S3E6: Stephanie Smith: Order Takers vs Consultants on Demystifying Instructional Design

Production Assistant: Donna Stanton

Stephanie Smith is the Learning and Design Manager for Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, Inc. located in Westminster Colorado. She has experience in training and development for a variety of industries including energy, safety, software, sales, customer service, medical management industries. Specializing in eLearning, learning architecture, learning platforms, and learning management systems, Stephanie has a proven track record of successful implementation of learning systems. She has experience creating solutions for human performance issues, leadership development, apprenticeship programs and change management course development. Stephanie has a BA in Speech and Media Communications from Colorado State University, a BA in Education, and a Master’s in Information Learning Technologies, eLearning Design and Implementation from University of Colorado. Stephanie manages the Learning and Development and Training Managers Group on Facebook, which supports members with management issues, metrics, ROI and other instructional design issues. As well as the Instructional Design and eLearning Community page.

In This Episode

Episode Transcript

REBECCA HOGUE
Welcome, Stephanie, to Demystifying Instructional Design, a podcast where I interview instructional designers to help figure out what it is instructional designers do. To begin with, can you start by introducing yourself?

STEPHANIE SMITH
Hi, my name is Stephanie Smith. I am the learning and design manager for Tri-State, which is an electric utility co-op. So a very interesting part of the business to be in the energy sector at this time. And I’ve been in instructional design for about 16 years. And then before that I was a teacher for seven years, and then in the education field for quite some time at this point.

REBECCA HOGUE
How did you get into instructional design? How did you make that transition?

STEPHANIE SMITH
Yeah, I was teaching. I had become a master teacher and I was really hitting burnout, as many do, and I was like, what is my favorite part besides the kids that I love? And that was curriculum design and and building things. I started this was way back before I think even e-learning had its big… I mean, there was some stuff out there, but it wasn’t huge. It was distance learning type of things that were out there at that time. And so I started working for the Library of Congress doing these sort of virtual field trips and stuff, creating these experiences for students. And I used that as the base of my portfolio and then I begged for a job. I found a company wasn’t a great company but found they were hiring. And I just begged quite a few times and then they finally gave me a chance and I came in. I’m trying to remember all of it, but I came in and I felt really comfortable on the design side. But I really had to learn technology where I think a lot of teachers feel that sometimes, which is funny because I tell people like, You really don’t need to know the technology as well as you think you do. But I sat with people. I learned… we had a recession hit at that point. Everybody was losing their jobs. So I thought, I better I don’t have to be the best, but I better not be the worst designer. So I started reading a lot of books, really trying to just up my game as an instructional designer. I was doing a lot of I was doing a lot of e-learning and video and I think finally my, my boss, who was also my mentor at the time, he’s like, if you’ve read all of these books, why don’t you just finish your master’s degree? And I had read the entire curriculum for my master’s degree before I ever even got there and took the

SPEAKER 1
master’s program.

STEPHANIE SMITH
He recommended me, I got in and I got to work with some really amazing people in our industry, like Patti Shank. She became a mentor for me as well. So it was really good. I’ve had two really big mentors in my career that have taken me to those next steps, those next levels both times. So it was really, really beneficial to have that.

REBECCA HOGUE
A question for you is how do you describe what you do when when you say, hey, I’m an instructional designer, How do you describe that to people?

STEPHANIE SMITH
So what I tell people is that we use a lot of we use like brain science, we use learning theory to really help people learn skills and knowledge to help further… like in the corporate world, we do that for for employees. And part of that is, gosh, I’m trying to think of how I would answer that question. But I think one of the big pieces that I try and explain to people is anybody can, like a SME can put together a PowerPoint or they can put together a training and really where our where we’re really beneficial is that we represent the learner, right? We are looking at what is the best way to convey this information? What is the best way for this learner to learn? We know there’s not going to be a ton of retention for a two hour course versus smaller chunking pieces. And so we as brain science and we use learning theory and we and we put together our best methods of trying to transmit that information to improve performance.

