How To Scale Instructional Design

While there are many challenges when trying to transform corporate training departments so they can meet the needs of the modern learner, the most fundamental problem is scaling instructional design.

As Josh Bersin stated, “we have entered a new era that is not only a shift in tools, it’s a shift toward employee-centric design.” Without fundamental changes to the instructional design process, it will be impossible for companies to effectively transfer knowledge from subject matter experts and keep pace with business needs.

Quality instructional design is needed to develop effective training content. However, in many organizations, instructional design is a bottleneck. As discussed previously, the question is not whether you need instructional design, it’s how can you scale the instructional design so that it fits into the new world of learning. Scaling instructional design is a priority if you want every employee to contribute to training content development.

Melissa Milloway at Amazon stated, “in 2018, design systems are going to be trending”. Not only do Learning Design Systems allow you to build training solutions faster, some even help transform instructional design from a specialized skill into something that every employee can do. They help companies scale instructional design by standardizing how to make the best decisions when collaborating to develop content.

To reap the benefits of a design system, you need to do a couple things:

●       First, there should be a simple tool to gather requirements from stakeholders and departments who request help.
●       Next, there should be a flexible way to organize relevant information around the business requirements.
●       Third, there needs to be a way for everyone to curate and organize content that can be used for corporate training, i.e. not everything needs to be built from scratch.
●       Surrounding all of this you need modern collaboration tools that guide project stakeholders and subject matter experts through instructional design best practices for consistency and streamlined communication.

Scaling instructional design means you must move from a small team of professionals with specialized skills who produce all of the training content. Everyone in the organization should understand how to design content effectively. To do this, L&D needs new ways to scale instructional design and incorporate it into the content generation workflow.

              Technology is changing how we scale instructional design

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Some organizations have managed to do this by stitching together Design Systems with Word, Excel or Google Docs, project management tools, collaboration tools, and other stand-alone tools. While these methods can provide some level of templating and collaboration, you don’t have time to train everyone to use a bunch of disparate tools for documenting, organizing, and collaborating. You can’t scale instructional design with this approach.

With the new modern technology available, L&D can provide new tools to ensure content is produced faster while maintaining quality. Whether you need to design, performance support material, micro-learning or mandatory compliance training, a Learning Design System such as Synapse should be part of your tools and processes. It’s agile, easy to use, and very effective way to scale instructional design.