105: We Went LIVE to Talk About Instructional Design with Nadia Johnson, Luke Hobson, and Heidi Kirby!

Holly Owens (00:00:01):

Hello everyone. We are here. It is 6:00 PM kind of on the East coast. We have all finished up our work days and we're here with you and I'm live at Op-ed Tech. We are here with Dr. Luke Hobson, Nadia Johnson, and Dr. Heidi Kirby. And we're super excited to talk to you about instructional design, our favorite topic to, as Luke puts it nerd out on. We're just going to get right into it. Before we talk about all things instructional design, I want each of you to take the time to introduce yourself, tell us all the wonderful things that you're doing. So Nadia, let's start with you. Well, hello, I'm Nadia. I'm Nadia Johnson. I'm a learning designer at and have been the K12 industry for about seven years. Awesome. Heidi you want to go next?

Heidi Kirby (00:01:02):

Sure. I'm Dr. Heidi Kirby. I have been in l and d for several years now and was a college professor before that. So came to instructional design by way of education, a lot of people do. And now I work as an L and D leader and my next role that hasn't even started yet is joining the Good Learning Agency as a fractional chief learning officer and learning strategist.

Holly Owens (00:01:33):

Alright, awesome stuff. I'm sure we're going to talk more about that Luke

Luke Hobson (00:01:37):

And I guess I'll go next. Hello folks. I'm Luke. You probably know me on the internet. It's Dr. Luke Hobson. I am a learning nerd. I'm a senior instructional designer at M I T. I'm also a lecturer at the University of Miami. I'm an author. I wrote two books now. What I wish you knew before becoming an instructional designer and so you want to become an instructional designer and I make a lot of content on the internet talking about designing, learning experiences. That's what I do.

Holly Owens (00:02:02):

Yeah, and it's pretty awesome. A combination of this is the perfect storm of instructional design coming together and ed tech, it's like all this synergy and I'm going to just apologize in advance for the dog that's barking in the background. I'm at home, but we all get that. So I want to jump into it. I want to know, and Luke, because a lot of people have read your book, and Heidi, because I know you and Nadia, I know you very well now, I want you to tell us a little bit about your stories, about how you've got into instructional design and what that was like for you. Just give us some background about that.

Luke Hobson (00:02:41):

Sure. You want me to go first?

Holly Owens (00:02:42):

Yeah, absolutely. Jump right in. Sure.

Luke Hobson (00:02:45):

Not a problem. So kind of weird about how I found myself inside of this type of a educational space. I actually failed out of high school my junior year. I just completely bombed and flunked out. So kind of a fun fact that now I work in m i t kind, weird. Life is strange is all I really have to say about that.

Holly Owens (00:03:01):

We love it. I love that story.

Luke Hobson (00:03:02):

Fast forward several years though. I found myself working at seven New Hampshire University and I was an academic advisor and I was just chatting and doing all these different types of coffee chats with people, happen to chat with one friend and he said that he was an instructional designer. I'm like, well, what the heck is that? He is like, well, you know how you're walking your students through all of these different types of courses. Well, someone has to design those. It's not just professors. There's all this other different forms of support involved and that's instructional design. That's actually what we do here. I was like, I had no idea you can get paid for a living to help with designing online learning experiences. So that quickly became a passion of mine and tried to being able to do that and eventually took a couple years to me to finally crack the code and figure out how to do it. But then eventually I ended up moving on over into that space and becoming an ID at Northeastern University and that's it. It's been happening ever since.

Holly Owens (00:03:58):

Now you're at M I T

(00:04:00):

And

(00:04:00):

Now you teach in a doctoral program at University of Miami, the U.

Luke Hobson (00:04:05):

Nothing makes sense.

Nadia Johnson (00:04:07):

Life does

Holly Owens (00:04:07):

Not make sense

Nadia Johnson (00:04:08):

On these path.

Holly Owens (00:04:10):

Yep, absolutely. Who wants to go next? Nadia, tell us your story.

Nadia Johnson (00:04:16):

Sure, I'll try to keep it short and sweet as much as possible. My story is a little similar. I came from an education background teaching the classroom, and I guess my first introduction to instruction move on was I had a colleague tell me about it when I was teaching. She had started the program at State University. I'm not sure, can you guys hear an echo?

Holly Owens (00:04:49):

Yeah, I'm hearing a little bit of an echo. Let me see if I can do some audio things on the background here. Hold on one

Nadia Johnson (00:04:54):

Second. It's driving, but

Holly Owens (00:04:55):

Keep talking.

