Transforming an Instructional Design Team
Here are three steps to help you adopt new practices for your team:
- The first step is the easiest - skill development. Improving task-analysis skills is one of the first ways to close many of the gaps listed above.
- Writing performance objectives that describe more measureable outcomes is another measure.
- Finally, learning to select appropriate testing instruments and writing better tests will also improve results.
The most important and difficult part of creating change lies in an instructional design team's leadership. The leader must be able to articulate a vision that will ultimately yield better business results for the organization as a whole. The leader will have to inspire champions in the client base and within the team. And most important, the leader will have to exemplify the change he or she wishes to make in the team.
A critical aspect of transformation will be to align team members' expectations and contributions. A common goal of many transformations is to develop some consistency of best practices for designing instruction. It might be faster and easier to give the team a proven methodology and ask them to use it, but this rarely works. It is more time consuming, but far better, to let the team develop the best practices they will use and hold themselves accountable for using and improving them.
Dick Handshaw suggests that it's best not to talk too much with clients about the work you have done with a team. Some clients may be interested, but most of them care more about their own results than the work your team and you have done - so give them results. If you are using a good instructional design methodology, you will be able to accurately measure learner success with skills that really apply to the job, especially if you have done a good task analysis and written performance objectives to match.
Involve your clients in formative evaluation so they can see first hand how learners are responding to the learning design. The more you can get your client involved in your process, the better ally they will become.
