Monday, May 7, 2012

Role of an Instructional Designer

The primary role of an Instructional Designer is to develop training materials that are instructionally sound to the learners. In other words, when developing a training material, the Instructional Designer not only has to focus on writing the content but also has to think and visualize on how to make the content interesting to the learners. Therefore, apart from good writing skills, it is essential that an Instructional Designer should be creative, innovative, and a good visualizer, have a knack for attention to details and out of the box solutions, and always possess good comprehension skills.


Most of the times, the role of an Instructional Designer seems to be limited to designing and making the training ready for development for a project. However, due to the diverse characteristics and qualities of the Instructional Designers, their roles can span across the different stages of the training development life cycle.
  • Analysis: In this stage, the role of the Instructional Designer is to identify the training requirements, analyze the audience, analyze the content, and deduce whether the available content is suitable enough for developing the training for the target audience.
  • Design: In this stage, the Instructional Designer summarizes his/her finding in the Analysis stage to create the Content Outline of the training as well as the Design Document depicting the high-level and low-level designs of the training as well as the strategies, models, and theories to be followed while developing the training.
  • Development: The role of the Instructional Designer in the development phase is to actually create the storyboards as per the Content Outline and the specifications mentioned in the Design Document.
  • Implementation: In this stage, the role of the Instructional designer is to review the training developed based on his/her storyboards and ensure that whatever s/he documented and visualized are reflected accurately in the final output.
  • Evaluation: In the evaluation stage, the Instructional Designer has to measure whether the training output is able to meet the requirements s/he identified at the very beginning of training development.

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