S2E14: Dr. Robin Sargent ~ Just take action and dare to share on Demystifying Instructional Design

Feature image by Kid Circus on Unsplash

Robin Sargent PhD, is an entrepreneur, instructional designer, and former professor, recognized as a leader in the instructional design community. She is the owner and founder of IDOL courses, IDOL Talent, and VITAL courses. IDOL courses is the trade school that serves clients through IDOL Talent while developing the next generation of creative learning designers. Business Insider heralds the IDOL courses Academy^SM as “one of the best choices out there if you’re serious about starting a career in corporate instructional design, but don’t want to pay for a master’s degree.”

Earning her PhD in Education with a specialization in instructional design and online learning, she has coached, mentored, and taught thousands of current and aspiring learning designers. Her dissertation was on the gamification of corporate training, and her vision is to create an IDOL world for all learners.

Dr. Robin is also a former Director of Learning & Development for a billion-dollar staffing firm with over 17 years of corporate instructional design experience. She serves as a volunteer board member for DESIGNxHUMANITY, a design collective and apprenticeship program pairing experienced creatives with fresh faces to collaborate on real-world projects advocating for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. In addition, she started the IDOL World project to match non-profit organizations with access to instructional designers and free eLearning modules on relevant topics. Robin lives in Atlanta with her husband, Kris, and their three boys.

In This Episode

Episode Transcript

REBECCA

Welcome to Demystifying Instructional Design, a podcast where I interview various instructional designers to figure out what instructional designers do. I’m Rebecca Hogue, your podcast host. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider subscribing or leaving a comment on the show notes blog post and consider helping to support the podcast with a donation to my Patreon account. Welcome, Robin to Demystifying Instructional Design, a podcast where I talk to instructional designers about what instructional designers do. Can you start off by introducing yourself?

ROBIN

Thank you so much for having me, Rebecca. I am just happy to be here and just a little bit about myself. I am the owner and founder of Idle Courses, a trade school that serves clients while developing that next generation of creative learning designers. And also the owner and founder of Idle Talent, which is a boutique staffing agency that hires out people who go through our trade school, the Idle Courses Academy, and places them in contract positions.

REBECCA

How did you get into instructional design?

ROBIN

I got into instructional design. It’s like a very similar story. It was somewhat of an accident, but I started out in higher education. And so in higher education I was first an academic advisor and then I was the assistant dean of students. And while I was the assistant dean of students, they wanted to start their very first adult studies program online. And so they had university programs like Bachelor’s and Master’s, but they had an annex campus for the adult studies program. So that just basically meant the difference is, is it’s the older adults and it’s at night, all the classes were at night. And so they wanted to create an online option. And if anybody’s met any faculty members, sometimes you might recognize that a lot of them are Luddites. They are scared of technology, they are hesitant to use it, or they’re just not that good at it. Or at least they weren’t back when I was in college in 2009 and ten, all the way to 12, and so I was put in charge of instructional designing their entire online program, starting with their online associates and doing their bachelors. And I built out the entire LMS. I was transitioning the courses to an online modality, and then I was also being the assistant dean of students for those online students. And I, that’s where I found instructional design. And I said, is this a job? Is this something I can just do all day long, which is the design instruction, specifically online instruction? And then that’s when I found corporate instructional design, where you not only get to do that all the time, you get better tools, you get a faster paced environment, faster decision making, and you are tasked with being a little more creative and they double your salary and you can work remotely. I was yes, sign me up. That’s how I found instructional design.

REBECCA

How did you make that transition?

ROBIN

Yeah. So for me in 2012, I started in 2011 trying to make that transition. And I mean, I just did all the things. I made a portfolio that does not exist anymore because I let the website domain lapse and I’m glad for it because geez, Louise, it was a crappy, crappy portfolio. I just threw everything in there. I would take screenshots of the learning management system I had built out for the university when I just made random things and took… I use a lot screenshots that say a lot of screenshots and I just filled it up like I thought it was a CV. I started a blog, I loaded things to SlideShare and there was another. I just loaded things to LinkedIn and another platform at the time that was getting some good SEO. You know, back in 2012 and I just did everything I could to make my name associate with Instructional Designer when you Googled me. Of course I did the other things too. I did reading and I did research or whatever, but it was mainly about how am I going to transition from higher ed to the corporate world? And it took me about nine full months to do it. And I really didn’t even get any interviews in the corporate setting except for that one job that I got. I didn’t even get to the interview except for the one that hired me. And even when he hired me afterwards, he said, I almost didn’t even bring you in for an interview. Your resume was like ten pages long.

