Instructional Design 101

While the term Instructional Design” is common among edtech enthusiasts, it still baffles quite a few within  education circles.
For us at LUMSx, effective instructional design is what ties our work together and we believe that it will enable LUMS to make its top-quality research and education scalable and relevant to new, unprecedented audiences all while retaining the engagement of our in-class environments. Without it, achieving parity in education would be an insurmountable task.

We have the LUMSx Instructional Design Team here with us today – Sameen and Faryal who are graduates of the prestigious Teacher’s College at Columbia University, Mashal who is a graduate from Divinity School, Harvard, and Maria, who is a gold-medalist from our very own LUMS School of Education – to deconstruct some common concepts pertaining to the field of instructional design.

How would you explain Instructional Design” to anyone who’s new to the term?

Sameen: I think for me, I would define instructional design as quite literally a design of how you want to deliver a concept. Just like an architect creates the blueprint of a building, you create a design for learning.

Maria: And it doesn’t have to be for an online course. It could be for any workshop or even if you’re teaching somebody a single concept, you can curate their entire experience of it.

Faryal: When we think about it in terms of designing a product – you start thinking about the user’s needs and how the product will fulfill them. Workshops, trainings, courses – these are all products you are making with a specific learner in mind. The design process lays the foundation and strategies of how the learning content will develop and progress for the learner – you think about things like where an assessment would be needed, how you would sequence concepts, the interface design if you are working on a digital learning app and so on. It’s an interesting field and it lies at the intersection of multiple disciplines.

Mashal: One of the ways I help family and friends envision the work I do as an Instructional Designer is by starting with a classroom, where everything is simply done by the instructor. They come and they deliver the lecture.

Nobody cares about the experience as such. When you go online, there’s a lot more responsibility because you have to adapt everything to an online setting, and you have to craft new ways to make it engaging. You must use all those things you’ve learnt about psychology, design, education and compile it into a course. I think pedagogy is something people are paying a lot more attention to now – the process of how learning happens instead of what is learned or what is taught. I think instructional design is something that lies at the core of online learning.

A lot of educational institutes have begun work on developing instructional design teams to enrich the learning experiences of their students. Why do you think there is a growing need for good instructional design within education systems? 

Maria: One of the things I’ve observed is that there’s a lot more focus on inclusive education – people know now that the one size fits all approach doesn’t work. Every individual has their own needs, prior experience, knowledge and so on and I think an ID’s role has increased as a result because the subject matter expert, while they might know the content, might not know the best way to present it to the learners per se.

There is also a greater focus on continuous improvement so faculty members are often interested in knowing how they can make their courses better. They include student partners or even IDs to bring that perspective,  recognize feedback and identify what can be changed. So we have a more diverse student body in our classrooms.

There’s also a plethora of learning mediums available for these learners, so they aren’t limited to in-person instruction – people can now use phone apps and during COVID, students took their entire master’s and bachelor’s degrees online. Could that also have played a role in why instructional design has gained prominence?

Mashal: Yeah, definitely. I think information overload is something that’s very prevalent in this generation because earlier, there was only one way through which you could gain knowledge and that was the classroom and your teachers. Now you have Google and you do not necessarily have to be present in the classroom to obtain knowledge. With that, there’s an added pressure of being able to achieve learning outcomes more effectively. That was not present, say, 20 years ago and it definitely has a lot to do with the number of sources we have through which knowledge can be obtained.

I say if done correctly because the solution is scalable only if the needs of the learners are properly identified and understood and then a logical methodology is applied to help address those needs. The problem with a lot of tech is that there is no logic applied – there’s a term for this –

Sameen: Technology for the sake of it –

Sameen: That is exactly where instructional designers come in – to ensure that these tools are used meaningfully. Accessibility of quality education was the issue and to tackle it, we often ended up using technology for the sake of it – there were schools where iPads were given to schoolchildren and before you knew it, they were using them to play games instead of learning anything new. That is where the field of Instructional Design emerged because we had just started to think about these things more meaningfully as well as about the science behind learning. So we recommend tools and utilize them in a way that would help anyone learn better. So that they are not simply interacting with technology but using it in a meaningful way that helps them achieve their goals.

Do instructional designers need to be tech-savvy?

