Support your eLearning Developer with the Right Instructional Design Consultant

Overview 

Designing new corporate training is a great way to encourage employees to learn new skills.

Since companies have switched from in-person training to eLearning to promote self-paced learning, they put considerable focus on increasing the efficacy of corporate training.

To make corporate training effective, you can incorporate new methodologies in eLearning modules to help your employees learn and engage in the process and grasp the knowledge effectively. 

Your company can achieve this objective by designing your eLearning modules thoughtfully and systematically. 

It requires you to look beyond developing modules to designing content and structuring resources.

This is where instructional design comes to play.

Instructional design allows strategizing instructions to engage learners in an effective learning process, so they intellectually commit to learning and build personal connections with everything taught.

This immensely improves their learning experience and results in the practical implementation of knowledge. 

So, before you develop your corporate training, tag along as we delve into how the Perfect Instructional Design Theory can give structure to your resources and why you need an instructional design consultant to build your training course design.

Let’s dive in.

How Does Instructional Design Help? 

Instructional design underpins the content creation process. It involves systematic design and development of instructional materials to effectively deliver knowledge to learners.

The process broadly covers identifying learner needs, determining the end goal, and creating ways to assist in the transition.

Instructional design helps deliver learning experiences consistently and reliably.

Effective instructional materials paired with small steps, frequent questions, and immediate feedback result in efficient, appealing, and engaging learning experiences.

The concept of learning design (or instructional design) emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It promotes the idea that “designers and instructors need to choose for themselves the best mixture of behaviorist and constructivist learning experiences for their online courses.”

Key Roles an Instructional Designer Has to Play

Instructional design consultants collaborate with developers and instructors to design training and work out plans to enhance the experience.

Their work involves learning about companies, identifying learner needs, researching and structuring content, and constructing design maps. They also storyboard the courses with supporting instructions and turn them into graphics.

After course completion, they also do quality assurance to test language and consistency and run usability tests.

You can hire a design consultant to design training that involves the following tasks:

Needs Analysis and Assessment

Identifying skills is fundamental to developing fruitful training.

By conducting a needs assessment, design consultants pinpoint areas that need improvement and establish learning objectives to improve them.

Curriculum Analysis and Design

Achieving organizational goals requires learning complex skill sets.

Consultants analyze and identify those skill sets and design cohesive and effective training curriculums that tie in with your company’s goals.

Course Design and Development

When instructional material involves a wide variety of modalities, it is much more effective at engaging learners.

An expert consultant can help you design effective interactive learning employing various modalities.

Content Development

Consultants are subject matter experts. They often possess excellent writing skills.

By working with your teams, they build content from scratch. 

Instructional Designer’s Skill Set

Instructional design consultants are often looked at as jack of all trades- who can take on all kinds of new methods and challenges to adapt to learner needs. 

However, their job is focused on a few key areas where their expertise lies.

Here are some of the top skills the design consultants have:

Deep Understanding of Learning Models

Every individual has a peculiar way of learning.

Some are visual learners, while others are auditory learners. You cannot design a unique experience for each learner. However, by adopting a mix of different models, you can engage all types of learners. 

An expert design consultant knows how to incorporate miscellaneous modalities and create potent experiences.

Learning Technology Experience

With technology, creating, manipulating, and sharing learning materials is much easier. 

For example, there are different tools that make it easy to store and share resources easily.

By finding the right tools and incorporating technology into learning, instructional designers make the process efficient and easier.

Presentation of Technology

A big plus of instructional designers is that they champion the best use of technology.

In addition to creating learning modules, consultants also work on creating videos, live sessions, webinars, etc. 

They can whiteboard ideas for materials and develop presentation slides, handouts, and storyboards, convert ideas to imagery, and present content in an interesting way.

Project Management

For designing eLearning, consultants need to be good at managing projects.

As project managers, they know how to develop the right strategy and appropriate structure and maximize the resources to strengthen the quality of the learning program. 

After the course development, they also listen to feedback and get insights into learner experiences to make improvements.

Difference between a Developer and Design Consultant

In a small company, the role of a developer and design consultant could be played by the same person.

However, large companies prefer to have an expert individual for each role.

Instructional designers work on the learning experience (such as designing curricula, teaching methods, practical exercises, and more.)

Hire eLearning developers are responsible for implementing the design and ensuring it meets the expectations.

Instructional designers design visual styles and expound to developers how each element should work. So, like an architect plans a building, an instructional design consultant puts the foundation of the course.  

A developer gives the design a concrete shape. They use authoring tools to ultimately execute the idea.

Eventually, when there are changes to curriculum or course content, an instructional designer comes ahead, and for all technical aspects, the developer is responsible.

The Bottom Line

Organizations need to look beyond development and focus on designing learner experiences to keep employees hooked on training.

While developers can handle the technicalities of custom eLearning development, to develop ideas for imparting knowledge effectively, developers need the support of instructional designers.

The essential skills we have highlighted above can help you look for the right design LMS consultant. 

Once you find a design consultant, you will need to hire eLearning developers to give shape to your instructional design.

At Folio3, our team of developers is quite passionate about refining learning and making experiences better. This passion has led us to customize every eLearning solution to an organization’s peculiar needs.

If you’re an organization with unique requirements and need a learning solution that fits your mold, we can help you