Instructional Design

What is instructional design?

Instructional design, also known as instructional systems design, is the practice of designing learning experiences and instructional materials in ways that are most likely to help learners acquire skills. Instructional designers create these resources and activities. They work with subject matter experts and key stakeholders to identify goals for corporate training programs, apply instructional design principles, and leverage instructional technology, such as course authoring tools and learning management systems.

Example: Our instructional designer used e-learning software to create online courses that helped us train our entire Customer Success team on best practices for handling challenging customer scenarios.

What is the instructional design process? 

The instructional design process involves identifying instructional objectives for a course, selecting the proper strategies and activities to help learners achieve those objectives, and building and distributing the course itself. It also involves choosing the proper technologies to create and distribute courses—for example, a learning management system to share courses with the learning audience and track learners’ behavior. 

Often, instructional designers develop their courses based on instructional design models like the ADDIE model and Bloom’s Taxonomy to prioritize the learning experience.