REBECCA

One of the things it’s funny because one of the things we tell students who are making that sort of transition is language is one of the things, but the resume is the other thing, right? It should not be more than two pages, but a CV is as long as it needs to be. And so that whole cultural context is an interesting challenge to it. So how did you go from being an instructional designer working at a corporation to running your own instructional design school?

ROBIN

So I made the transition. I’ll never forget it. It was August 2012. I just had to tell all my students and all of my peers I’m leaving. I’ve doubled my income and I’m going on to be a full time instructional designer. And so from there on, my first job was at a software digital marketing platform, and then I stayed there for two years, and then I became a senior instructional designer. And then that same year I got that role, they got bought out and they were laying off everybody in the training department. The only two people left standing was me and my manager, and we’re looking at each other like, gee, I mean, are they going to get rid of us too? And at that same exact time that we were looking at each other, I got a LinkedIn message. It was somebody who wanted, they said, hey, do you want to start and run and set up a learning and development department in our, our mid-sized business? It was like a, it’s like a 500 million recruiting and staffing agency. I said, yes. And so then of course, from there I hired people to work underneath me and trained them. And all along the way I was doing side hustles. I was working on the side from my very first job. I remember one of my colleagues said to me, oh, you know, I work on the side all the time. I was like, What do you mean you work on the side? Because in higher ed, the way to work on the side is you’re an adjunct teacher and you take on additional classes and that’s how you make your extra money. And I had always done that. And so I was like, okay, well, tell me how you make extra money in this field. And so she told me about contracting and building e-learning for outside clients. I started doing it as soon as she told me so in 2012, I got my first full time, I also got my first freelance gigs and I kept freelance gigs and building that book of business all the way through 2018. And when I went on maternity leave for my third and final son, that’s when I made the transition. I had a big enough client base and one giant client to go out on my own starting January 2018. And what’s wild is I thought my business was going to be something different, and it’s definitely pivoted and changed since I started in 2018 but I always knew that I wanted to do some kind of business. But I knew that any kind of business I wanted to do was going to have to be something that I was obsessed with or passionate about or just, like, loved, because I knew that I would put.. you put everything in your business, especially if you’re bootstrapping from the ground up. And when I found instructional design and started doing it on the side, and then I met somebody who ran their own consulting business in our space, that was it. And that’s when I knew what I wanted my business to be in and it’s changed over the years but right now, where I am, this is the long haul. This is like the real vision and mission has come about. And, and this is what my business will be doing forever.

REBECCA

What kind of people take your courses?

ROBIN

It’s really interesting to see the students that have come in to Idol Courses Academy, which is actually an authorized vocational trade school in the state of Georgia. And what’s interesting is, like at the beginning, it was a lot of early adopters. I started the Academy in July of 2019, and so it was people who were familiar with instructional design, but they were having trouble getting the job. And just like I shared my journey, it took me nine months and because I didn’t have anybody hold my hand or there’s no like blog posts about transitioning instructional designers. As a matter of fact, the first person I found that said anything about that was Christie Tucker. And so those first kinds of students were early adopters. They just needed like a little bit of help with their portfolio and resumé and interviewing. But as it’s grown, I get people in the academy that have no clue what instructional design is. They just want to get out of their current field. And so right now it’s a huge mix. I got people who have no idea what instructional design is. I have directors of Learning and Development Department signing up. I have whole companies that come in to the Idol Courses Academy. I have universities that send their instructional design staff to the Idoll Courses Academy and of course the newbies. So it’s a huge, one of our academy students just landed a chief learning officer role coming through the academy. So really it surprised me just as much as anybody else. And I would say probably about 75% of our students have master’s degrees in instructional design.

REBECCA

So you do take students who have master’s degrees already. And what’s the big benefit for them?

ROBIN

The huge, the biggest benefit, and this is from them, is the practical practice of instructional design, so the course is based on three principles that is social learning, learning experience design and deliberate practice. And really deliberate practices, like I mean, that’s all, that’s all I think about is just how are we actually going to give them real world context and practice opportunities so that they can build their skills? And that’s really what you do in corporate instructional design, right, is you are looking to build the skills through practice and the application for your learners. And in our field, a lot of the formal education, while those things are beneficial, the theories and all the research and peer reviewed and evidence based practices, those are all really good things to know. But the things about confidence, being able to interview well, being able to build a portfolio, being able to use the tech and the tools are things that you do not get without actual practice and putting hands on it. You can’t get confidence without taking the action. I can’t build skills unless you do the practice. And so I think I have quite a few people that will join a master’s program and they will come in the academy and do it side by side so that they are working on their skills so that by the time they’re done with their masters or even before they’re done with their masters, they are job ready, not just knowledge ready. And I think that’s the key.

