QUESTION: Should an employee learning to develop WBT be trained on instructional design principles or just on how to use authoring tools? I think ISD is important but other people in my department disagree.

Your question is a common one, but this is not your classic "chicken or the egg" dilemma. Without question, instructional design skills must come first. Because learner engagement is critical, Web-based training must be rooted in sound instructional design principles.

A similar question arose a few years ago when desktop publishing software was first introduced. At that time, companies made the mistake of expecting administrative assistants to become instant graphic designers. Remember the newsletters published by people who had great new tools but no sense of appropriate design principles?

Or, do you recall the painful experience of being subjected to a face-to-face course delivered by someone with no formal training in either course design or effective delivery? If you're meeting resistance on ISD training from people in your department, why not ask members to share stories of the worst training they experienced as a participant? Ask such questions as, What was your experience? Were you able to remain attentive or did you tune out? How much did you learn? How did the training make you feel? What did you tell others about the course? Would you take another course designed by the same person? I guarantee that everyone will have a horror story to tell, and the responses will make your case.

Another analogy that you can offer is that of Websites that take over your system with fancy introductions or pop-up advertising, or are simply laden with flashing images and colors that give you a headache. Where do those sites come from? Individuals with enthusiasm and new tools but no substantive background in Web design. Would any organization assign the job of designing its Website to an employee with no expertise in professional Web design? No company would be willing to risk losing customers by making such a foolhardy decision.

E-learning is a similar case. Research by The MASIE Center found that poorly designed e-learning can actually damage companies' training efforts. Consider the example of one company's first foray into online learning. Their initial offering was, unfortunately, poorly designed from an ISD perspective. After the employees tried the program, there was no shortage of negative feedback. Even when the organization took a different approach and began to implement well-designed WBT, the employees were so turned off by their prior experiences that they wouldn't try the programs. It took the company two years to recover from that first poorly designed course.

It's important to note that there are dangers at both ends of the spectrum: A boring "page turner" in which learners merely click forward and back to view text and graphics is just as bad as a graphics-heavy course that gives little thought to learners' needs. Bad instructional design is bad instructional design. One resource that can help you learn what to avoid is the PowerPoint presentation "Common Blunders in WBT," available on the Website that's a companion to William Horton's book Designing Web-based Training.

Your organization may need to abolish the paradigm in which one person worked alone to design a course from scratch. Designing e-learning is rarely a solo endeavor. To develop and implement a successful online course, you need a team comprised of people in various roles and with various skills, from instructional design and subject matter expertise to graphic design and IT support. In the team model, the programmer or person who uses the authoring tool is just one team member, albeit an important one.

If your organization ends up taking a multi-disciplinary approach with instructional designers on the team to round out the skills the employee doesn't have, he or she can contribute to the team effort by focusing on learning how to use an authoring tool. But I wouldn't recommend tackling e-learning design as a solo venture. Your department may be setting up the employee to fail.

One final analogy: Remember the days before you had your high-speed Internet connection, when you cursed Websites loaded with graphics that would take forever to download? Ask members of your team if they have similar memories, which are perfect parallels to learners subjected to poorly designed online courses.

People will be motivated by e-learning only when they understand how it benefits them and when they can learn what they need faster or better. No organization can afford to risk frustrating an employee by making him or her wait for a plug-in to install or a video clip to download, only to find out that the item has no instructional purpose.

For curriculum suggestions for instructional designers who want to learn e-learning development skills, see Answer Geek.

Published: October 2001