As registration begins for Spring Quarter 2023, the WRD blog is excited to showcase several brand-new course offerings, beginning with Sarah Brown’s graduate course WRD 550: Online Instructional Design and Pedagogy.
As an MAWRD alumna, Brown has worked in instructional technology and faculty development at DePaul’s Center for Teaching and Learning for over a decade, and she has taught several courses in the WRD department. In 2021, Brown received the Excellence in First-Year Writing Teaching Award from WRD. Here, she shares more about her plans for the course and what students can look forward to learning.
As we get started, you mentioned that you’ve had several different roles in teaching and instructional design. What does the instructional design landscape look like for you now?
Like anything it is an evolving field, and for one thing I think the technical skill barrier-to-entry has gone down. Instructional design has evolved from people with teaching expertise who also have some technology skills, to instructional design now being almost a matter of curation. Sometimes, the instructional designer role can also be like a counseling role, or a role for bouncing ideas around with someone else. For example, when I talk to faculty, some may have a fuzzy idea of what they need to do. Then, they rely on my expertise to help them scale their ideas and get tools that fit their needs.
I don’t have to know how to hard code an entire website to do instructional design effectively. The role of an instructional designer is just like anyone in the current educational landscape in that everybody can’t know everything, so we need a cross-functional team of people working together to make students’ class experiences the best they can be.
What are some things you learned in the WRD program that you apply to your instructional design work?
At the time that I began working in the Center for Teaching and Learning, it had a nice alignment with the work I was doing in WRD. I was taking Tony Ceraso’s Document Design course, and at the same time, I was creating documentation for different sites and tools to help professors with effective teaching. I was creating this documentation, and I was using my technical writing skills and rhetorical awareness to do so. So much of instructional design is centered on the written word, communication, and multimodal communication.
The other aspect that is key to instructional design is knowing your audience and understanding the rhetorical situation. There are so many overlaps where the disciplinary tenants of Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse align with good teaching. They also align with a brain that is thinking about how students might take information in, like thinking about how information can be carefully arranged to keep students engaged, how to build informational hierarchies, the design of the learning space itself, and ways to highlight key terms for a course. These are all places where you have to apply rhetorical strategies that you would use in many other types of genres. In instructional design, we’re just applying those strategies to tools like D2L, for example.
What skills can students expect to practice in this course?
I’ve found instructional design skills applicable in so many other professional capacities that I have been in. They’ve made me a better emailer, a better meeting organizer, and a better listener. Taking the foundation of understanding and responding to rhetorical situations has helped me operationalize my instructional design in so many great ways. In addition to learning best practices and theoretical foundations, I’m hoping to focus this class on two listening skills that I’ve often had to practice myself in the decade I’ve been in this field.
One aspect of this listening is working with someone to help solve their problems, but understanding that I cannot solve them too quickly. Sometimes, when I’m meeting with faculty, I have to resist the impulse of thinking, “I can fix that for you!” In this course, I’m hoping to design some scenarios that invite practice around that listening skill–because yes, there’s the technical work of this job, but there’s also the important interpersonal work. As an instructional designer, you don’t want to be coming to somebody who is an expert in their field and has dedicated years of their life to understanding and teaching about a topic and think you know immediately how to solve their problems. It’s collaborative, and often it takes listening to them like unraveling the problems they’re having and letting that sit before you bring what you can bring to that conversation. This type of listening is one skill I want to focus on in the class and allow students to practice.
The other listening skill we’re going to work on is one is figuring out how to translate what you’re hearing into something actionable. This is where I want to start the course grounded in a writing class situation–that way, we can focus on a discipline students may be more familiar with as we apply instructional design methods. Then, we’ve got to get unfamiliar! We’re going to look at some other disciplines and figure out how to listen for and understand what faculty are saying in different scenarios. I actually think sometimes that the most powerful thing I get to do is be an interdisciplinary bridge. I get to talk to all kinds of faculty when they often don’t get to leave their disciplinary silos themselves, and some of the best moments I’ve had with faculty are where I say, “Actually, I think what this theater person does might help you, chemistry professor. Maybe you all should talk because you’re dealing with the same constraints in different or unexpected ways.” In this course, students will learn how to start making these connections to widen their understanding of what’s possible in instructional design and pedagogy.
Besides those two great skills, what are some things you hope students can take away from this course?
One thing students will take away is just knowing that even though there are whole degrees and certificates you can now get in instructional design, it’s still great to be able to point to a graduate level class you’ve taken and say that you understand principles of instructional design and you have some practice in it. Whether you’re applying to be part of the learning design team at Slack, a university’s Center for Teaching and Learning, or a K-12 tech specialist position, I’m hoping that this class gives you some very practical skills, identification, and language around this field.
Even though the tech world is always changing, I think these skills are in demand as companies are seeing the need for this kind of work in their content and trainings. There’s always going to be a need for a company to say, “Okay, we have information that all of our employees need to know, and we need people who can help us make that translate,” whether that’s in an HR office or in a DEI setting. I think this is a skill set that may have always been needed but is just now developed into an actual band of job titles. After taking this class, you won’t have to figure out how to make the case that you have this skill set. You’ll have work in this class to directly point to if you’re interested in doing instructional design related work across any field.