our "customers"

Manage the implementation of new technologies on-campus for the use of instruction."
Source: www.instructtech.wordpress.com

Educational Technologist

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View definitions for instructional design, educational technology, educational psychology, instructional technology, curriculum design, & instructional systems

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Instructional Designer Infographic - FIU

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Instructional Designer Infographic - FIU

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FIU Online Instructional Designers Infographic - Online Insider

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Learn more about how our awesome IDs work to create amazing learning experiences online! Download here: ID_Poster

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Introducing the ASU Instructional Designers

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Introducing the ASU Instructional Designers

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About 40 staff members at Arizona State University have the words Instructional Design or Instructional Designer in their job title. Even though there are a lot of them about (and some have been at ASU for quite a long time), for many of us, the full range of what Instructional Designers do may be unknown. We asked a large group of ASU Instructional Designers and Technologists to tell us about the work they do and here is what we discovered.
Communicators
The first skill we master in Instructional Designer (ID) 101. Listening, speaking, writing and presenting are all important parts of our day-to-day. Our work is collaborative by nature. We are skilled at building consensus.
Thinkers
We think about things. We brainstorm. We experiment. We look for new and better all the time. We think about human psychology. We think about aesthetics, design, user experience, flow, look/feel. We think about the different senses and how they come into play.
Designers
We design instruction/teaching and learning experiences. At the heart of the matter is often the alignment of objectives, activities and assessments.
Relationships
We are skilled at building relationships and rapport with faculty, staff, and clients. There is the potential for a lot of emotion around what we do.
Data Analysts
Data-based decision making is part of what we do.
Superheroes
Look! Up in the sky! It's a media producer! It's a collaboration expert! It's an ID!
Guides
Instructional Designers are consultants, technologists, trainers, and evaluators. Whatever instructional issues you may face, we can be right by your side to help.
Builders
We bring a systematic approach to constructing learning experiences that includes analysis of the audience, environment, objectives, content, technologies, etc. Planning maps, guides, templates, process docs, outlines, storyboards, are all part of the way we approach projects.
Explorer
It's important that we stay on top of the latest processes and skills related to ID work. We communicate "best practices" in teaching and learning (particularly related to using technology).
Project Managers
We talk about projects and project management constantly. It frames how we think about work.
Fixers
When a course link breaks, when a weighted grade column doesn't add up, we can be there to help. We fix things that are broken. We solve problems.
Evaluators
We design, develop and evaluate content/instructional materials. Review and revision are essential.

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Introducing the ASU Instructional Designers [Infographic] - TeachOnline

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About 40 staff members at Arizona State University have the words Instructional Design or Instructional Designer in their job title. Even though there are a lot of them about (and some have been at ASU for quite a long time), for many of us, the full range of what Instructional Designers do may be unknown.

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So what do Instructional Designers at the University of Northern Colorado do? Learn about the responsibilities and skillset instructional designers have and the services they provide for faculty and staff at UNC.

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Vanguard Projects: Expanding Teaching and Learning Horizons

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Members of the higher education community provided a long list of projects that exemplify the six developments in educational technology from this year's Horizon Report. A few of the projects are highlighted to convey a sense of the range and direction of current innovations in teaching and learning in higher education.

Credit: Monkey Business Images / Thinkstock © 2018

EDUCAUSE is actively working to complete the 2018 Horizon Report for Higher Education, fully in the tradition and style of past Horizon Reports. We recently released the Horizon Report Preview, which contains summaries of all 18 sections (six trends, six challenges, and six developments in educational technology). The preview is freely available to the community. EDUCAUSE hosted a webinar exploring the 2018 Horizon Report on August 9, 2018. Access the recording.

In the past, as a part of the report, the New Media Consortium (NMC) and EDUCAUSE traditionally issued a call for exemplar projects-leading work being done by institutions around the globe that illustrates the findings of the report. EDUCAUSE has continued this practice and in early June issued a call for exemplar projects that involve one of the six developments in educational technology as laid out in the preview. We are pleased to announce that we received a terrific response, with some 107 project sketches being submitted. This list summarizes the distribution across the six developments (as laid out in the preview):

Mixed reality: 31.4%

Makerspaces: 28.6%

Adaptive learning technology: 16.2%

Analytics technologies: 15.2%

Artificial intelligence: 4.8%

Robotics: 3.8%

Of the projects that were submitted, here's the breakdown across institutional types:

Doctoral public: 48.6%

Doctoral private: 14.3%

Masters public: 10.5%

Bachelors private: 8.6%

Masters private: 6.7%

Others (including non-US): 11.3%

It is encouraging to note that these figures suggest that public institutions, despite their ever-growing funding challenges, have been able to continue to do leading work in the exploration of how digital technology can help improve higher education.

An initial review of the proposals suggests a few patterns or trajectories within each of the technology categories. Following are a few of the more conspicuous ones. I stress that these are but a subset of all the examples that could be mentioned here.

