The Tedium of Instructional Design

Instructional design is not all flashy high-brow consulting and development work. Sometimes you have to do grunt work. Busy work. Administrative mind-numbing repetition.

I’ll share with you a couple examples of what I mean:

• When a company changes their branding and style guide it impacts the fonts, colors, images, and icons in every single deliverable. And guess who gets to convert all of our training materials? Instructional designers! I have spent the past few months getting intimately acquainted with the slide master functionality in PowerPoint and Storyline.

• My team has been experimenting with different captioning and transcript functionality in Storyline, Camtasia, and Premiere Pro. Which means adjusting time stamps and generating .srt files for every eLearning asset. I learned the hard way not to import captions until the script is finalized.

• We have compliance/process docs that get updated every 18 months. I recently volunteered to take one for the team and review our legal documentation, not realizing it was a 32 page document that needs to be cross-referenced with 7 other sources. I do love details, but this takes on a whole other level of minutia.

In short, we are not always changing the world. Sometimes instructional designers are working on trivial tasks for the sake of consistency or compliance or accessibility. It all contributes to the bigger picture, however. Sometimes I even appreciate the brain break from heavy conceptualizing.

View original post on LinkedIn.