Reflection on Chapter 15: What Does the Day in the Life of an Instructional Designer Look Like?
Each blog post in this series (#WIWIK) will take a moment to reflect on the questions at the end of each chapter.
Feel free to join the conversation by responding in the comments with your answers to the discussion questions (with plain text or a link to your post).
Here is the reflection question for the fifteenth chapter:
Explain a typical day in your work. How does this translate into the day of an instructional designer?
Having already transitioned into instructional design, I suppose it makes more sense to discuss what my day-to-day as an ID looks like. However, as Dr. Hobson mentions in this chapter, it's difficult to explain what a typical day looks like because our activities can vary greatly depending on what project stage we're in.
In the early stages of my projects, I'm meeting with project sponsors and the assigned SMEs to determine the scope of the project and try to figure out how long a given project will last. We create learning objectives, scour our digital asset management system to see if any existing resources can be used or repurposed for the project, plan out activities that align with the objectives, and begin creating a storyboard for the course.
After that, it's time to start developing any new assets we need for a course. During this stage, I'm using a variety of tools like Premiere Pro, PowerPoint, and Acrobat Pro to create accessible videos, slide decks, and PDFs for the course and working on building out the actual course.
Once the first draft of the course is finished, the review process begins. During this time, I am waiting for feedback from the SME and colleagues on how everything looks, the user experience, accessibility, and the copy. After each of these reviews, I implement the feedback in the course and on the learning assets before exporting the final version of the course to be uploaded to the learning management system.
Given that I'm usually working on several projects at a time, it's not rare for me to be doing a little bit of everything mentioned above in the same week, and sometimes even the same day.
In addition to these project-specific tasks, there are also administrative tasks such as meetings and emails, consults to help other instructional designers with a second set of eyes to look at a problem (as well as asking someone to be that second set of eyes for me), and my own professional development.
References
Hobson, L. (2021). What I Wish I Knew Before Becoming an Instructional Designer. Independently published.
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