Makerspaces. These resources are clearly evolving, moving beyond being drop-in-anytime centers, somewhat loosely connected to the curriculum. In many instances, the submissions reported integration into the mainstream curriculum. Some are also reaching out to their immediate community, involving high school students and providing support for community programs. Examples include:

Mixed reality. One trend here is the use of extended reality (XR) technology in the humanities disciplines, especially history. At Bates College, at least four courses are using XR for historical reconstruction of structures including ancient mosques and Roman theaters. Similarly, students at Wellesley College are using photogrammetry to reconstruct objects in museums and then integrating the reconstructions into their course work. At Case Western Reserve University, a collaboration has devised ways to integrate holograms into a dance performance. At Ohio State University and Humber College Institution of Technology and Advanced Learning, virtual reality (VR) is being used to develop training resources for first responders to medical emergencies.

Adaptive learning technologies. This technology made its first major entrance on the "stage" with its application to gateway courses such as algebra that traditionally had DWF challenges. This application of adaptive learning technology has been greatly encouraged by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, administered by the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), in which a set of institutions has made tangible progress in precisely this area. We are now seeing this technology being applied at scale and in areas other than gateway courses. A few example projects:

For the Harvard Graduate School of Education's How People Learn project, the institution is developing adaptive technology "to recommend pathways and enable learner agency while also maintaining choice."

The Georgia Institute of Technology has developed a textbook for its Computer Science 1 course that both adapts content to the student's ability but also enables the student to proceed at his/her own pace using active learning exercises.

The University of Central Florida has made a strategic investment in the use of adaptive technologies to address student academic success in the general education program and in STEM courses and to improve completion rates for first-time-in-college and transfer students.

Analytics technologies. Learning analytics made its first appearance in the Horizon Report in 2011, situated in the 4-5-year adoption horizon; since then it has largely drifted upward, to its position in the less-than-a-year spot in 2018. Some patterns emerge among the projects in this area: participatory development, the inclusion of non-IT community members to develop application ideas; the integration of digital resources (such as Amazon Web Services) to support analytics projects; and an increasing role of consortia in analytics projects. A sampler of projects:

Again, it's important to stress that this is only a sampler of the set we received from the community. EDUCAUSE would like to thank the community for the level of participation in our call; the response exceeded anything we expected. We will be selecting a few from this set to serve as exemplars in the 2018 Horizon Report. We also plan to contact many of the others in connection with other ELI programming opportunities, leading up to the ELI Annual Meeting, February 19-21, 2019, in Anaheim CA.

Speaking of the Annual Meeting, a note that the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) has issued its the Call for Proposals for the 2019 Annual Meeting. As always, we invite all members of the community to submit proposals not just about the six Horizon Report developments but also for any aspect of postsecondary teaching and learning.

Learn more about the exemplar projects and their implications at the EDUCAUSE Live webinar exploring the 2018 Horizon Report on August 9. Register to reserve your spot.

Malcolm Brown is Director of the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative.

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vanguard projects: expanding teaching and learning horizons

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Vanguard Projects: Expanding Teaching and Learning Horizons

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Members of the higher education community provided a long list of projects that exemplify the six developments in educational technology from this year's Horizon Report. A few of the projects are highlighted to convey a sense of the range and direction of current innovations in teaching and learning in higher education.

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What Do Instructional Designers Really Do in Higher Ed?

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What Do Instructional Designers Really Do in Higher Ed?

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Campus Technology

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Research

Despite Increase in Instructional Designers, There Is No 'Universal Profile' for the Role

The role of the instructional designer first surfaced during World War II as experts in psychology and academics to create training and assessment materials for troops. Since then - and especially since the spread of digital learning in education - the ranks have only grown. In higher education, one 2016 estimate pegged the "minimum" number of instructional designers employed by colleges and universities at some 13,000. But, as a new report from the Online Learning Consortium pointed out, "There is still a certain mystery surrounding who instructional designers are."

" Instructional Design in Higher Education: Defining an Evolving Field" seeks to clear up the mystery. The report is the second in a series to examine aspects of the digital learning landscape by doing a literature survey of existing research. The first report looked at accessibility. The series is being produced by OLC's Research Center for Digital Learning & Leadership.

According to authors Elaine Beirne from Ireland's Dublin City University and Matthew Romanoski from the University of Arizona, there is "no universal profile" for an instructional designer, and the path to the job may come through teaching in higher ed, working in technology, holding an academic research role or having a graphic design background.

Even with this variety, the goal of the job is consistent across the board: to improve student success. In this, collaboration with faculty is the "top challenge." Oftentimes, instructional designers have to overcome the idea that online learning works "crock pot style" (set it up and "forget it"), or they face instructor concern that a given course will become more mechanized and lose its personal touch in the design process, leaving students adrift as little more than an ID number.

Those obstacles are being knocked over instructor by instructor. For example, at U Arizona, designers begin their work with faculty members by asking about how they teach concepts in their traditional courses, and then using that as a starting point for discussing how those same approaches can be translated to an online class.