You all come from different educational backgrounds yourselves from Law to Liberal Arts to BioInformatics –

Sameen: Biotechnology-

-right! And you all have different areas of expertise within Instructional Design from Adult Education to Instructional Technology. What encouraged you to pursue it?

Sameen: For me, I experienced the pitfalls of poor instructional design firsthand when I began work for this NGO which was forcefully integrating technology in schools where children were coming from a different background and did not have familiarity with such devices. Even as a Biotechnology student, I had been interested in the science behind learning, but it was during my Masters in Instructional Design that I became truly convinced that it was what I wanted to pursue. The program was great and really helped me understand the theory behind learning and how empowering and simple it could be for learners if the rights tools were applied in really clever ways.

Maria: For me, it started when I took my first Coursera course during COVID, it was my first digital learning experience, and I ended up fascinated with self-directed learning and its possibilities because it’s not possible to
create or to construct thousand more schools in Pakistan nor is there any school which completely fulfills the needs of its students. During my MPhil program, I took a course on cognition and computers, which was interesting because it talked about the learning process, how knowledge is absorbed and that’s what convinced me that I wanted to do something in this field.

I eventually worked as a curriculum developer where I used technology to help my students, who were very young kids, achieve their learning goals but it was at LUMSx where I truly stumbled upon this field, and it continues
to pique my interest.

The instructors you’ve worked with for LUMSx have had a lot of good things to say about the instructional design team – they mentioned that the process really helped them see learning in a new way and they would like to explore this modality a lot more in their future courses. So good job, team! What are some of the strategies that you use when you’re preparing digital courses for LUMSx? What are some of the roles that you must play as instructional designers?

Maria: From what I’ve experienced so far, I feel you have to play a very active role as a researcher throughout the course design cycle. You need to be aware of design trends, the evolving needs of your learners and contextualize them as well. It also helps when instructional designers have different backgrounds so that they have a more holistic understanding of the learning environment and the context of their learners.

Mashal: For me, it’s the hat of a psychologist – I think how is this going to get into the head of my students in a way that stays? This also stems from my experience as a teacher for a few years

Faryal: For me, I just literally envision an ID just literally holding the ship together – you remove the ID from the course, it falls apart because the ID is the person who knows the learners needs and are communicating them to the rest of the team whether it’s the web developers or the video production crew or the instructors or the scriptwriters. She is the course lead and who has the responsibility of getting the course to its finish line and in a form that ensures the best quality to the learner. You are always wearing multiple hats and within this one role, I have been able to develop many critical skills including user-testing, conducting focus groups, managing timelines, reviewing and often writing communications for the course. You need to have an idea of production, storyboarding. You’re guiding the creative team from the perspective of the learner as well. It can be challenging but also quite rewarding.

Sameen: Another hat would be the learner’s hat, right?
I am an instructional designer, but I’m also a learner who’s learning this course. If a concept is coming in from an SME, first I’m trying to digest it and understand it as a learner learning and see if it makes sense to me and what would help me learn better. For me, that’s both a hat I wear but also it works well as a strategy I use to inform the process.

Would it be correct to say that the IDs at LUMSx are learners first, and the other roles come after?

All: For sure.

Faryal: And in the process as well as with the content.

Give us an example of a course, program or a digital tool that you like, which you felt was innovative in its approach?

Maria: Well, it hasn’t been introduced in Pakistan yet – and I hope it comes soon – but I find it really cool the way educators are integrating augmented reality/virtual reality within their courses. So, for instance, if you are a medical student, you get to see a human body lying before you and study the organs through dissection with the aid of AR/VR.

Even if you’re in school and learning about the Solar System, imagine being able to see the Sun and the planets in your classroom as you study about them which is so vastly different from our time when we were dependent on
text and diagrams to learn about different concepts.

Mashal: For me, it’s the diversity in assessments because in our time we were mainly tested on our recall of content knowledge. Now, there is an understanding that intelligence is varied, and with that acceptance comes this need to assess different kinds of skills and abilities.

Faryal: There’s also more emphasis on elements of the assessment besides the grading – you can use assessments to help the learner develop their thinking by building a skill or a concept explained in the course videos and there are several creative ways to do this. For example, for one of the LUMSx courses, we’ve developed a learning journal which learners can use to reflect on their process of learning which the learner can edit and develop as they go along the course.