Nadia Johnson (00:04:57):

Okay. But she was telling me about instructional design. She just started at Georgia State University and the way she pointed it to me was corporate. She was like, you can build corporate program, running program training program. At first I was like, I'm not for, that's really the route I want to go because I was very passionate and fast forward to the pandemic. I took a role for an online learning academy and my role was really more of supporting teachers, but building out courses because all of our curriculum was now online due to the pandemic. And once I started in Canvas, I was like, I really enjoyed this. I love this. It's fun. How can I do this on time? And so then I thought about instructional design, that club that

Holly Owens (00:05:58):

I had and I pursued it, went to Georgia State University, pursued my masters and instructional design, almost done, and moved into EdTech as a learning designer and here and here we are. All the fun things. All right, Heidi, how about you?

Heidi Kirby (00:06:20):

I love it. I love how there's so many similar parallels to all of our stories and where they overlap. So I was teaching college English and I had done a graduate degree program in curriculum and instruction, so I kind of had an idea of what instructional design was from that program. And then I became pregnant with my son and I was like, I can't keep doing this adjuncting at five different colleges in my area thing. If you've ever done adjuncting, I can't be working or not working while I'm paying for daycare. And so I actually started a PhD program in instructional design when he was six months old. Little wild little extreme of a move. But I did it and I actually attended the program at Old Dominion University and a couple semesters in I was like, wait, I was already doing this as a professor. This is a fun part of the job that I was enjoying. I didn't enjoy the facilitation as much, and so I was able to leverage the skills I already had to land my first instructional design role at NASA of all places. And so that's how I got in

Holly Owens (00:07:33):

So many big names and name dropping. Maria didn't mention, but she worked for Nearpod as a contractor. So a lot of different big negatives here and totally unexpected. That's a great thing in an instructional design when you are transitioning into the role, it's not a ING path. So people always say, well, my story's really unique, and yes it is, but instructional design is like that and into the different stores. So really very unique stories coming from each you. But like you said, Heidi, I do see a lot of similarities between those stories. So what I want to ask is now my mom's up here scolding the dog. This is fun. This is fun. Real life things happen. This

Luke Hobson (00:08:22):

Is what happens when you go live, Holly. Yeah, this is media life. This is a real podcast experience all day. They've been asking, I believe it. Most people hear the edited version, the cleaned up, polished version. This is the raw real stuff that we do as podcasters. This is the

Holly Owens (00:08:38):

Real life authentic version of going live. So one of the things I want to ask, and any one of you can answer this, there are probably a lot of people in the audience, I'm assuming from the almost 300 registrants that we had about the Go live that are thinking about becoming instructional designers, whether that's education or they're in higher ed or they're transitioning out from a different profession. What kind of advice can you give people about transitioning into a role like this? Anybody can pick it up.

Luke Hobson (00:09:11):

I'll go. I talk a lot. So I'll start first with everything. So trying to be able to think about this, the first thing that I would really try to be able to wrap your mind around is thinking about your current strengths, your talents and your skillset sets right now, but you currently do possess because depending upon where you want to be able to go, what you want to be able to do, we always say about how people are trying to transition over into instructional design, but instructional design is an umbrella term. There are so many different types of roles within this learning and development space that you can go into. And you might find that your skillset maybe is not exactly aligned with instructional design, but it could be something else along the lines of more for educational support or as a technologist, a strategist, there's always ever different types of paths.

(00:09:53):

So first thing is first figuring out exactly your strengths, what makes you unique, what do you possess? And then going out and trying to be able to tackle and then to do all of those things. So that's kind of step one. Once you then figure that out, then by all means do all the things that we talk about for updating your LinkedIn profile and the resumes and everything else. But step one is that because I quickly learned about how we have so many different types of job titles that when you're searching for jobs, by the way, and if you're trying to be able to do this via from the instructional design space, you're going to see sometimes that there are exactly two jobs that are called instructional designers. And then you go through and you read everything as far as the qualifications, what the job's actually about, and you're like, it's not the same job. One focuses on this one side with tools and tech and everything, one's much more under the hood and focusing on research and learning science, yet we're still called the same thing. So think about you first and then you can figure out the path you're going to be taking.

Holly Owens (00:10:52):

It definitely varies by company too. I tell people that what people see instructional designers have, look at it. We have an ed tech, we have higher ed, we have corporate, there's nonprofit, there's government, there's so many different types of roles that are available in this space. Who wants to jump in next?

Nadia Johnson (00:11:11):

And to pig me off of that, I always say I think there's a big thing and especially transitional where it's like I have all these transferable skills coming from a future to move into the space. But I think what sometimes we forget is how are these skills are utilized? They're utilized differently in than maybe they were in previous. So I think it's important to understand that yes, you have these skills. We all have skills, but we need to know how they're utilized and make ourselves aware and understand how utilized and then upskill in that space. So I think that's the biggest because project management and communication in another sector or another role is completely different than that same skill, and I do. So I think it's important to go into it knowing that

Holly Owens (00:12:20):

I love it how you talk about those transferable skills. And you can have certain things, and we'll get into this so that you can do as an educator that are transit, you can transition to instructional design. But as an educator, we ought to be careful that you're not saying you're an instructional designer depending upon what you're doing in the space. Because maybe if you're a coach or a technology support individual, yes, you're doing some instructional design, but as an educator, lots of differences there. Heidi, I definitely want to hear what you have to say.

