Moving to Online Instruction
Instructional Design is not a Powerpoint Presentation
Instructional Design
March 2020
With COVID-19, schools and colleges are having to close doors and look to online alternatives for educating their students. At the same time, employers interested in developing their employees need scalable solutions to help their teams stay current and learn new skills and knowledge. To address this need, many organizations turn to instructional design tools to construct the content for their learning modules.
One of the challenges in using instructional design tools is the predominance of the Powerpoint metaphor for designing learning content. While a presentation provides a visual accompaniment to what would traditionally be considered a lecture, the construction of an entire module using a presentation is a bit like picking out what images to put on a slide without thinking about what the key points are that need to be communicated.
When thinking about learning, the first step is thinking through what are the core competencies we need to develop and what is the best way to curate and organize content to support the learning and practice of those competencies.
Unfortunately, competency development seems to have become a laundry list of skills and concepts rather than a purposeful understanding of what learners should be able to do and, more importantly, what it looks like when they are proficient.
From there, we backtrack to understand the scaffolding and formal learning opportunities we need to construct to help learners get there. That is instructional design – not the layout of the content, not the Powerpoint slide.