Instructional design as engineering
Recently, I had a faculty member taking a session of the Online Teaching Certification Seminar express some skepticism regarding instructional design and its role in supporting instructors and guiding educational development. Whether online or offline, can instructional designers really claim to know what constitutes successful teaching in a given discipline?
After all, most of the time, instructional designers are not experts in the subject matter of the courses or programs we are supporting. Even if instructional designers base their guidance in up-to-date educational research, the faculty worried, who is to say that research can truly tell us what counts as successful teaching in any given discipline, much less across all disciplines? If you are an instructor yourself, you may have had (or still have) a similar concern. How can instructional designers help me and my students without being expert in the subjects I teach?
As someone coming into instructional design from philosophy (I was in the process of completing my PhD in philosophy when I first discovered, and eventually joined, the field of instructional design), this concern piqued my interest. Questions about the nature, purpose and goals of education are as old as philosophy itself (if not older).
We can even find ancient thinkers like Plato and Aristotle building substantive theories about what education is and what it should aim to do. And that makes sense: broad, abstract and fundamentally evaluative questions — questions like “What constitutes successful teaching (in any given field)?”— are pretty paradigmatic of philosophical inquiry. Do instructional designers (and the educational researchers upon which they rely) have to tackle these massive philosophical questions (or, worse, make broad assumptions about their answers) to do their work?
Fortunately, I think the answer is “no.” I don’t think instructional designers need to (and we certainly don’t pretend to) answer these large philosophical questions. Rather than a strict philosophical or scientific domain defined by a core set of questions (or answers to some core set of questions), I think much of the work we instructional designers do can be understood as more or less analogous to engineering work.
Certainly, this is the case when an instructional designer works alongside an expert instructor. Given tasks and goals set by relevant authorities (an architect, a city planner, etc.), an engineer will work alongside the authority to recommend structures, strategies or techniques, grounded in the best available information and scientific understanding, for completing those tasks or achieving those goals. While the engineer may absolutely have opinions about the validity of those tasks or goals, she typically doesn’t need to evaluate those tasks or goals to do her job as an engineer.
When we, as instructional designers, are supporting instructors, we take a similar approach. We rely on the instructor, as the subject matter authority, to set the core educational goals and tasks: students in this subject matter should know X and be able to do Y. We then rely on the best available information and scientific understanding of human learning processes to recommend strategies or techniques to complete those tasks or achieve those goals.
As instructional designers, we know that we are not typically in a position to question an instructor’s expertise on whether or not knowing X and doing Y are part of a successful education in the relevant discipline or in general. Of course, instructional designers do occasionally rely on some evaluative assumptions (e.g., we assume good teaching is inclusive and accessible teaching), but I suspect this is an inescapable part of any applied discipline (e.g., engineers assume good bridges are safe bridges).
In this way, the relationship between an instructional designer and an instructor is, at its best, a partnership. If you are an instructor, you have the subject matter expertise and practical experience to provide vision and direction for your educational programs and classes. As instructional designers, we have expertise in certain research-backed, educational methods, strategies, practices and tools to help you bring that vision to fruition.
-Javier Caride, Instructional Designer II
