Bailin Fang

It sounds like tautology to state that academic institutions are learning organizations.  However, the fact is that some of them are not structured or managed in a way that people are willing or able to create and share knowledge, especially in the field of distance education which is more susceptible to fast changes of technology.  Changes are necessary.

Since World War II, instructional designers have played a vital role in making these changes happen.  Instructional designers should actively participate in the management of knowledge related to distance education. Yet, today instructional designers constantly find themselves jolted out of their domain of designing instruction to manage the institution’s specific domains of knowledge, to coordinate different agendas of technical teams, academic units and oversight committees, and to assist faculty members in improving their online teaching skills.  These changes mean that instructional designers have to become comfortable as performance consultants, as well as instructional designers.

To take instructional design to a new level in a given institution, one has to revisit the emergence of instructional design from the broader context of educational technology, and the many assumptions and practices of instructional design, to search for alternative methods for design, development and evaluation.

Purpose and Focus

The third presentation examines some of the assumptions we hold in instructional design processes, especially in the cascading model of analysis, design, development and evaluation.  The presentation also examines the role that instructional designers are now asked to assume in academic units.  Instead of simply creating courses by working with subject matter experts, they often spend more time creating knowledge and disseminate the knowledge in an effective and efficient way to the faculty members who require their expertise in building their courses.   Instructional designers today do not just design and develop courses; they lead, or become part of, the effort to improve faculty members’ performance, particularly in online teaching.

The presentation will also discuss the connotations of Instructional Performance Consultant: for instance, their new roles and responsibilities, their working relationships, and some of the ways instructional designers can better qualify themselves as instructional performance consultants.