REBECCA

Yeah. One of the words that you said I think is really important, and that’s confidence. I’ve seen students even in, in a bunch of cases, students go through our program and come out. And when I say our program, I mean UMass Boston, they come out with confidence. But then there’s also a bunch of them that don’t. They go through the program, get their master’s degree, but don’t have the self-confidence to put themselves out there. And you need that in order to be successful, especially today.

ROBIN

Yeah. You get in those interviews and if you feel self-doubt or you don’t feel confident in your skills, oh gosh, people just smell it on you. And so it’s the only way to overcome it is to take the action. There’s a really interesting book. It’s called The Confidence Gap. You can get it on Audible Plus, you know, it’s like a free read, if you will. And I read that because I’m obsessed with my students. I won’t lie. That’s why I wrote a book recently and all these other kinds, because I’m like, how do I help them with these other things? So it’s not just about the practice of instructional design. It’s a mindset right? It’s a mindset that has to shift, especially from people who are going from teachers to the corporate world, and especially corporate instructional design. The way of being is very different in the corporate world than it is from what they currently experience in the classroom, where they are dictated how things are supposed to do. They are micromanaged. They are sometimes ordered to teach a certain curriculum, a certain way to reach test scores, and that’s not at all the way that ig works in corporate. And so the confidence gap< one of the key things that I say in that book and I thought was just really just inspired me for how I work with my students, is that action comes before confidence. Confidence never comes before action. And I’ve just seen that principle be true time and time again. And, and so really a lot of what we do as far as the mindset part is focusing on doing it messy. Just take the action, just dare to share. Just put your stuff out there and through design thinking, which is iterative feedback cycles of improvement, you will improve every single asset, which of course develops your skills at the same time and builds their portfolio. So that really is the only way to get confident in any new thing.

REBECCA

I really like the way that you describe that. What’s one of the biggest challenges that you see either yourself or your students facing?

ROBIN

Besides the confidence thing, and I think that it’s a double edged sword in the sense that you don’t get confidence without action. Well, the biggest challenge, of course, is to get people to take action, to get them to take messy, just take a stab at it, type of action. What’s interesting is because they are motivated. They’re motivated because they have some kind of goal when they enroll in any kind of program. They enroll in a university, they’ve got a goal, I want to get my degree. And they’ve got to pay for that. They’ve got to get certain credits. They got to get certain grades in order to obtain the degree. For my program there’s different motivators, right? Like they need to get their job application assets ready in order to get the job. But there’s no deadlines in the Idol Courses Academy, there’s no grades. It’s a one time payment and you’re done. So it’s not like, you know, if you don’t use it, you’ll lose it. It’s a lifetime thing. You pay one payment and then you’re in. And so I think the challenges are getting people to be either overcome their own perfectionism or overcome whatever type of bad study habits they have or overcome the overwhelm that they feel in this new challenge to take the action to do the work. And people ask me about outcomes and results, which I’m obsessed with. I really just I think I would just say all the time, I’m obsessed, but these are the things that I’m truly passionate about, results, and, and our students. But the thing about it is, every single person who has taken the action and builds their minimum viable portfolio, I’m not even saying they need to have a stellar portfolio. I mean, sure that will help with like the bigger jobs or whatever, but a minimum viable portfolio, a resume and a LinkedIn profile. And they can get a job in our field at the current state that we’re in, but it’s getting people to take that action and just build that minimum viable portfolio. It’s a 100% success rate for every single person that does the work, and we do everything we can to support people as long as they raise their hand. I think that’s the biggest challenge and that’s why we try to do things like early mastery of things. That’s why we have to do a messy challenge, like real small. We tell you step by step how to create your website and on and on to try and get that early mastery motivation as well. But it’s people taking the time, making the time, the self-discipline, the doing the work. I think that’s the biggest challenge.

REBECCA

What do you see as a minimum viable portfolio?