Heidi Kirby (00:12:52):

Yeah, no, everybody brings up really great points and to just kind elaborate on all of them, it is a career shift and whenever you're making a career shift, even if you're coming from education, which is a very popular path, a lot of times people are sold this bill of goods that it's easy or there's a fast way and there's no fast way to change your career. There's just not. It's going to take some upskilling, it's going to take some realization. And to your point about not saying that you were an instructional designer before, not misrepresenting your past because you're afraid of how your background in education will be perceived. It's much worse when I see a resume that has somebody saying, oh, I was an instructional designer at San Pedro Elementary School the last 20 years because I know full well that there's a really great chance that your title's probably not instructional designer there.

(00:13:55):

And to me that says that you haven't done the work or the research or the upskilling to understand the nuance of the difference between what you were doing before. And like Nadia said, connecting those transferable skills to what instructional design is all about. So to me, that's actually a red flag that you don't quite get it yet. And so I would say really understand that it is a career shift and that it does take time, especially because like Luke said, there's all these different titles or there's the same title, but there's all these different roles that have that same title. And so you really have to learn some things and some new things to be able to move within the space.

Holly Owens (00:14:39):

I don't know about y'all, and we're going to get into the different sectors here in a minute, but every role that I've had, even within higher ed corporate on freelance, they're all different. They're all very different.

Luke Hobson (00:14:53):

There's

Holly Owens (00:14:53):

Different responsibilities and roles and things. And speaking of higher ed, Luke, we want to talk about instructional design and higher ed. And I spent the better part of my career in higher ed. So this is a wheelhouse for me for sure. But for you working at M I T and all your experience in this area, how is instructional design impacting higher ed? And also what is it like being an instructional designer in the higher ed space?

Luke Hobson (00:15:19):

It's so interesting because it's constantly evolving. So I was kind of doing a little bit more research and diving into the recent trends and enrollments within higher education. And one of the things that I really do believe in is that right now we really do have the tools, the experience, the knowledge to be able to really create incredible, meaningful and relevant types of learning experiences for students, whether they're going to be for adult students who are coming back to school after a period of time, or for those who are just coming in right after high school and transitioning on over because people are trying to be able to do more flexibility and autonomy. They want to be able to do exactly what they find is working for them and taking the very best approach. And if you have gone through anything with any form of higher education, which most of us have done, no doubt you have taken some form of traditional course and you're like, this wasn't that great.

(00:16:11):

And it's just like, yeah, that needs to shift. We need to move away from this and now make sure that as we are setting people up, that we're setting the up for complete success from all different angles and perspectives about the learning experience. So when I say learning experience, as far as for what someone like myself does inside of this space, I do work with professors and subject matter experts where they're the experts in regards to teaching the forward facing instruction. They know about the content, absolutely, but thinking about things from the backend and thinking about things from the student's perspectives and making sure that everything as far as for the learning and the design is properly incorporated. That's huge. And that's only going to grow as I've now seen with every single university and college and institution hiring for more and more instructional designers, which makes me very, very happy to be able to hear as someone who took some courses online back in the day that were kind, they weren't so great. And I hope that we move away from those and work towards these better different types of learning experiences. And the way to do it, in my opinion, is to make sure that we do have the right support team, hence the instructional designers, the advisors, the professors, and everyone else. And that's what's really going to make this a unique experience for everybody. So that's what I'm seeing in the higher education space. Ollie,

Holly Owens (00:17:30):

I'm half tempted to ask you about AI right now, but I'm going to hold off because I know higher ed has quite the issue with ai. And I know you're going to tell us a little bit about, I'm going to hold off, I'm going to entice the audience a little bit, but all the

Luke Hobson (00:17:46):

Things you mean to say that higher education is afraid of change.

(00:17:48):

Holly, is that what you just

Holly Owens (00:17:51):

implied? No, I'm not saying

Luke Hobson (00:17:52):

No. That's

Holly Owens (00:17:53):

Two words. Two words make higher education, afraid of change, academic freedom,

Nadia Johnson (00:18:01):

Some areas is just afraid of change.

Holly Owens (00:18:04):

Yeah,

(00:18:04):

Absolutely.

(00:18:07):

-So Nadia, I and I want to move to you and then I want to move to Heidi next for the corporate space. So when we're thinking about instructional design in the ed tech industry and what's happening there, any key insights or challenges that are going on that instructional designers are facing in that space that you're in?

Nadia Johnson (00:18:28):

So I'm going to clump this into challenges and opportunities, and I'm going to look at a VE diagram. There's opportunities and challenges, but tech, tech feel industry is, I would say the first one challenge I think would be

Holly Owens (00:18:53):

Nadia, I don't know what's happening, but we're getting the audio is like every other word is coming through. It's like old school Verizon, right? Can you hear me now? I don't know if it's on Riverside's end or your end, but the internet was very choppy. Can you hear me? Let me see. Yeah, it says in your video shut off, but that's okay. Why don't we go over to Heidi and then we'll come back to you. Is that okay?