As the field evolves and the importance of the instructional designer role grows, suggested the authors, more effort needs to be put into sharing research and best practices, improving in training and development processes, outlining industry standards for the field and identifying practices for improving career pathways.

The report is openly available on the OLC website, along with other reports from the series.

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal and Campus Technology. She can be reached at dian@dischaffhauser.com or on Twitter @schaffhauser.

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instructional design in higher education

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Despite Increase in Instructional Designers, There Is No 'Universal Profile' for the Role -- Campus Technology

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Research The role of the instructional designer first surfaced during World War II as experts in psychology and academics to create training and assessment materials for troops. Since then - and especially since the spread of digital learning in education - the ranks have only grown.

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Data on Instructional Designers (pages 25-29)

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Data on Instructional Designers (pages 25-29)

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Updated March 2016.

I hope this list of job sites below is useful to you. Please add other resources below in the Comments section, and I'll add them to this list.

First, from Recruiter.com, an article on the career outlook for instructional designers.

My List of Job Search Sites

1. This is the â€œjobsâ€ category from the news site for the University of Memphis graduate program in Instructional Design and Technology. We post job notices here (mostly local and regional), along with other program news.

2. ASTD lists job postings for instructional designers across the nation.

3. From Instructionaldesign.org - lots of recent instructional design jobs in academic, commercial, and government environments.

4. A job board from the Society for Applied Learning Technology (SALT). Most of these are in e-learning. None are in education.

5. Learning Gurus.com lists Jobs in Instructional Design and Technology

6. Dennis O'Connor's job listing and career help Scoop.it newsletter

7. Elearningindustry.com lists jobs for instructional designers, instructional technologists and trainers, etc.

8. Browse instructional design and eLearning jobs on the Instructional Design Central job board. Find instructional design jobs in government, higher-education, K-12, non-profit, and private business sectors.

9. View E-learning and Instructional design jobs all around the world on Blue Eskimo.

10. Instructional Design and Technology positions in higher education across the United States via higheredjobs.com

11. Here is a list of jobs in education, public and private sector for instructional designers via indeed.com.

12. View e-learning, technical writing, and instructional design jobs via careerbuilder.com.

13. ID jobs from simplyhired.com

14. Monster.com jobs in instructional design and e-learning:

15. List of ID jobs on glassdoor.com. You can narrow your search by reviewing the salaries and job types.

16. Interested in working from home? Hereâ€™s a board for Instructional Designer Jobs for public and private sector organizations on VirtualVocations. You can also chat live with an agent on this website.

17. Search for home-based instructional design jobs in USA on Careerjet.com

18. Jobs2Careers lists jobs for instructional designers and instructional managers.

19. Search for e-learning and instructional design jobs on Dice.com

20. Careers.org has jobs posted for instructional designers and software developers. The website is frequently updated and has recent jobs posted.

21. Jobs.com lists Elearning and Instructional Design jobs.

Other Lists of Job Search Sites

Professor Curtis Bonk from Indiana University has listed over 30 job search websites in Education Technology and Instructional Technology on trainingshare.com.

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Updated March 2016. I hope this list of job sites below is useful to you. Please add other resources below in the Comments section, and I'll add them to this list. First, from Recruiter.com, an article on the career outlook for instructional designers.

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2018 Key Issues in Teaching and Learning

Each year, ELI surveys the higher education community to determine key issues and opportunities in post-secondary teaching and learning. These key issues serve as the framework, or focal points, for our discussions and programming throughout the coming year. More than 900 community members voted on the following key issues for 2018.

Download the infographic below and share with colleagues, or explore each of the issues more deeply with the resources below the infographic.

1. Academic Transformation

2. Accessibility and UDL

3. Faculty Development

4. Privacy and Security

5. Digital and Information Literacies

6. Integrated Planning and Advising Systems for Student Success (iPASS)

7. Instructional Design

8. Online and Blended Learning

9. Evaluating Technology-based Instructional Innovations

10. Open Education

11. Learning Analytics

12. Adaptive Teaching and Learning

13. Working with Emerging Technology

14. Learning Space Designs

15. NGDLE and LMS Services

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Each year, ELI surveys the higher education community to determine key issues and opportunities in post-secondary teaching and learning. These key issues serve as the framework, or focal points, for our discussions and programming throughout the coming year. More than 900 community members voted on the following key issues for 2018.

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Instructional Design in Higher Education Report

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CHE (2016) Demand Grows for a New Breed of Academic

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CHE (2016) Demand Grows for a New Breed of Academic

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Instructional Design in Higher Ed: Defining an Evolving Field: Annotated Bibliography

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Instructional Design in Higher Ed: Defining an Evolving Field: Annotated Bibliography

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OLJ (June 2018 ) - Students’ Perceptions of Quality Across Four Course Development Models

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Students' Perceptions of Quality Across Four Course Development Models | Brown | Online Learning

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Students' Perceptions of Quality Across Four Course Development Models