ROBIN

Yeah. I don’t think it needs to look like the most experienced portfolios like those exemplars that we see in our field. They are great to look at as far as like inspiration and goals, but you don’t need a perfect portfolio to demonstrate that you got the skills. And that’s the whole point of a portfolio is to demonstrate that you think like an instructional designer, you can explain your design thinking, you have some kind of visual design chops, if you will, and, and you can use the tools. And you can do a minimum viable website as part of your portfolio. Right? The very organization and the look of your website is what counts. You need your instructor led training and I encourage a package, a presentation, a facilitator guide and a participant guide. Before COVID 80% of corporate training was instructor led training. That’s still going on, right? Whether people think that it’s not or not, it is or is not, it’s still going on. They’re still building ILTs. And then one, I encourage 2 to 3 e-learning courses. I’m not saying they have to be long or big or any of that kind of stuff, but like one built in something easy, like Rise, maybe a microlearning tool like Seven Taps and then one heavy lift authoring tool like Storyline. That’s the number one tool that we’re using or Adobe Captivate or maybe even Genially, something that you can export to SCORM. And a job aid and an instructional design document. That way you have a little piece of everything, a minimum viable portfolio. I can do from soup to nuts, instructional design. Maybe I want to focus on, you know, just the design or just the elearning development. And so maybe you might add more elearning if you want to focus on e-learning development, but what’s great about having a minimum viable portfolio with a little bit of everything, more skills, more opportunities, more options when you are applying for your instructional design jobs, especially in the beginning, right? We talk about Caterpillar skills versus a T-shaped skills and at the beginning you got to show your Caterpillar skills before you drill down a niche.

REBECCA

Can you explain that a little bit more? Because I don’t know that our listeners will understand caterpillars and T shapes.

ROBIN

Yeah, I just think of it like a visual reference, a caterpillar. Right? You know how they have each little piece of their body is like a little cylinder. And we would think of each of those cylinders on the caterpillar as a different type of skill sets. And I’m saying get a little bit of skills and all the things Idol. For me, Idol stands for instructional design and online learning. So that’s why I say Idol. But just a little bit and everything instructional design and e-learning, because you’ll be a better instructional designer when you understand the tools, you’ll be a better e-learning developer when you understand instructional design. And so it’s better at the very beginning. Just jump in the deep end, get a little bit of understanding of all the things. And then as you continue to do the work of instructional design and online learning development, then you can get ,you can drill down in one of those niche skills and get a longer, deeper right skill set in something specific and that’s what we call a T-shaped skill. And usually T-shaped skills are when you become an expert in your field at the beginning, you want to be a caterpillar.

REBECCA

That’s actually really good advice, and I really like the visual that goes with it too. What skills do you find most useful?

ROBIN

Oh my gosh. I would say the most useful skill is got to be self-directed. I can’t tell you how many times I see students struggle because they don’t use a Google search or they don’t know how to self advocate or look for their own resources or do their own learning. So I think being able to be self-directed, I think that’s going to be the most important skill like right up front if you have to, if I have to pick one, because nothing, no other skills are going to be built in this industry if you’re not self-directed. And I tell people all the time, they’re like, what is instructional design like? Who is instructional design good for? Did you like doing homework in school? Were you good at turning in your homework assignments on time? Because that seems to be those are the people that are good in instructional design. People who get their homework done.

REBECCA

People who get their homework done on time. What do you wish you learned sooner about instructional design?

ROBIN

You know what? I think it has a lot to do, I really am not trying to plug my book, but I have to bring it up right now because I wish I would have learned exactly what I put in the book. What’s interesting, it’s really interesting to try and develop a practical vocational training program around instructional design, because instructional design is full of irregular problem solving. And you get a group of students who are used to basically formulaic problem solving, A plus B, equals C one plus one equals two or whatever. Right? And our problem sets are irregular. And so you have to learn how to be a problem solver and design courses. And so what I’m saying is I wish I would have found, discovered and understood, David N. Merrill’s First Principles of Instruction at the very beginning. And that because I was always looking for a formula or a guide on how exactly, I understand ADDIE. I understand how to do the different things in ADDIE, but when I would get to that part where it’s time to design this course, to structure the course, to write the scripts. No ADDIE model’s going to tell you how to do that. It just says, okay, time for design. Okay. And also, no design thinking is going to tell you exactly how to do it. Oh, we’ll just go ask people, just make something and just give feedback on it. But that does not share with you how to structure your course the first time before you go get feedback on it. And so I wish I would have learned the first principle of instruction by David and Merrill and really understood it, because now that I found it only because I was obsessed in looking for formula for my own students who are asking the same questions. And, and it was finding that and really understanding it and teaching it to my students and seeing the better quality of scripts and courses and things that they are producing based on these first principles of instruction. I wish I would have found that sooner and really just in summary, that’s what do it messy approach is all about. In my book and in David Merrill’s book, his first principles of instruction is to create a problem centered or a task centered design that starts with activation, activating prior learning and creating a structure, demonstrating, demonstrating the whole problem, creating application and practice opportunities for your learners. And then integration, right? Integrating that application into the real world and also some social learning at the end.