REBECCA HOGUE
Cool! What kind of projects do you find fun?

STEPHANIE SMITH
I think in my career I’ve really enjoyed when they have an actual problem and I have to really think it through and really do analysis and to do. I had one where, you know, they came back and they’re like, we have to teach this skill. It’s a super important safety type of skill and we go through this whole process of analysis and we realize that as we’re going through this analysis and talking and interviewing people on the job, that everybody was doing something different. And so we realized that there was a there was a huge discrepancy on what was supposed to be the actual process. So I actually love projects that have a problem where I have to really be creative and think outside the box. And then I also really do love doing courses that are fun with lots of different multimedia. I love doing video, so there’s a development side that I enjoy. But from that design side, I really love figuring out, Hey, this is the problem. What are the nuances of the problem? And then coming up with different types of solutions that will really attack that and help.

REBECCA HOGUE
And so what are the biggest challenges you face as an instructional designer?

STEPHANIE SMITH
I think one of the biggest ones is order taker versus consultant. A lot of instructional designers, especially newer ones, they come in and what do you want? You want a video? I’ll make you a video.

SPEAKER 1
You want that?

STEPHANIE SMITH
They take the order and they create the product, versus really trying to get down to what is the issue, what is the problem you’re solving for? And really being able to guide the customer into a solution that’s going to be the best solution for a learner. And one of the things that I’ve always had guide me is if I wasn’t willing to take my own training, that I didn’t do a good job. It’s because it’s funny. I’ve been a teacher, I’ve been a trainer, and if I can’t sit through it because I just I’m not a good student sometimes. And so one of my benchmarks. If I can’t stand it and didn’t hit it out of the park.

REBECCA HOGUE
I totally relate to that. And when I was working in tech writing, it was the same thing. If I didn’t use the stuff that I was writing as a reference, then it’s not good enough. It’s not solving the problem. And so that’s very interesting. And I really like the order taker versus consultants analogy there because there is so much of that, especially when people don’t understand what instructional designers do. It’s, oh, build this training for me. I want training for that.

STEPHANIE SMITH
Yeah, I want an e-learning course. Okay. Why?

REBECCA HOGUE
What exactly do you want it to do? Yes.

STEPHANIE SMITH
What do you think you’re going to get from it? Yeah. And having having them get something from it. Right. You want to be able to have that return on investment and I would say corporate. In the corporate world, we don’t do a great job on doing that. But I’ve really worked hard to try for our department to make sure that we’re showing our value right. I’m trying to advertise, hey, these are all of the things that we fixed for the company that we did for the company. And so that it… that’s the other thing, right? In a recession, what’s the first department to get killed? We don’t need training, showing your value, being a consultant and a huge portion of that is starting a project as the lead. You’ve got to lead the project. You’ve got to guide your customer through those processes, but explain what we’re doing and trying to teach them. I have at this point, some of the people we work with, they just love it. They’re like, I know you’re going to handle it. You’re going to guide me each step, and they really enjoy it working with us.

REBECCA HOGUE
That’s awesome. So what skills do you find most useful in your work?

STEPHANIE SMITH
I have seen very successful instructional designers in my career and not so successful. There really is a brain for it and it’s not necessarily something that you’re going to learn in a program. But one of the biggest skills is managing a project. If you can’t manage a project well, you will have scope creep and you will you will have a you’ll have a very impatient customer who then starts changing their mind and then you don’t know what you’re doing anymore. So having really good project management skills, and part of that’s customer service and communication pieces of talking your way through the process and then having this mental ability to organize and chunk content and to look at content and convert it into something that is a lot more easier to digest. For example, I might look at a participant guide and if I see paragraph after paragraph, I’m like, I’m going to snore through. This isn’t working. How do you create graphics? How do you pop things out? How do you make it digestible? And those are some really key things. And so when I’m interviewing, we create scenario questions because want to see how how does their brain work? How do you get from A to B to C? And that’s going to show me what kind of designer you are. So there is a brain to it. It’s not always, hey, I can make a really great job aid or I can make a video. It really comes down to how do you organize and chunk information so that learners can consume that and be able to retain it.