Nadia Johnson (00:19:23):

Yeah.

Holly Owens (00:19:25):

Perfect. Alright, Heidi, similar question In the corporate space, I'm new to this now and you're very much a veteran in this space and somebody I look up to what to do, I freak out and I'm like, I'll just read Heidi's post and I'll be okay. I'll be fine. So how is instructional design in the corporate space? What are some best practices you could share with people? What is that environment like?

Heidi Kirby (00:19:51):

Yeah, I think the further we get into kind of this economic downturn and where we've got these tech companies laying off, I'm seeing L and D people getting laid off every single day. I think it's more critical than ever that we focus on the utility of what we're creating number one first, right? Because I think sometimes we tend to want to just do what we're comfortable with or do what we think is fun for us to make. I know I was that kind of designer when I first started is like, oh, I really want to create this cartoon. Oh, the gamification. Yeah, I want it to be really fun, but I'm not really thinking about whether it's useful. And I think that we need to not only be concerned about what's useful for our learners, but what's useful for the business. We really need to acumen and really be working with the other teams and in our organization if we want to keep our jobs moving forward because l and d is a cost center and if we struggle to prove that value or that worth and we can't connect what we're doing to the R O I or the organizational goals of the business, we're putting ourselves up on the chopping block as well.

(00:21:07):

And so I think that to your point about bringing up ai, we should not be using AI for content creation. I will die on that hill all day. We should be using it to make our jobs more efficient, to help us with meetings, to help us automate communications that go out after a good training to help us with those logistical or as I like to call them, administrative BSS things that we do so that we can then focus on creating those learning experiences and it works so much better and we can get so much more trust and buy-in from our organization when we can do that and really show the value or the impact that what we're creating has on the overall organization.

Holly Owens (00:21:51):

And when I stepped into corporate recently, I'm going on two years now and I've learned so much, and I still straddle both higher ed and corporate. I still teach, but corporate is so much more, no offense, higher ed, no offense, Luke, so much more innovative and you're able to move things forward, especially if the business wants it. It's really easy to get things approved and get that buy-in. And a lot of people there don't, I'm not designing the learning experiences or working alongside you say higher ed faculty who have this idea of what it's supposed to be.

Heidi Kirby (00:22:26):

So

Holly Owens (00:22:27):

That leaves it very open, and I love that about the corporate space. I really love

Heidi Kirby (00:22:32):

That you can really become the trusted expert. You can really become the advisor in a different way that you can't in higher ed because the people, your subject matter experts think they know at least a little bit about what you do, right?

Holly Owens (00:22:47):

Yeah, absolutely. Now let's go back to Nadia. We love to see your face. The video came back. Let's go back to EdTech. Tell us a little bit more about what that looks like from an instructional design perspective and anything that you've experienced over the years in the industry as an id.

Nadia Johnson (00:23:06):

Can you hear me?

Holly Owens (00:23:08):

We can hear

Nadia Johnson (00:23:08):

You.

Holly Owens (00:23:09):

Yay. Yay. I'm

Nadia Johnson (00:23:10):

Trying to get rid of, it's not working. I

Holly Owens (00:23:14):

Had the echo turned off, but I don't know. It's not echoing on my end.

Nadia Johnson (00:23:18):

Okay. So in thinking about opportunities and challenges, there's plenty of opportunities and challenges within the

Holly Owens (00:23:28):

Space. You

Nadia Johnson (00:23:30):

Me, is it

Holly Owens (00:23:35):

Went in and out again.

Nadia Johnson (00:23:37):

I think it's the echo that's causing this because it's looking fine on my end. Are you

Holly Owens (00:23:41):

Still there, Nadia? Oh, oh, no.

Luke Hobson (00:23:48):

Isn't technology awesome?

Holly Owens (00:23:50):

Yeah, we're having an instructional design chat and technology in the internet is telling us that we're living back in the 1995 with dial up. It happened to me today too on an Amazon meeting. My whole thing cut out. I was like, this is ridiculous. In 2023, no,

Luke Hobson (00:24:08):

Luke is gone. I did a

Nadia Johnson (00:24:10):

Can. Can you see me?

Holly Owens (00:24:13):

I can't see you and I can only see Heidi and Luke and your video has gone away. Unfortunately

Nadia Johnson (00:24:21):

I can't see Luke and I can only see

Holly Owens (00:24:22):

And it's got a little bit of delay.

Nadia Johnson (00:24:25):

So it's weird.

Holly Owens (00:24:30):

It's every other word that we're getting.

Nadia Johnson (00:24:35):

Okay.