REBECCA

What advice would you give to new instructional designers?

ROBIN

Oh, boy. I mean, how long we got? Okay. Okay. Okay. I’ll try to keep it.. I’ll try to narrow it down. My first advice has to be you have to go and look at the different jobs. Go do, I say approach it like the ADDIE model, right? The model stands for Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation and Evaluation. The first step is you got to go do your analysis. What is instructional design? What does the job market look like? What are the different types of roles that are available? What are the skills that are required in these job descriptions? Okay, which of these jobs appeals to me most at this time where I am right now? Doesn’t matter if you have the skills or not? What appeals to you about what that job description says? Then I encourage you to make a list. All right, here’s the skills that are required in my ideal Idol role is what I call it, and here are the current skills. Obviously, you have to be honest with yourself, right? Here are my current skills and where I am. These are the skills that I’m missing. Work specifically on those skills. How do you work specifically on those skills? You got to do the practice and I encourage deliberate practice. Now, deliberate practice is not just doing the practice of instructional design in the dark, it’s not where you just like sit alone in your room and you just work on e-learning and learning tools all by yourself. Instead, deliberate practice is how you accelerate your results in your skill building, and that is where you have a coach or a mentor or some kind of expert in instructional design or e-learning development that say, alright you need to work on this skill. All right, I need you to go and do X, Y, Z, come back, I’ll look at it, I’ll give you feedback. And then based on what you produce in my feedback, you’re going to go back and you’re going to build the skill on the next part of what it is, right? So it might be like, okay, your visuals, okay, but you need to take up on your visuals or your navigation. So that’s the deliberate practice of instructional design. And as you do that deliberate practice and you’re working with somebody who’s an expert who can give you feedback and you can, you know, really get used to getting feedback to, that is such an important, critical thing in our field. And if you feel… if you get like defensive or uncomfortable or when people give you feedback or even criticism, nobody likes to be criticism, criticized. But if you find yourself getting defensive when that happens, instead of just like letting it roll off your back, then you need to practice accepting feedback. The crappy kind, the good kind, whatever. Just practice it so you can let it roll off your back. And so you do your analysis and you start designing things, right? You start working on your skills and then you start doing the development of your portfolio and then you start implementing it, implementing that feedback, loading it to your portfolio, and of course evaluating your results. What are the hiring managers saying about your portfolio and your resumé and what kind of how are you doing on those questions? And that’s part of your evaluation. And if you think about that, it like that, you can really narrow down exactly what skills you need to focus on. You’ve got, obviously, the key that we’ve already been talking about is you got to do the work and you got to accept feedback. And if you can do those three things, then you’re in a really good spot just right at the beginning.

REBECCA

Can you tell me a little bit about what your book is about?

