Instructional design has become a popular and valuable role in the worlds of business, education and government across the globe.
So, what is instructional design? It’s the process of creating and delivering learning products that solve performance issues with effective and engaging learning experiences.
Like the technical crew of a theater production, instructional designers work behind the scenes, rarely teaching the learning products they help create.
Through collaboration with subject matter experts, instructional designers develop and design learning experiences by writing instructional content and creating storyboards, then developing them into interactive eLearning experiences.
Instructional designers sometimes also develop job aids, facilitator guides, slide decks and other learning deliverables, making them even more vital to the success of their organizations.
How to Become an Instructional Designer
Boise State University’s online Master of Science in Organizational Performance and Workplace Learning (OPWL) can help you develop a strong understanding of what is instructional design. Each course also provides portfolio-worthy assignments to help you develop your portfolio website.
Three courses in the program curriculum, in particular, will lay the groundwork for you to pursue a career in the field.
- OPWL 537 Instructional Design (required)
By working with a real client, you will complete a performance-oriented design project throughout the extent of the course. You will also learn with a systematic and systemic instructional design process and employ methods and strategies involved in designing effective instructional interventions for the workplace.
- OPWL 523 E-Learning Authoring and Development (elective)
You will learn to use e-learning authoring tools and develop performance-based e-learning through hands-on practice. You will also produce a video, a web-based instructional module, a scenario-based e-learning object and a final project with supporting design documentation.
- OPWL 525 E-Learning Content Design and Learning Management Systems (elective)
You will learn foundational principles for implementing e-learning solutions and learning management/content management systems, evaluate e-learning demo programs, study the use of reusable learning objects, sharable content objects, metadata and e-learning standards in the current practice. You will also develop sample multimedia learning objects and implement them on a learning management system.
Why Become an Instructional Designer?
In addition to a steady increase in demand and versatile career field options, instructional designers regularly report high job satisfaction.
Instructional designers’ salaries are solid, with an average of $86,700 per year in the United States. The annual average job growth rate for instructional designers is around 10%.
Additionally, instructional designer jobs often rank high on top jobs lists because of overall job satisfaction and good work-life balance, whether in the corporate, education or government realm.
Corporate instructional designers use e-learning tools to build interactive e-learning courses with quick turnaround times. These courses facilitate large corporations with their version of a university.
Higher education instructional designers spend a great deal of their time in meetings with faculty members converting in-person courses to an online format and maintaining existing courses. They also help maintain learning management systems, such as Blackboard or Canvas.
Government instructional designers perform similar work to their corporate counterparts, but that work largely depends on the government organization.
No matter which instructional design route you take, Boise State University’s online OPWL program can help you prepare for a fulfilling career.
Steven Zeller’s Journey to Instructional Design
Video has closed captions and a text transcript is provided at the end of this page.
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Video Transcript
Steven Zeller: I think the OPWL program is doing a great job of reflecting what’s going on in the business world right now. Technology is a part of almost all collaboration. I actually work full-time as a remote instructional designer. So, most everything I do is going to be online.
So, the OPWL program has really helped fill in some of the gaps that I was missing from my own professional experience as an instructional designer. I hadn’t done a lot of project management. I hadn’t done a lot of change management, some of those fields. And so they’ve really helped to kind of expand my skillset so that I’m not just viewed as just an instructional designer, but people come to me in my workplace for all sorts of advice and guidance now on some of these other aspects of the business, so that I can be really a mentor and a guide for them in ways that I would have never been able to do prior to being in the OPWL program.
The Boise State faculty, and particularly in the OPWL program, has really been fabulous. I couldn’t really ask for better professors. They’ve been incredibly supportive. Honestly, being in the OPWL program as a student has really felt almost like being a part of a family. The small, close-knit feel of the program has really been outstanding. It builds community.
In many of the classes that I took, I had work groups that I was in where I would meet weekly or more than weekly with those different students. And, you know, you start to you’re all busy professionals. You all going through life changes, you know, having kids or getting new jobs, all those kinds of different experiences. And you’re sharing those together. And I think one of the, the best things that I learned is how well this program really creates empathy. And I think that really helps to build camaraderie. And the program is doing an excellent job with that.
The flexibility of the OPWL program has been really significant in my development at this stage in my career. I have a wife and three grown kids, and we have a busy life. And I was just speaking with my wife the other day. We were on a walk, and I told her, you know, I’ve got one semester left, just five credits left. And she was like, “I can’t believe you’re already through with this degree program. It’s gone by so quickly.”
It’s really an awesome thing to see all of us in all these diverse settings come together to create successful products and to be able to leverage that technology in such a way that we are really innovating and we are really changing the way that business is done. And I think it’s exciting to be a part of that.