5 Steps to the Instructional Design Process (+Challenges)
- April 16, 2022
Corporate training teams, as well as those employees going through the training program, both have limited time on their hands. Yet at the same time, they’re both under pressure due to rapid digital transformation and the need for reskilling.
Organizations all have tailored needs when it comes to employee training and development. They also have processes for creating and designing their training content. However, 33% of employees find their corporate learning and development (L&D) programs uninspiring and add that this is one of the biggest challenges impacting their training.
No matter the contextual needs, there is still a relatively standardized approach to the instructional design process that guides L&D teams through the challenges of creating training courses and resources.
5 Steps of the Instructional Design Process
Creating impactful, accurate, and contextual learning content involves several steps that include analyzing learners’ needs, consulting with internal stakeholders, using eLearning content authoring tools to develop the training content, and training content distribution.
For ease, you can consider instructional design to include five steps:
- Research
- Creation
- Delivery
- Feedback and impact
- Updates
Understanding these steps, along with the various tactics and tasks involved at each stage, will help you create engaging, impactful learning and development content. Let’s further break down each step in the instructional design process:
1. Research
The research stage of the instructional design process sets the foundation for your entire training course and material. This helps you understand not only your business and training objectives, but also your various types of learners, technology you’re using, expectations, and more.
In the research stage, you’ll need to spend time understanding:
- How to identify business and learning objectives.
- How to align those business and learning objectives.
- Your various learner profiles to create personalized learning paths based on backgrounds, learning preferences, and role.
- What type of employee training program is best for your course.
- What method of training is best for your learning material.
- What content is best suited for each elearning course.
- What technology is best suited to host and manage each learning objective.
2. Creation
In this section, you’ll begin to develop the content itself. This includes segregating all your training content into small, bite-sized groups that allow you to deliver microlearning lessons. Many of these steps can be created using a SCORM authoring tool or corporate LMS.
In the creation phase, you’ll need to:
- Determine the instructional approach, such as video-based learning or face-to-face learning.
- Build a storyboard
- Get approval for this prototype
- Develop the training material itself
- Create a post-training assessment, quiz, or another way to quantify your learning results.
3. Delivery
In the delivery phase of the instructional design process, you’ll need to host your new training materials on your LMS, Google Drive, company intranet, or other mediums. An LMS is the most effective way to host and distribute this material, as it has features that allow L&D teams to send alerts to learners and employees, as well as provides ways to track and measure progress.
With a tool like Whatfix, L&D teams are empowered to provide real-time learning to employees, in the flow of work.
4. Feedback and impact
After you have launched your instructional course, it’s time to measure the impact it has had. You’ll want to gauge its effectiveness from both a quantitative and qualitative approach. This includes:
- Gathering feedback from your end-users on the trainings level of engagement and usefulness through post-training feedback surveys.
- Evaluating the impact and results of the training from an organizational perspective.
With a tool like Whatfix, L&D teams can gather training feedback at the moment of completion, right inside your digital applications.
5. Updates
Finally, instructional designers can take the feedback and evaluations from the previous step to make data-driven decisions for improvements on future corporate training programs. This includes:
- Documenting what worked, what didn’t work, and how to incorporate feedback into your learning courses.
- Updating current training materials.
- Changing processes for content delivery and hosting.
Challenges of the Instructional Design Process
The challenges of the instructional design process come from the difficulties associated with creating engaging content that drives learning results. Here are a few of the most common challenges in the instructional design creation process:
1. Time to create interactive training materials
Research from a consultant company for learning initiatives, Chapman Alliance, was conducted in 2010 and divided eLearning into 4 levels:
- Instructor-led training: Primarily uses linear, text-based learning materials with little or no interactive elements.
- eLearning level 1: A mix of text-based learning and interactive learning materials.
- eLearning level 2: A moderate amount of interactive training material, mixed with a little text-based training.
- eLearning level 3: The highest amount of interactive learning materials.
The higher levels are more effective they are, but require exponentially more time and resources to create this level of interactive training materials.
From this graphic, you can see that the time it takes to create an hour of instructional content can range from 78 hours for traditional, text-based learning content, to 469 hours for content with a high-level of interactivity.
This presents multiple challenges for instructional designers and L&D teams, as the more engaging and interactive the learning content is, the most impact and ROI those end-users take from it. However, this means there is less time to focus on the other components outside the content creation process, meaning less energy is spent on researching, analyzing feedback, and distributing that training content.
2. Steep learning curves for content authoring tools
For comprehensiveness, instructional design software and authoring tools come with complex functions and features. Ultimately, time-strapped instructional designers and training content creators might use only a small set of these functions (with the company paying a subscription for the entire suite of features.)
Most content creation tools are complex and require instructional designers to spend hours in training before they can properly utilize the full breathe of the platform.
3. Creating content in multiple formats
Videos have long since changed how people perceive content. Today, videos are one of the most popular learning solutions with the highest level of engagement.
It’s a widely known fact that our brains are wired to process visual information much faster than textual information meaning that video lessons are highly effective when it comes to training. Videos are engaging, easily accessible, shareable, and a flexible medium for learning, not to mention offering great scope for creativity.
However, videos are difficult to create. In addition to recording and editing the content, content in instructional videos require callouts and voice-overs to highlight information, include interactive elements such as quizzes, and of course, a meticulously drafted script and storyboard. All of this adds to the challenge of creating instructional videos and again circles back to the time-consuming aspect of creating quality instructional content.
