Understanding Instructional Design

Do you need help to design a new course or are thinking of redesigning an existing one? Do you need help to strategize and plan teaching activities and technology revolving around it? An instructional designer is what you require.

What is Instruction Design?

Instruction design is basically how you will explain the user the subject and devising a methodology to make learning easier for them.  Instructional designers develop courses of instruction on specific topics, their job is to create and deliver educational training materials. The training material, eLearning courses, videos, manuals and handouts for businesses, higher educational institutions, and other organizations are designed by the instructional designers.

Instructional Design has nothing to do with the engineering of any product or structure, nor any building, construction, or fabrication process. What the instructional designer adds to the process is experiences of learning and practicing; Instructional designers are aware of how to teach people and help them learn in a better way.

How to get into Instruction Design?

To get into Instruction Design one can get their masters degree in instruction design, educational technology or something similar to that. This is a way to get into instructional design if you have no degree or training experience.

 A lot of people with specialized degrees and training experience start designing instruction manuals and get into instructional design at later stages of their career.

What are the skills required?

Most of the instructional design jobs are for online manuals or for e-learning, to be an instructional designer one needs to be comfortable working on basic and common technology. This includes being well-versed in PowerPoint, Word and other office tools.

Apart from that basic HTML is required along with course development and understanding skills.  Some jobs might require working on Flash programming. What is required more than anything else is the desire and motivation to learn new technology and ability to incorporate that in your design.

Resources for Instructional Design

There are many instructional design related programs, degrees, and certifications to choose from. Here is where you can learn instructional designing.

1)      The E-learning Coach

2)      About E-learning

3)      GradSchools

These include, degree and certificate programs related to instructional design, E-learning design and development, educational technology and educational media design including both and offline and online courses.

If you are already qualified as a Instructional designer you might find jobs in companies like NIIT, Cisco, IBM and a lot of other IT companies.

Check out jobs for Instruction designers here. 

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