Holly Owens (00:24:36):

All right. Well we'll try to come back. You did come back and it was very clear and your image was really clear and it was flowing. But I want to move into some of the other questions that we have. We are talking about technology and as technology is continuing to evolve, especially with AI and different things, and Luke in the higher ed space, what are instructional designers doing? What should they be aware of when it comes to these sort of technologies? How are we going to help people navigate this?

Luke Hobson (00:25:05):

There is a way I'm trying to carefully phrase these things. AI to me, by the way, it is a Kickstarter for ideas. As Heidi was saying, AI is not going to be that you ask it to be able to do something, it then gives you a perfect answer and you're like done, publish, send it out to the masses. We can't rely on AI in that type of capacity. So to me, if I'm using chat G P T or Google Bart or Dolly or any of the other different types of various forms right now or producing these different types of elements to help you out with your job is fantastic. But at the same time, we need to recognize the limitations about everything. There is always going to be a human element from an empathetic perspective, a critical thinking perspective. You need someone to make sure that whatever you are giving to chat G P T or Google Bar, that it actually is giving you the correct types of things that you were looking to be able to see and do.

(00:25:59):

And certainly we've seen plenty of cases where this was not the case and there was a whole bunch of different forms of issues. I think now everyone recognizes that AI is so strange because we've only been talking about Chad G P T for about not even a year. It's been out for longer, don't get me wrong. But I feel like since last December we were kind of talking about it and then it kind of just blew up on the internet around March-ish or so. And then that's when we all started to recognize it. So everyone's aware about fake citations, but of course now G P T four and Google barter connected to the internet. So that's kind of going away from that type of perspective. But overall now what I'm seeing from ai, which is so interesting, is a new ways to being able to use it. Right now I've been creating different forms from scratch. I never thought that was possible. That is mind boggling to me. I was listening to some instructional designers, aspiring instructional designers, and they were saying how great it would be if we could actually practice going through a mockup type of a interview for an instructional design job. So I was like, all right, I can do this. I created some feedback, some guidelines use chat G P T, and all of a sudden I have a simulation about how to go through this for an interview

Holly Owens (00:27:08):

Process,

Luke Hobson (00:27:09):

Which is like, okay, this is cool. So instead of me trying to be able to pay X amount of dollars for customization from an organization, if I can start producing things on my own in this capacity, that's pretty game changing from a higher education perspective. One of the things though, if you are an ID and you're just looking for a way to be able to start with this, certainly I have a lot of content out there about that on YouTube and podcasts and stuff, but what I want you to be able to try to do is just to experiment with AI difference. It is not what you think. If there's a lot of people who I've seen online who have essentially said, I did this one thing, it didn't do what I wanted to do, I'm done. And it's like, that's cool. That's not how the world's going to work.

(00:27:52):

It's not just going to magically go away just because of a one failed attempt. You need to be able to do more of prompt engineering with learning more about how to really use this because AI is already in exactly everything that we do. And I don't know why For some people they're like, what do you mean it's in Grammarly and it's on my smartphone? And it's like, it's here. It's not going away. But we need to be smart about how we use this by far for everything. And from higher education's perspective, one thing that we have not cracked the code yet is talking about from a plagiarism perspective, there's still no way to detect

Holly Owens (00:28:25):

A hundred

Luke Hobson (00:28:26):

Percent certainty of plagiarism. So that's a huge thing with higher ed right now.

Holly Owens (00:28:30):

Yeah, I think that that kind of makes people shiver a little bit in higher education. But also too, on the other side of that, you have to create these authentic types of assessments where the learning experience is something that where you're tapping into what the learners know. It's real world applicable. And I feel like sometimes writing papers and stuff, while that's important, if you're continuing your studies, other things can substitute for that.

Luke Hobson (00:29:00):

So thinking about it from an instructional design perspective, it's changing the assessment, which is one of the things that we certainly do and thinking about from learning experiences is making sure that our learners are on track, and this is of course how we do this with assessments and then providing guidance and support from there. I was talking with a composition teacher the other day and he was asking, he was like, well, how do I do this if AI teach about writing, so what do I do? And I was like, well, you should do what I do with my students because many IDs right now are like, it's going to replace me. I'm like, no, it's not there yet. It can produce things, but it doesn't mean that they're good. So I told the instructor to be able to do that as well was just like, have chat G P T create for you an article, and then I want your class to be able to essentially go and tear it apart, talk about how it didn't write this thing correctly or how it didn't cite this properly or anything like that. Because I do that with my ID students where we create different forms of syllabi and outlines and whatnot, and I say, look at it from a universal design for learning perspective. Did it do things correctly? Are there other different areas we could pursue to be able to improve upon these things? And there's always ways for us to be able to do that. So it's getting more creative with being able to do so, but that's the direction we need to go in.