Other than videos, training content is often found in the form of PDFs, slideshows, etc. depending on the type of learning format preferred by an individual and what they are trying to learn. If you ask a content creator, each format requires detailed thought into the flow and content to fit the format and exploit it best. The repeatability of efforts within formats is typically low.
In addition to creating multiple formats, instructional designers need to continuously measure the effectiveness of the different learning formats with different learner groups and measure them against learning goals.
With a digital adoption platform like Whatfix, instructional designers and L&D professionals are enabled to create in-app learning content with no-code tools.
Organizations and end-users can export this learning content to their preferred medium automatically, with a click of a button, into PDFs, Google Docs, videos, slide decks, and more.
4. Reviewing and updating content
With products undergoing regular updates and releases, updating the respective training and instructional content have become a relatively frequent activity in the instructional design process.
While development teams use ‘agile’ methodologies to churn out frequent innovation to deliver on the ‘continuous innovation’ promise of SaaS vendors, instructional designers follow the outdated and manual process of editing, generating these files, making changes, and then making sure that they are updated throughout the various formats.
For instance, with a tool like Adobe Captivate, making a change requires generating the original file, making the required changes, and uploading it again. And this has to be done every time you need to update the existing content. This adds to the difficulty and time consumed in creating instructional content.
5. Creating contextual content for user-specific roles
When it comes to employee training, instructional content varies in who needs to know what depending on their roles. For instance, the activities and workflows of a sales representative using an application like Salesforce are quite different from that of a sales director. This means that the interface and steps taken to reach individual outcomes differ.
Instructional designers need to account for these variations during the content creation stage in the instructional design process. This leads to a multiplication in the effort required to create content to account for different roles, different learning formats, and in some cases, even in other languages.
Ultimately, instructional designers spend a significant amount of time with authoring tools, and that makes it essential and urgent to find tools that are intuitive, easy to use, and simple to create courses with. Instructional designers must be able to get on board these tools with minimal difficulty and use them to their advantage.
With a tool like Whatfix, L&D teams are able to create contextual user paths based upon their role and learning preferences with in-depth user behavioral analytics.
Simplify Your Instructional Design Process with Whatfix
Whatfix, a Digital Adoption platform for web applications allows instructional designers to create and deliver interactive guides that allow enterprises to improve employee onboarding and training across several enterprise application software.
It provides real-time, in-app guidance to users making training a part of an employee’s workflow as opposed to it being a disjointed experience.
Whatfix is highly intuitive and requires almost no technical or programming knowledge to start. Instructional designers can quickly acquaint themselves with the application in no time and get right to creating content.
Here are four ways in which Whatfix helps empower L&D teams to create interactive, effective training content while streamlining the entire instructional design process.
1. Creating multiformat content automatically
People learn differently. The effectiveness of a learning format depends on an individual and what they are trying to learn. This means that not only do instructional designers need to be knowledgeable about creating different types of training content, but also continuously measure the effectiveness of these various formats with different learner groups and learning goals.
Whatfix eases the process of creating multiformat content since the walkthroughs created in Whatfix are instantly converted into PDF documents, videos, slideshows, and articles.
These files can be easily downloaded to be used offline by your end-users. They can even be integrated into knowledge bases such as Zendesk, Freshdesk, or as simple training manuals, emails, etc. – saving training and development teams a significant amount of time.
2. Segmenting content by user roles
Whatfix empowers instructional designers to create and assign training content automatically, based on user roles. In combination with assigning tags, display conditions, and visibility rules.
Whatfix automatically segments training content for a user, saving administration effort for content creators in information delivery.
3. Updating content on Whatfix
Whatfix also makes it easier to update and review training content. Every time a change needs to be made to an in-app widget or course, the change is automatically updated everywhere the training content is displayed and used.
This avoids the need for instructional designers to meticulously generate each file, make required changes, and upload it to the system. With Whatfix, you can update and review content with minimal effort in just a few clicks. There are even auto-testing features that allow your platform to preform automatic experiments on new flows and personalization, as well as content versioning to save previous content states.
4. Measuring training effectiveness and gathering feedback
Ultimately, it all comes down to how effective the training content turned out to be and whether employees gained something from the time they spent on it. Whatfix uses in-built analytics to give a clear view into how your end users interact with training content. It allows you to gather information on metrics like user engagement, most popular content, usage trends of widgets, and so on. You can track user feedback, and completion rates, and even find out the kinds of queries users might have.
Whatfix makes training measurable with analytics and integrated with the overall learning plans in LMS using the SCORM integration
It also provides the tools to gather real-time feedback, at the moment of training, without leaving the application. This allows you to gather both feedback on your in-app training content, as well as allow end-users to suggest new training content that is missing from your current resources.
Whether its implementing new enterprise application software, onboarding a new employee or reskilling an existing workforce, there is always a need for training. But the fast-paced nature of industries means that employees today have less time to spend on training. This is why training needs to be made quick and efficient.
An important part of effective training lies in creating and delivering engaging content. Whatfix allows learning and development teams to achieve this by making the creation and execution of instructional design a seamless process.
Learn more about Whatfix for L&D teams now and see how Fortune 100 companies are driving training ROI with in-app guidance and on-demand support.
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