A Snapshot of Instructional Design: Talking Points for a Field in Transition

"World-class instructional designers can help one institution differentiate itself from others in the online learning market.

"Today, we need instructional designers who are equally fluent in learning design, faculty professional development, research methods, and technology," Bowen elaborated. "They must be able to partner with faculty to create, experiment, and publish innovative approaches to teaching and learning. Unfortunately, this looks a lot different than what we have in many instructional design units right now."

Educational development is often embedded in a highly variable campus ecosystem where other units or individuals may take on some of these roles.

What follows is a flexible, four-part lens for evaluating key possible dimensions of a CTL’s work — hub, incubator, temple, sieve — derived from a heuristic developed by others to categorize the literature on purposes of higher education (Stevens, Armstrong, & Arum, 2008).

Because documentation of student learning impacts may not reflect the core objectives of all CTLs — and because this investigation is resource-intensive

Short-term (i.e., “This year, I will see...”) and long-term (i.e., “In 10 years, I will see...) indicators are needed.

While these are excellent frameworks for evaluating instructor-level change, our field is pivoting from an emphasis on 1:1 work or workshops to longer-term, systemic change initiatives

“What are you most proud of?”

These guidelines offer a lens that is distinct to our field and represent emergent directions in our work that are important to capture, particularly larger-scale change initiatives in alignment with college and university priorities.

These guidelines define evaluation as information used for local decision making, which can also make a CTL’s work visible on campus.

Effective evaluation is “a contextually bound practice [that] allows for diversity”