Holly Owens (00:30:10):

Absolutely. 100% agree with you 100%. Heidi, what is this doing for corporate? I mean, I'm getting the thing I, and I don't do this. I'm not saying I do this. This is a hypothetical situation. Go on my Amazon computer chat, g p t, it has me acknowledged that I'm not sharing any confidential information if I'm on chat G P T or if I'm trying to, how is this going to impact us as I incorporate

Heidi Kirby (00:30:39):

Space? It's a similar problem to plagiarism, but it's just in that it's way heavier, right? Because plagiarism doesn't involve multimillion dollar lawsuits. Sometimes I think it should as a former comp teacher, maybe it should, but you have a lot of companies saying don't use it, right? And that's like the general, the let's not approach it with a sense of curiosity and see what it can be For us, it's like a hard no right now. It's like don't use it because you can't protect our ip. We can't protect our company information and our proprietary. So yeah, to your point, when you go on the Amazon chat jpt from your work computer, it's like, Hey, don't share anything. And so I think that it's a little bit, it depends on the company too. I most recently worked for a smaller organization and so they were more open to the idea and weren't saying, Hey, don't use it, but it was just like, whoa, we dunno what to think about this.

(00:31:44):

And so I think to Luke's point, I don't think we need to be worried about it taking our jobs yet. The corporate sense is like, whoa, this is terrifying. And they're still not even warmed up to the idea yet. And so if we can find ways to use it, it's not going to, hopefully it's not going to be to pump out courses. I've seen some of those, the AI let's pump out an entire course and oh, I actually just saw one on TikTok that was actually using material off of YouTube and then charging people for it. And it's like material that friends of mine that are L and D creators give out for free on YouTube and they're like, whoa, hold on. This is not okay. I think there's a lot of legal layers to it yet that we need to sort out before people are going to be able to use it,

Holly Owens (00:32:39):

Unfortunately. Yeah, me too. I definitely think that for generic things like outlining and stuff, that's what really helps

Heidi Kirby (00:32:46):

Me. Yeah, ideas, brainstorming

Holly Owens (00:32:47):

Ideas. Yeah, sometimes I'm not good with my words and I know what I want to say, but chat G P T says it's so much better than I do.

Heidi Kirby (00:32:55):

Yes.

Holly Owens (00:32:56):

Yeah, for sure. Yep. Well, I want to take a moment and I actually want to pause and I want to highlight our sponsor of this event. So IPR is wonderful. They sponsor our podcast quite frequently and we're so excited that they have sponsored this event for us with all these lovely individuals. So thank you ipr, and I definitely encourage all of you to go out and check out ipr. I'll put a link in the chat and I'll put it out when we share this on YouTube and in the show notes when this becomes an episode. So IPR has over 60,000 clients in more than 150 countries and they've been in the market for 22 years. That's unbelievable. So everything ipr, I use it, I love it. I do lots of webinars with them. I know that Luke's come across it, Nadia and Heidi, it's a really great tool to go check it out.

(00:33:50):

Alright, let's talk a little bit about technology. So when you're jumping into this instructional design role, and we're going to kind of go towards the career path a little bit more, people have a common misconception. I feel like that if you know all this technology, you're going to be a great instructional designer. If you know, articulate ice, Blackboard, Moodle, canvas, captivate, Adobe products, I'm going to be the best instructional designer ever. Canva graphic design. Luke, you were a graphic designer. You are graphic designer. I can tell you do all the fancy things on the web.

Luke Hobson (00:34:27):

Skills have really gone down over the years. Definitely not as good as I was in college.

Holly Owens (00:34:33):

Is this the case? Do you have to knowing all this, does that make you a good instructional designer?

Luke Hobson (00:34:38):

God no. Absolutely not. No, no, that was the answer. Next question Heidi. No, to explain more about that though is that there are so many different types of, well, let me back up for a second. When you think about an instructional designer, we have a couple of different types of paths and technology is certainly one of 'em, but what makes up an instructional designer? We have the learning expert, we have the project manager, we have the researcher, and of course indeed we do have the technologist, but also I would say that we also have a fifth element, which is like the relationship manager, those who work with other people. Instructional design is a people first job. We are people focused. We work with people all the time. There's so much collaboration working with subject matter experts, being able to interview and talk with potential learners.

(00:35:22):

Coming into our courses and working with engineering and support and you name it, we're constantly working with people. So there is a huge emphasis on yes, we know how learning works, but also people is the big, big thing about what is it that we do? Decision making, influencing negotiation, all those different types of elements. That is step one for everything. When you're thinking about from the tools perspective, whatever the project is going to call for, that's the tool you should be using where if we're taking the approach, Holly, that you just mentioned is that the tool comes first and then you build around the tool and that's not the proper way of being able to do. So do we have tools that we'd use and we identify because the organization uses them then? Sure, of course. You mentioned about a whole bunch of, and not to dismiss any of the tools you mentioned.