REBECCA HOGUE
What advice would you give to the new instructional designer?

STEPHANIE SMITH
My first mentor, one of the things he had us do was we would take learning theory and then we would try and figure out how to apply it in real life. And so we would do these sort of workshop scenarios. And I will tell you that you start to really learn a learning theory that way and really think about how if you’re looking at behaviorism, how am I applying that to what I can do for my learner? And so they weren’t always. A lot of them were very rhetorical and discussions, but we really tried to figure out how do you take these concepts and apply them in different mediums. So that was one of the things that I think can really help.

REBECCA HOGUE
Do you have an example of that? Do you have one that off the top of your head?

STEPHANIE SMITH
One of the ones that I did through that process, I did the format theory, which is not actually really obscure, but a teacher think she was a teacher. She came up with this one. But basically it combines a whole bunch of things from like Kolbe’s Learning Theory of how we perceive and internalize training as being able to take some of that and apply like how do you give time to give content and then allow for processing and then communicating that that content out. So that was one that we did. It’s harder to do with e-learning, but it’s pretty easy to do in the classroom, right? You can present content, you can allow them to. Then you have to look at what is the schema of the learner. Having a learner that’s somewhat familiar with the content. Like if you’re teaching something about dogs and you’re like, Oh, I love dogs! That’s the learner’s brain’s going to do right? There can be like, I’m learning all this content about dogs. They’re going to reference their memories and experience of dogs and you’re going to encode that that into their schema and then having them have a chance to think about it, to process it, and then to communicate that back, that’s going to help reinforce what they’re learning. And so those are some types of examples that haven’t used that one. But I should say I’ve used that one as an example to use, but I haven’t actually got to do an amazing course about dogs. I would love that.

REBECCA HOGUE
And so you mentioned you’re a hiring manager and so when you’re hiring an instructional designer, what are you looking for?

STEPHANIE SMITH
One of the biggest pieces for me is do they fit on my team personality wise? And I think that’s where I’ve seen a lot of people online very discouraged, where they’re like, I didn’t get this job, or I went through this whole hiring process and sometimes it has nothing to do with your skill set. Sometimes it has to do with how are you going to fit in with the rest of my team because I need you to be able to work together. Yes, there are skills, there are competencies that I am specifically looking for, but that is one of the bigger pieces of what, of who gets hired over someone else. I recently was looking at two different candidates and they were really equally strong and one one of them didn’t have a strong portfolio. But you know what? She sent me emails thanking me. She followed up. She got a lot of eagerness from her. And so when I went to compare the two, because they looked really close, I was like, I’m going to take the one who just put just a teeny bit more effort into it.
And that’s what I ended up going with.
I know it’s brutal out there, but knowing learning theory and understanding the difference between learning theory and instructional design theory, that’s a big one. You should know the difference. A lot of people can’t answer that question, which is really surprising our industry. And so having being able to like take a scenario, walk through it, I have I’ve hired people who said I don’t know to a question. I can teach that. So being honest, if you don’t know something is totally fine For me as a hiring manager and portfolios, honestly, they can help you, but they don’t get you the job. For me as a manager, I’m really looking at like how your resume looks and that’s going to get you in my pile of interviews and looking to see how you perform on that, those interviews. And then I’ll probably take a look at your portfolio and see you. It looks like you have those skill sets or but you’re going to talk about that in your interview with me. You know, it can be a lot of things, but the portfolio doesn’t make or break for the job hunt.

REBECCA HOGUE
And what can somebody do to stand out.

