Getting Started in Instructional Design and Digital Learning Design - Part 2
Updated: Feb 23
This is the second part of a series of blog posts aiming to cover some of the aspects of getting started in the field of instructional design and digital learning.
While the previous post talked about choosing your desired area, this one can help identify things to learn and the time and other commitments involved in the process of getting started.
Here are the posts available so far and feel free to browse through the other blog posts on the website if you would like to check out other content. 1. Decide which area you would like to focus on more depending on your interest, background and possibilities
2. Identify the key points you need to learn about and the time, financial investment you need to make – technical skills, theoretical background, tasks to be performed, possible challenges
As mentioned in the previous post, it’s always worth checking a variety of sources when you prepare a career move. This can not only help you save time, but also help make better decisions related to the amount of effort you need to make and the realistic expectations you can have.
2. Identify the key points you need to learn about and the time, financial investment you need to make – technical skills, theoretical background, tasks to be performed, possible challenges
In the previous post, we talked about deciding the main area where we would like to focus on.
For the sake of this post, we will be looking at instructional design and e-learning development related features, but make sure you find information related to your specific choice.
What to do next?
By this time, you’ve most likely had a look at the different theoretical and technical aspects of getting started in the specific area where you would like to focus your energies.
This could mean that you’ve started hearing about or even looking at adult learning theories, the fundamentals of the pedagogy behind learning design and familiarised yourself with some of the more common terminology of the industry. This could also mean that you’ve seen a few tools that are often mentioned such as Storyline, Rise, Canva, Vyond and so on.
One of the first things could be to decide which of the above you feel that you know more about and which area is less familiar. For example, someone with a background in teaching will quite likely have a good understanding of the main pedagogical aspects of learning.
It’s important to note that digital learning and face-to-face classroom teaching have a lot of differences. They often use similar language, e.g. “learning outcomes”, but the actual meaning is based a lot on the context of learning.
The situation with the technical tools is easier from a “what to do” perspective as it’s clearer what you know and what you don’t. The difficulty here will be to choose which ones you will need and to what degree.
For example, there are a number of e-learning authoring tools which could all be learnt if we had the time and money for it. To make the decision, it can be a good idea to briefly check the different tools one by one first – there are a lot of samples and tutorials on YouTube to help you with this. Most of this software also has a 1 month trial period which you can use to play with them a bit and see how close they are to your taste.
Matching preferences to the needs
If you want to make the right decisions about prioritising your learning process, similarly to the previous part, it can be quite helpful to actively look for job adverts and survey results related to what companies and hiring managers are looking for.
This can help you identify the key areas that are required to find a job and you possibly need to improve on. 18/20 jobs in your area and interest are asking candidates to be able to create courses in Adobe Captivate can be a good hint for you to focus your attention on that tool.
The same applies to the other requirements. If storyboarding as a skill or usual task is a returning theme in the ads you’re looking at, it’s worth checking out what the process is and even think about if you’ve done something similar before and what other duties you had could be linked to this process. During your research, you will find that there are a lot of overlapping elements with other industries, such as project management, graphic design, education, IT, andragogy, psychology, website development, marketing and the list could go on.
Try to stay focused
The amount of new things to learn can be overwhelming and scary at any part of anyone’s journey. Therefore, it’s important to work out practices to keep motivated and focused on achieving your goals. Whether it’s doing a lot of research combined with networking or if it’s based on a smaller amount, but more targeted sources, it’s important to find ways to keep things in control.
Set clear goals for you to measure and track progress. This could be something like: by the end of the week, I would like to be ready with the conceptual idea of a portfolio project that I will put on my website. This will be in the format of a Word document or a mini-storyboard which will describe the main parts of the learning experience. Or something like: by the end of the week, I will have familiarised myself with the most important terminology related to instructional design project management.
Time and financial investment and possible challenges
Time
It’s difficult to estimate how much time it would take someone to be able to find their first job in this field because there are a variety of factors that affect this. These usually fall under the following three categories:
Current level of knowledge related to the theories, skills, tools needed
Amount of time available for daily / weekly learning and skill development
Type of job wanted – or if freelancing, type of projects to work on
Once you start going through the steps, the required time commitment will be much clearer. For example, it took me around 2-3 months of self-directed learning to feel that I’m fairly confident in using Articulate Storyline. This was around 4-5 hours a day, sometimes closer to 7-8, sometimes fewer.
Money
This will also depend on your goals, but it’s less difficult to estimate. You can go online and quickly find the cost of books, courses and e-learning authoring tools, Adobe Creative Cloud and Vyond subscriptions.
The difficulty here will be to decide how much you would like to invest in this before having a job in the field and actually seeing any income out of it. It’s a fairly big risk to take which makes the decision difficult, but fortunately as mentioned above, in most of cases there are free trials available and there are plenty of free tools you can choose from which are similar to the paid ones. These can all help you to gauge your preferences and get started with some learning while you work out what exactly you would like to do and in what format.
How it worked for me
I’ve just realised that I’d already talked about this a bit in my previous post. When I first learnt about the area, I decided to get started with Storyline while I was continuously learning about the other aspects of instructional design mainly through watching and listening to videos on YouTube and reading articles.
At the beginning, due to my life situation back then and the fact that I was predominantly interested in working remotely, my goal was to find freelance opportunities. This meant that I soon had to make a decision about spending money on the following:
Articulate 360
Adobe Creative suite
Freepik for stock images and vector graphics
Website editor (Wix) yearly fee
Other subscriptions: cloud storage, invoicing account etc.
Based on my ideas about getting started and my strong belief that this could work out for me, I didn’t consider these costs particularly high. Looking back now and having someone else’s situation in mind, I can totally understand that these costs can be off-putting or simply unaffordable.
Possible solutions
As I mentioned earlier, there are fortunately some free solutions available which can help you save money. These include both e-learning authoring related skills that you can pick up (free trials and similarities with other software) and theoretical knowledge - there are many videos and podcasts with summaries of key instructional design concepts using real-life examples.
One of the best things about digital learning is that the amount of information available online is incredible. There are extremely helpful communities out there who can help with almost any question you might have during your process. I often asked and still ask others about their views on tackling specific issues and the people I've met both in-real life and online have all been very supportive and equally interested in these topics.
This is the end of the second part of the series of blog posts. The next part is: 3. Start developing your skills based on #2 while possibly trying to establish your online presence by creating a portfolio or doing some small projects on the side or in your current job
Let me know in the comments where you are with your journey and what is your biggest challenge at the moment. If you are interested in any other topics in the world of instructional design, e-learning and digital learning, check out my other blog posts.
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