(00:36:09):

Oh those are fabulous tools and I'm not saying that, but as far as for them not being great or anything of a sort, but every organization has a license to use X, so therefore the ID is going to be using that and that's plenty fine, but I know it's super confusing for the new IDs out there because you read a job posting, depending upon which one you read, it could have listed any of the ones that Holly just described and then some. But oftentimes they're actually competitors with one another, so it doesn't make sense to know all 10 things that all do the exact same thing. So that's kind of this weird

Holly Owens (00:36:43):

Part about that. I'm glad you said that. Yeah, they all do, especially learning management systems, they all do the same stuff just in different ways. Exactly. It's really like if you know one and the basics of one and how to do stuff on the backend, you're going to be able to figure it out in the next

Luke Hobson (00:36:59):

For sure. Exactly. I can train anyone to use blackboard or Canvas. That's no problem. Where I find the struggle is no, we're thinking more about how do you collaborate with ses, how do you pivot when plan A, B, C and D all fail and you're on plan E and you're trying to be able to go from there. It's that innovation, it's that flexibility. It's that relentlessness. That's something that you definitely need inside of a designer and that's harder to find.

Holly Owens (00:37:27):

Yeah, absolutely. I saw Nadia back for a minute. I want to see if we can hear you. Nadia, I don't want to leave you out of this. You have so much to add, that's why you're here.

Heidi Kirby (00:37:37):

I'm in timeout. Can

Luke Hobson (00:37:39):

You hear me?

Holly Owens (00:37:44):

You got your time machine and went back October 25th, 1988. Isn't that what back to the future is? That's the little where he goes back or two or whatever. I just have so much to add to this space. Yeah, it is lagging still. Alright, all Heidi, tell us about technology and how that impacts the corporate space. And if I know, I can't tell you how many LinkedIn messages I get if I learn articulate, if I learn Camtasia, if I learn Adobe, is that what I need to do? Do I need to buy all this? Do I need to get all this to be a great instructional designer?

Heidi Kirby (00:38:26):

I think one of the most common misconceptions is that you also need to build a website for your portfolio. As an instructional designer, I've gotten by for years with a Google Drive folder. Listen, because web development shouldn't be a skill you need unless there's a reason for it. Like Luke saying, there's a reason for every kind of tool. I haven't need to know web development or any kind of programming languages for 99

Holly Owens (00:38:54):

Point. I love that 99% that scares me. That scares me so

Heidi Kirby (00:38:59):

Much from all of the jobs. Sams one random, not normal contract that I did once upon a time and I didn't even really have to know coding for that. I just was taught how, because I was working in an L M Ss that didn't have a front end, so I had to program everything and copy and paste. But outside of that, you don't need to build a website even. And a good instructional designer can be a good instructional designer with a notebook and a pen and it's hard to understand, especially when you're brand new and you're aspiring and you don't know the processes or you don't know what a needs assessment is or you don't know what a smee is. But lemme break it down for you like this. If you wanted to become a photographer and the only thing that you were fussing over is what kind of camera to buy, you could go out and buy the most expensive camera and there's probably a good chance that you'll take some good photos. But what would be even better is if you could learn things like composition or how lighting affects things or how to position people in a certain way that's going to make the photo look amazing. No matter whether you're using a Polaroid or a digital camera, we're all millennials here. We used to use back when we were teenagers and in college used to carry out with us everywhere or a $15,000 camera.

Holly Owens (00:40:26):

I love it that you put it in that perspective because driving the Toyota Corolla can be just as good as driving the Range Rover with instructional design. I mean people do so many creative things with one of our leadership principles at Amazon is be frugal and we have done so many great things just being frugal and so many great projects and things have come out of that aspect. You don't need the most expensive piece of software to do something wonderful and have a great learning experience

Heidi Kirby (00:40:56):

For sure.

Luke Hobson (00:40:58):

It makes you become a better designer.

Heidi Kirby (00:41:00):

It does.

Luke Hobson (00:41:01):

Yeah. You're like, oh, I don't have a budget for this. What am I going to do? You have to get really crafty and that's really where the design element shines. You're like, what learning strategy can I use on a budget, which is not going to cost me anything, but I can still make this awesome. And that's a fun challenge. I like that about it. You're like too, how's this going to work?

Holly Owens (00:41:25):

Yeah, how are we going to piecemeal this together? I haven't seen a technology yet. So for all you founders and people listening that does it. All that we need to do as instructional designers have not seen a piece. It's all like piecemeal. You have to go to this one for that. You have to go to this one for this. So I'm not going to mention any names, don't want to get people in trouble. So I want to shift a little bit and talk about one of the topics that I'm finding, especially in the corporate space that isn't as focused on as much as it should be or in my experience is accessibility. When it comes to accessibility, and this is something that's pretty important because there's laws and different acts and things that surround accessibility. I know in higher ed there's a big push for accessibility and there's different recommendations and their support services been incorporated. It's a little bit absent. So I've kind of trained my team, but Heidi and definitely Luke, I'm going to hear from you about accessibility. How does that work in corporate and what can we do to make it better so that everybody can have access?