STEPHANIE SMITH
And guess that should be… okay. I have hired somebody based on their portfolio before. And this person, he was straight out of college. He’d never had a job before. He had an amazing portfolio. I didn’t believe he made it. So I called him because I didn’t think he made it, and he did! And he walked me through his process and he walked me through what he did with his portfolio. And I hired him and I trained him on all the other stuff. But so I have hired somebody based on their portfolio. Guess I should be honest about that. But that was because he had zero experience, right? So he had an amazing portfolio, zero experience. But most of the time I see a lot of people who have decent portfolios and some experience.

REBECCA HOGUE
So you have a stack of resumes. What makes some person someone stand out over someone else?

STEPHANIE SMITH
Good. That’s a good question. Okay. So things I’m looking at, when you have, and I’ll take you’ve got some of your job titles. But what I’m specifically looking at is do you have the tasks that an instructional designer does in that list of what you did for that job? So are you managing projects and SMEs? Ae you communicating with those stakeholders? Are you are you following the ADDIE process, doing analysis on different projects? Are you developing? Some people are not developers. There’s a lot of instructional designers that just do the first analysis and design and they hand it off right. I work in a shop where we do everything from soup to nuts, so I want to see that you know how to do everything from soup to nuts. And if you have that, then I’m usually in the yes pile. I’m going to I’m going to at least give you a chance and give you an interview.

REBECCA HOGUE
Cool. You mentioned that when you get to that interview, one of the things you do is scenario. Can you give an example of the types of things you ask people?

STEPHANIE SMITH
Yeah. So one of the questions I will ask is if you had to teach the color red, how would you do that? So if your objective is describe the color red, how do you fulfill that? What would you do? What what learning theories would you bring in? What would you do to teach that?

REBECCA HOGUE
Wow, that one’s got me really thinking! I was, like the color red. Really? That’s interesting.

STEPHANIE SMITH
And then in a sense, it’s a little bit of a trick question because anytime you have the word describe, you’re really, really what that does in instructional design is you’re telling me what it is and what it isn’t. I’ve used red, I’ve used the I’ve used an elephant or a moose. We’ve used all sorts of different things depending upon the interview, but we’re really looking at, can you tell me, can you describe what it is and can you describe what it isn’t? You create learning pieces around that, and a lot of times what people do, they’ll go and say, Oh, I want to teach them the parts of a moose and I want to teach them what an elephant sounds like. So they’ll start to get that. And I know that’s where their brain is going. And that’s really the answer to the question.

REBECCA HOGUE
The color red is particularly hard because there aren’t parts to it. But it’s funny because the thing that went to my mind, are okay, so the RGB values and the hues and all of the things that make the color red. Red like the prism.

STEPHANIE SMITH
Yeah, that would be a correct answer. Yeah!

REBECCA HOGUE
That’s fascinating.

STEPHANIE SMITH
Or one of the other ones is I’ll ask and I’ll say, tell me about your your favorite learning theory. Why do you use it a lot? What do you use it for? How do you use it? So just getting to talk about how they’re applying those instructional design pieces around that. I also ask a question like, if you were going to design… You got a project to design new hire benefits, like you came on to the company and you have to teach a new hire about their benefits. What would you do? So things I’m looking for are getting stakeholders involved, starting with analysis. It’s really an ADDIE question, right? What are the points of. And so just having them talk through that sort of scenario tells me that they understand the process and they understand how to… if they SAM or if they use something else, that’s fine too. I just want to see that they can apply the instructional design theory and follow up with that.

REBECCA HOGUE
What are the biggest mistakes that people make during the interview process?

STEPHANIE SMITH
So having examples and using examples that don’t fit with an adult learner. So the big red flags I have, if they if you start talking about, Oh, I can have somebody do a crossword puzzle, what’s the actual benefit of that besides busy work? You can do some vocabulary, things like that.

REBECCA HOGUE
Just to say I use it for vocabulary, but that’s about it.

