Instructional Design Now Infographic

Instructional Design Now Infographic

Instructional Design Now Infographic, a collaboration of the Association for Talent Development (ATD) and the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp), explores a learning landscape rich in emerging opportunities, populated by professionals eager to create and unleash content that drives employee development and organizational performance.

A century ago, education systems and instructional design (ID) were shaped by the concepts of scientific investigation and empirical knowledge. Fifty years later, instructional systems, as well as their components and properties, were revealed in the writings of Robert Gagne, James Finn, and others (McNeil 2014). Today, instructional design is at the core of an organizational learning industry that finds itself inundated with new tools, technologies, and approaches.

Instructional design appears to be retaining many traditional touches, despite the constant challenges from evolving technologies, corporate expansions taking employees’ learning needs global, and perennial struggles for funding and support. Live, instructor-led classrooms are still widely used in organizations, and other personal-touch learning methods, such as face-to-face coaching and mentoring, continue to produce effective results.

But ATD and i4cp found that instructional designers don’t rate their profession’s overall efforts as highly as they might. Only about half of surveyed design and learning practitioners characterized their instructional design efforts as effective in helping to meet organizational business objectives. Far fewer believed that their instructional design was highly effective at addressing learning needs.

The diverse influences on instructional design today raise many interesting questions. Does formal education still play a valuable role in preparing designers for the challenges of the workplace? Are most organizations embracing high-tech options, such as mobile learning, social learning, and MOOCs? Which of the newer tools and approaches produce better learning results for companies? And what can instructional designers expect the next few years to bring?

With those questions in mind, ATD and i4cp gathered insights from instructional designers and learning professionals worldwide to assess the current and anticipated future states of ID and its contributions to business success. Find out more in the Instructional Design Now: A New Age of Learning and Beyond report.