Why do we need Instructional Design (ID)

While designing and developing trainings, I have asked myself this question many times. Often, I wondered about the significance of ID or about the significance of presenting content in a sound instructional manner to audience. I questioned the use of the flashy graphics and sound effects that supplement the textual content; are they created to only attract the learners to the content, or do they help them understand and learn? Certain issues, such as the Connect is missing, How does this content piece relate to the previous??, There is no flow in the content, Who does the pronoun refer to, raised by the reviewers of my documents often annoyed me, and I heard myself saying “Come on our learner is an adult; not a child. And just like other adults, he too can deal with some ambiguity in life.” I felt that adult information seekers or learners are able to make use of content regardless of its presentation, language, grammar and style; they are smart enough to connect the unordered, disconnected and flow less content pieces together and learn.

Then one fine day, enlightenment struck me while I was cleaning my closet and was arranging my clothes in the shelves within the closet. Somehow, the exercise resurfaced my ID-related doubts and helped me derive this amusing and interesting analogy. Continue reading, to know more.

Have you ever wondered the purpose of arranging and organizing clothes within a closet? After all, you are to use the entire place to store your clothes; then doesn’t the exercise of arranging the clothes become useless, redundant and trivial? Instead of wasting your time and effort in arranging your clothes, you can simply dump your clothes into the closet and save yourself some considerable amount of hard work. Of course you can, but you wouldn’t; simply because dumping clothes will result into a terrible chaos while taking them out of the closet. You would have to search multiple shelves to find the dress that your want to wear for party tonight or to take out the pair of trousers that you plan to wear to work today. To save yourself from this chaos, you prefer to organize and arrange your clothes in the closet so that you don’t have to look for your clothes in multiple places within the closet. Therefore, the exercise of arranging the clothes is useful because it saves you a considerable amount of time and effort later. In addition, the exercise makes your life easier and stress free.

ID does this and many more useful things to content. Applying ID on content is similar to arranging the clothes in your closet; rather it's more than that. We are living in the age of information; the age in which loads of information is available to us either on the Web or over the T.V. or radio or newspaper. Often, the learners are dumped with information and expected to make sense of it and start applying it. Just imagine the plight of the learners these days; you too are one of them. In order to learn, along with learning (which is the primary objective) the learner is expected to:

• Research and identify the relevant content.
• Structure the learning.
• Relate numerous content pieces with each other.
• Fill the information gaps.
• Adjust to the presentation of the content; regardless of his/her individual and preferred learning style.

Do you see that apart from learning, the learner does numerous other activities all by himself/herself? Isn’t this too much of an expectation from an adult learner when learning is an important stepping stone for success? I think, it definitely is.

Ideally, the learners should focus only on learning and none of the above-listed activities because they come under the ambit of ID and these activities are performed by Instructional Designers through the application of various ID theories and models.

Therefore, ID is relevant, helpful and important for the learners and crucial for the organizations that want to develop and maintain an aware, confident and effective workforce. So:

• Learners: Claim your right to learner-friendly content the next time you are expected to make sense of anything vague, unclear and complex.
• Designers: Continue creating, cleaning, arranging and maintaining the content closets for your learners/audience!

Spl Note: I hope you enjoyed reading this post as much as I enjoyed writing it. Also, I hope that I successfully conveyed my message to you. I would love to read your reactions, opinions, perspectives and views; therefore, please don't hold yourself from commenting on this post. Looking forward to your comments!