STEPHANIE SMITH
Yeah, but typically that’s not going to be something that we’re and if you use that as an example, that’s okay. But I’ve had a lot of people who, who don’t seem with the examples that they use, they’re not thinking about what an adult learner is. And then I know that’s not going to fit with my clients, right? They’re going to be like, why am I filling out a crossword puzzle? Whereas they’re trying to learn. One of the things that we do at my company is we have we have apprenticeships, so people are coming in and it’s like a college in a lot of ways.
It’s not to say that we don’t do vocabulary with them, but that is… they’re looking at pieces of machinery and how things fit together. And so you’ve got to you’ve got to think about what’s going to engage an adult learner and what makes sense for them, if that makes sense. So that’s usually a red flag. I also again, I’m looking at different types of teamwork questions or part of the interview process is it’s two sided, right? We are interviewing you to see if you fit with us, but you should be interviewing us to see if we fit for you. You think people forget that sometimes. And part of that is I’ll ask you a question like what’s your favorite part of the process or what’s your favorite things to do at work? And if it’s completely different than what we do, then we know we’re not probably a fit. We want, I want you to be happy. I want you to stay and work for me for a long time and be engaged. And so I want to find somebody that’s going to want to do what we do.

REBECCA HOGUE
It makes total sense. How big is your team and what is it comprised of? What types of people, do you have instructional designers, but do you have other trades as well?

STEPHANIE SMITH
Yes. So we have three instructional designers and then I have an IT trainer, so she does some of the design work. She’s like a SME in-house for IT projects and then she’s also our trainer. Then I have an LMS administrator and she also helps manage and run the apprenticeship programs that we have. I team manage partner with our other team, which is our trades and crafts facilitators. I think there’s nine of them. So they are doing training on all the different facets of an energy company from generation of transmission. So we have somebody who’s teaching linemen how to be linemen, teaching electricians and mechanics how to operate a plant. So it’s very extensive. So there’s nine of those guys, and then we also partner with the safety department.

STEPHANIE SMITH
So the safety they have, gosh, I don’t know how many facilitators they have, they might have up to ten. It might be like somewhere between 5 and 10. I’m not sure how many facilitators they have over there that go out and do safety teaching and we support them.
We build programs for them as well.
And then we have an organizational organizational development person. So she’s looking at our leadership programs and some of it is like change management. So some of it’s that sort of big picture piece. So we partner with her and then we have on my team, my instructional designers are part of they do they’re part of a DEI committee, some leadership, different committees. So not only are they doing that, but they’re also trying to be part of these bigger corporate changes that are integral to what we have to do in-house. And yeah, and my team of designers, I think instructional designers, I usually have anywhere between 3 and 4. I have four right now, sorry.

REBECCA HOGUE
When you’re looking at portfolios because you mentioned you look at resumes first, but then interview and look at portfolios. What are you looking for in the portfolio? What do you want to see?

STEPHANIE SMITH
That’s a good question. So the first thing I will say is I’ve had people submit portfolios that are locked where I have to go in and I try and get in there and then I contact them to give me permission to see it. That wastes my time. So having something that is easily consumable is very important because if I have to waste time, I’m going to go to the next person. Not to say that I won’t take a look at it, but and totally understand all of the sort of IP types of issues that that come with that. But make it easy for me as the hiring manager so I can see your stuff really quickly. I will say that I spend probably about five minutes in there, so I’m looking for examples of do you have an e-learning project? Do you have… does it have audio, so can you do audio? Do you have a video project? Do you have a participant guide? Do you have some examples of job aids or writing? I had one person who had a portfolio where she showed this really cool interactive job aid to get started with jobs. It was something so different I had I’ve never seen. She immediately got an interview. Like I was like, yeah, I want to talk to her because this looks cool. So if there is something really special that you’ve made that stands out, I know a lot of the colleges will have you do write ups. I am skimming. I am looking for… Do you have the basic development skills? Your resume should show me that you have the knowledge skills for instructional design. But can you show me that you have the development skills? Do you have a PowerPoint? I’ve had a hard time too, where there’s only Rise courses in somebody’s portfolio. That’s not e-learning, where it’s higher level e-learning, branching with different types of questions and application pieces. I want to see that you can build some of that. So some of it is really just to show some examples or or skills. I will even take screenshots like if I can just see, hey, you did build something like that. Works for me. But again, I may have 20 resumes so you get five minutes. So it just needs to be clean. I don’t want to have to try and figure out where it is. If there’s a huge file structure that happens too! So those are anything that makes it not. I might dig into something a little bit longer if I’m really interested in your your stuff, but you have to, it has to have that five minute mark. I’m going to just skim it. And if it looks good, you’re in the “Yes” pile, that kind of thing.

