New Skills for Instructional Designers — kineo
As Ellen sees it, the practice of eLearning instructional design sits at the intersection of instructional design and IT. ID + IT = eLearning. Take a moment and imagine four pie wedges:
- Instruction (learning and pedagogy)
- Design (creative production – writing, graphics, video)
- Business Intelligence (being able to speak the language of business, analysis and metrics)
- Technology (architecture and implementation – authoring tools, programming, LMSs)
Many of us ID practitioners entered the field from one angle of that pie. What about you? Did you come in to the field with an aptitude or passion for facilitation and training or writing or learning design?
Now take those four wedges and combine them into one individual and you have a superhero. Or a great eLearning instructional designer who can really make a difference in the business.
What you have is a true eLearning professional.
From DSC:
I’m glad they mentioned that if someone were to have all these skills and abilities, that you would have a superhero here; because when you consider all that those four pieces of the pie contain (which you only know if you’ve actually worked in those areas — which I have), it’s a huge and ever-changing amount of information to know.
Again, this is why I go back to the need to specialize.
I struggle in this area of being a generalist vs. being a specialist. In my current work, I need to play the role of a generalist (which probably helps explain in part why I attempt to scratch the surface on such a broad and sweeping set of topics in this blog).