The second session of the day was perhaps the most thought-provoking session. I was in awe at the end, and felt enlightened and excited to incorporate what I learned in our own design shop. We began the workshop filling out a worksheet, “30 Circles of Instructional Design.” We had 3 minutes and were to work collaboratively to think of pictures that represent ID. Sounds easy, right? The easy part was coming up with ideas; the hard part was coming up with images/symbols/sketches to represent them. The speaker provided this activity as a good example to begin a training session to get everyone engaged and collaborating.
She then continued to describe design thinkers. They demonstrate empathy, practice integrative thinking, are optimistic, and must collaborate. The learning design process involves 5 steps: 1.) Empathize; 2.) Define; 3.) Ideate; 4.) Prototype; 5.) Test.
In the first step, Empathize, we must develop a deep understanding of our learning audience. To do this, we might develop personas that represent our audience. The speaker provided a diagram that we can use to analyze our learners, and we performed a collaborative activity in which we filled out this diagram according to the persona of “Instructional Designer.” (You’d think this would be easy, but again, it was difficult!) This diagram asks us to identify how an individual thinks and feels, what they hear, what they say and do, what they see, and the pains and gains involved.
The next step, Define, requires us to explicitly define the problem the course is striving to address. Again, the speaker provided us with a tool to use to map the problem out, identifying the knowledge, attitudes, skills, and habits (KASH) involved.
The third step in the process is to Ideate, or brainstorm training solutions considering the learner and the problem. The fourth step is to Prototype, or create a working model/product that can be used to evaluate the quality of the design idea. Prototypes should be perfectly imperfect and done quickly, likely wrong, and surrounded by communication.
The fifth and final step in the design learning process is Evaluate. In this step, we answer the questions of what worked and didn’t work. We generate ideas and steps to improve (or simply throw away).