REBECCA HOGUE
You mentioned earlier that you use an LMS for your e-learning. What? Which I’m curious… which LMS?

STEPHANIE SMITH
Yeah. Right now we’re using Sumtotal Learn which just got bought by Cornerstone. I’ve worked, I actually had a job at one point where we used to sell our training and part of my job was to get it implemented on customers’ learning management systems. So I ended up like learning a ton about learning management systems. And it’s really funny because it’s like a dime a dozen, some of them work great. You have to know what your… what do you need it for? And then usually you can find a product that’s going to meet that. So Sumtotal, it is not the… it looks good on the user end, on the back end it’s a lot of work, but it meets the needs for what our company needed at the time.

REBECCA HOGUE
I’m running out of questions. I’m wondering if there’s any question you want me to ask.

STEPHANIE SMITH
I see a lot of people wanting to transition into. Instructional design. And then there’s a lot of there’s a lot of debates about whether you have a master’s degree or you do a certification. I went the master’s degree route for myself. I actually felt… did my program prepare me for everything? No! But it took me to that next level. It did bring me where… it built. I would say some confidence, but it also took me into I would say that if you’re it took me to that senior level of design, if that makes sense. I will look at people who have a certification. I know there’s a lot of great programs. There’s not so great programs. But I will say a master’s holds a lot more weight for me as a hiring manager just because I feel like you get a lot more of design theory and you get a lot more skills. And I know some people come out and they’re like, I don’t know how to do Articulate or I don’t know how to do Captivate. Oh, they’re easy. Don’t worry, I’ll teach you. I’ll teach you that stuff on the job. But having a good understanding of adult learning theory and having a good understanding of how to apply learning theory and how to think through. I remember doing a capstone project where I was running my own business and I thought at the time, I go, I’m never going to need this. I’m always going to work for someone else. And I ended up having a consulting side business and I used that! I took the stuff that I used from there and and was able to apply it and then I felt a little bit better. Okay, I could work for myself if I wanted to. But I do love I like being in the corporate sphere as much as I enjoyed the consulting piece, but that’s where I really like being.

REBECCA HOGUE
Yeah, everyone has their preference, right?

STEPHANIE SMITH
Like they do. And one of my employees, she came, she was on her way to be a college professor. And she’s an amazing designer. She’s… so talented, and I really want to keep her. so… right? So as a manager have to really work hard at that. But it’s I wouldn’t say that there’s a waste with with having a master’s degree. That being said, if you’re a teacher and you’re transitioning the and it’s not in instructional technologies, that’s okay. Because think if you have anything in that sort of realm whether that’s. Whether that’s like leadership, organizational development. I think all of those kind of feed together. I usually flag those first. And then the other big one that people miss they think that instructional technologies means like they’re learning the tech side of instruction. And that’s it’s actually the science of instruction. And I think that’s really funny that a lot of people miss that one, or they’ll misuse it. And I’m like, that’s not totally what that means, but that’s okay.

REBECCA HOGUE
Yes. Yeah, we get a lot of the, oh, do you know, Articulate? or will I be learning Articulate or will I be learning Captivate? I’m like, Sure, I’ll teach you H5P, though it’s free, but it doesn’t really matter which one as long as you know how to apply it in the right context.