ROBIN

I would like to. Talking about a little bit just because I never thought I’d write a book. Rebecca, I. I just said, ah that’s not for me. I’d rather create some fun videos or whatever if I’ve got spare time or build another course for Idol courses. But like I’ve been mentioning, I really have been looking for a step by step course design formula that I can teach to my students that make it go, oh, if I do this step and then this step and then this step, by the end, I’ll have a full course, prototype, script, blueprint, whatever you want to call it. And that’s what I’ve been looking for. And of course, I found that in David Merrill’s thing but David Merrill’s book First Principles of Instruction is a giant textbook. It is. It’s just and it reads like a textbook. And, and it’s a lot, it’s a lot to wade through really good stuff in there. But I just don’t see new instructional designers going to that book. It’s not like a newbie Idol type of book or material. And so basically I wanted to make the First Principles of Instruction for Dummies. And of course, I’m not calling my readers dummies, but what I wanted to do is like really strip it down. And I was inspired also by, have you ever read one of those or gotten one of those art books, Rebecca, where they say okay I’m going to teach you how to draw and they say yes and they show and the first step, you got to draw a sphere and then we got to understand the principles of shading. And then you draw your sphere and then you shade it. Well, one of the books, and I bought one of these books, and one of the books that I read, it took you through the steps and each of these steps build on each other. So already great instructional design. And then after he would, the author, would demonstrate drawing the sphere and shading it. He would include student examples of their spheres or whatever you were drawing in this book, and I just loved it. I just love the idea of doing something small every single day because it’s something that I teach in the academy, right? You don’t have to reach your big goal today. Instead, what you need to do is make a sacred promise to yourself to do something towards your goal every single day. Whether you want to carve out 20, 30 minutes a day or you want to say, I’ll complete three small tasks and so I wanted to build a book that was like that. You do something small for 20 minutes a day by the end, and if you follow my instructions, you’ll have a full course prototype. And what do I mean by prototype? You’ll have a full course script. That is a draft that you can take to your subject matter experts, your stakeholders and your learners, and start getting feedback and start iterating on an actual prototype instead of what usually happens is people like, alright outline script, develop. But, and they might get feedback along the way, but it’s that script writing that people really struggle with. And a lot of times when they write those scripts, they don’t think necessarily about making the complex task or the main problem at the center of everything or including demonstrations. And so really that’s what the do it messy approach, a step by step guide for instructional designers and online learning developers is all about. It is a step by step how to build your course prototype in 20 minutes a day.

REBECCA

Cool.

ROBIN

Yeah. So it’s like, what a do it messy approach is get out of your own way. Beginners mindset type of thinking and design thinking. So it’s like, it’s both.

REBECCA

Oh, that sounds fascinating. I have another question for you, which is you mentioned that you have the academy, but you also have a talent agency. And what types of people succeed in the academy to get in the agency?

ROBIN

It’s the people that are connected, it’s the people that are connected in the community that do the work. It’s truly, that’s it. If everybody did the work, then I’d have to go get more clients to hire them all. That’s just nature. Most people, let’s just be clear, most of the people that come through the academy go and land corporate jobs all on their own. But I have the Idol Talent because I always wanted to give paid experience opportunities. And so a lot of the people that work in Idol talent, they already got full time jobs or they got other freelance clients or they got part time jobs. And the way that they get into Idol Talen is they have to have their portfolio done, minimum viable portfolio. I’m not even saying like you got to have your perfect portfolio. It’s got to have that MVP like I talked about earlier. And then they have to have either landed a full time job or reached their big Idol goal is what I call it. Either they have a full time client or they got a full time job, or somebody else has hired them as a corporate instructional designer. Or if they don’t have that in their portfolio, then they’ve earned some of the badges in the academy, which are pretty, they’re pretty rigorous. And that’s how we vet people to join Idol Talent. And that’s why all the clients that work with us keep hiring more and more of our talent, because those are the people that make it into the Idol Talent.

REBECCA

I’m going to ask you one last question, which is the last question I ask everybody, which is, what’s your prediction for the future of instructional design?

ROBIN

What is my prediction for the future? I think that there’s a lot of ways that we can go in instructional design and as far as the future goes, I hope to see just like the same thing that we always talk about. I just hope to see us more as a business partner. I hope to see instructional design really be brought in to solve real problems. I’d like to see the type of training that’s just content management, if you will, given a different title. And then the instructional designers really stays in the in the lane of solving performance gaps. And I’d like to see, I think I see that being integrating course, new technologies, but I think really just moving more to that performance model and doing more just in time training. I’ve seen some really interesting thoughts around learning clusters and just providing people resources just in the time of need. And it’s not always a full training solution. And I also see in corporate instructional design taking on some of what we’ve learned from people who have created online training schools like mine, and I guess you’d call them digital course products. And I see them taking some of that in the sense that one of the things that you can really learn from the field of digital course products that could influence corporate instructional design and that is making real transformations for people. And so I think if we really focus more on the transformation, solving the performance gap, solving the problem, focusing on the task based complex tasks and the problems that we need to solve, I think that, I think that’s the future of instructional design. Or at least that’s where I hope to go.

REBECCA

Thank you very much, Robin, for all of your insights. This has been a great conversation.

ROBIN

Oh, my gosh. It’s been such a pleasure to be, I mean you just asked me all my favorite questions, Rebecca. So thank you so much for having me.

REBECCA

You’ve been listening to Demystifying Instructional Design, a podcast where I interview instructional designers about what they do. I’m Rebecca Hogue, your podcast host. Show notes are posted as a blog post on Demystifying Instructional Design dot com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe or leave a comment in the show notes blog post.