STEPHANIE SMITH
And the really the funny part is that technology just keeps getting easier. So back in my day when I first started e-learning, we had to code by hand , in these like Excel sheets to get the XML file to work old school. And then now I’m on my phone and I can click on my kids’ pictures and it pops out the background and I’m like, You don’t even need Photoshop anymore!

REBECCA HOGUE
Yeah, exactly, Exactly. It’s funny because, yeah, when I started out, I was I would storyboard and so my first job as an instructional designer was actually writing storyboards that we then handed to programmers who would create the Flash interactions. And an interaction was a page flip. It was considered interactive if you could, if you had to click next. And that was like, yeah, wow, we’ve come a long way.

STEPHANIE SMITH
We have come a long way. Yeah. And I still look at projects and we have that on our team. We’ll have some stuff that we know we’re going to do a cheaper level. It’s probably going to be slide show next button with a quiz at the end versus something… we have one that’s for our cybersecurity program that is scenario based. Instead of talking head based. So it puts you in a virtual environment. You have to make decisions for cybersecurity and then it teaches you as you go. So that’s a very high level, high design, type of course. People loved it!

REBECCA HOGUE
Oh yeah.

STEPHANIE SMITH
Because they’re like, there’s no talking person.

REBECCA HOGUE
People actually learn.

STEPHANIE SMITH
Yeah. And then our cybersecurity team, we have videos, so if they may, if they do something, then they’ll pop up
and then they’ll tell them, but it’s their own people that they work with. So it’s really, it’s a great course. So I’m pretty proud of my team for that one. So yeah, we mean we go the gambit and understanding as you go through your your career, you will have an understanding of. cost versus sometimes we build things cheap, sometimes we don’t. But even understanding the cost of instructor led versus e-learning, right? E-learning is very expensive upfront, but it has, you don’t have to bring in your people from all over the country to take a course, but sometimes that’s needed. So understanding the cost of things, I think that’s something as you go through your career, you’ll start to really understand, but that’s not necessarily something we focus and teach on early on.

REBECCA HOGUE
So the last question I have, which I ask everybody, is what’s your prediction for the future of instructional design?

STEPHANIE SMITH
I think we’re already seeing it. It’s learning in the moment. And this is so this is really interesting. So my company right now is converting to Oracle, and Oracle has a program called Oracle Guided Learning. And it is basically like Articulate or Captivate that’s embedded into their program. So my designers and we’re going to we have a meeting coming up. We we thought, oh, we’re going to build job aids, we’re going to do this. And then we got this tool and went, we have to rethink everything we’re doing, what needs to pop out, and what needs to tell them how to do something while they’re doing it. So to me, and that comes into you can’t frontload training anymore, you’ve got to do it while they need it. That’s when it’s most meaningful. That’s when they’re going to remember it. So I think that’s we saw that with the sort of the MOOC movement, these small bite size pieces. But now I think it’s going to be like, what can we put into MS Teams? What can we put into… it’s almost like the reliving Clippy that would come up. It’s not dumb, but I do think that’s really where things are. It’s going to be when I need it, just on demand, easily consumable pieces. I think that’s really where we’re heading.

REBECCA HOGUE
Performance support.

SPEAKER 0
Yeah.

REBECCA HOGUE
Yeah. And it’s really yeah, in the corporate world, that’s really a big trend.

STEPHANIE SMITH
Yeah. Not to say that people are and I’m always surprised there’s a lot of people, adult learners who love podcasts, who love TedTalks, who do books, and so you still have people consuming some of these sort of bigger mediums or longer, I should say, for an attention span. But I do think that that’s one of the biggest directions we’re seeing on the corporate side.

REBECCA HOGUE
Well, thank you very much. This has been really insightful, really great. Yeah. So thank you for being a guest on Demystifying Instructional Design.

STEPHANIE SMITH
Thank you. It was great. I’m so glad to help out and and help guide people as they come in. And this is a, it’s a wonderful field. I love this field. Makes me happy to go to work.