Heidi Kirby (00:42:37):

So I think it's been really difficult for me to argue for anything accessible as part of an internal l and d teams. Where I've really been able to leverage just the utmost care for accessibility is for in customer education, which is where I've most recently worked, because you don't know your customer's abilities. You don't know what they're running into on a daily basis. Daily basis. There might be customers using their product, using your product that can't use a mouse. I think it's something some amazing number, like 30% of people will at some point, whether it's a temporary injury or otherwise not be able to use a mouse. And so so many people are colorblind and we see these terrible font jobs that are just hard for me to read and I'm not colorblind. And so I think that it really depends on the organization's commitment to accessibility. But if you can find that and you can embrace that, the unfortunate part is that it automatically rules out some authoring tools, some LMSs to be a hundred percent accessible. Some of those tools get kind of ousted immediately if you're really focused on heavy accessibility.

Holly Owens (00:44:02):

And I think it's something definitely like you're saying, it's a priority. It's something to consider when you're purchasing a tool or a system or something. And I know higher ed, you have to look what you're about to talk about and you have to jump through some hoops and get some things approved before you actually can purchase a tool. So tell us a little bit about accessibility in higher ed and how that all works.

Luke Hobson (00:44:21):

So actually I want to go back to AI real quick. This is where I'm excited about, by the way, for ai, it's accessibility. It's actually designing for people. So when we talk about how we try to design learning experiences for everybody, if we have essentially a sidekick to be able to help us out to do this, this can be done. And we've seen this with a couple of different examples that are mind blowing. I'm not sure if any of you have followed the updates with Be My Eyes. Have any of you seen the updates with that recently? No. Be My Eyes is an app that is designed to be able to help those visual impairments, those who are fully blind, all the way to a slight type of visual impairment. And the way that the app works is that, think about it like FaceTime, is that you have a volunteer in the other side from the Be My Eyes organization, and then you have the person with the visual impairment and they're essentially walking around their house with holding up their phone and the other person is able to actually go into a system.

(00:45:16):

So if they go into their fridge and they pick up a carton of milk, they can just say, can you read this for me? Tell me the expiration date. And the other person on the phone could go in and say this. Now of course this is kind of intrusive. You don't want a random stranger in your house all the time. So my eyes was able to partner with OpenAI to now have the ability to use chat G P T inside of the app. So instead when you go into your fridge, and yes, it can tell you if you're scanning it in of is this expired or not or could do so. But if that is still good, then you can be able to say, skin everything inside of my fridge and then tell me what can I make for dinner tonight? Create for me a recipe of what I currently have in stock that's like, oh, oh, we could, okay.

(00:45:57):

It was like, so now we're helping all people because now thinking about it from an educational perspective, we can help out so many students in so many different ways. Whether they wanted to go and explore culinary or for fitness or for fashion or whatever it is, it's incredible about where this could potentially go. So yes, there is this whole talk about how AI is not great and all these other different things of that nature, don't get me wrong, but this is where I hope that we truly move the needle as far as for with using accessibility, making that a priority, which is a really difficult conversation as we're talking about right now, is that it's always a welcoming and embracing conversation amongst those usually been L and z and instructional designers where we're all like, yeah, absolutely. And then you talk with other people outside of your space and you're like, wait, why don't you feel that way? We need to, if not,

Holly Owens (00:46:50):

And meeting with the resistance.

Luke Hobson (00:46:52):

Yeah. Then it's like, oh, but then people can't enjoy these same things as us. We need to. So it's extremely tricky to be able to guide those conversations and to get that going. But as Heidi was just saying, absolutely, if it does not meet certain types of compliance factors, then it's gone. You're like, Nope, we can't do this. Or if you're going to be going through with something and sometimes something will pop up that you've never encountered it before and you're like, okay, didn't realize this was a feature. How do I make sure that everyone can access this at the same time? So there's always different types of things for you to be able to go through and to work very, I mean, I work extremely closely with the accessibility team and I have all the past universities and institutions of tell me more. How can I improve upon this? How can I make this better? How can I revise things? Because always having a second set of eyes is extremely helpful, especially for the people who know way more than you is fantastic.

Holly Owens (00:47:45):

That's another good point about instructional design. You don't have to know everything.

(00:47:50):

And when you talk about accessibility, I'm sure there's things that I know that Luke doesn't know and Heidi and Nadia, we could all come together and probably know everything about accessibility, but you don't have to know everything. There's just an awareness to this position. You're like the Jack Jane of all trades. Different things are happening, technology's changing. You want to be informed. So that level of awareness is important. I'm glad you mentioned that and I really like the fact that instructional design departments work closely with the student disability services and to make sure that you're designing learning experiences and keeping certain things in mind. There's lots of checklists that float around about accessibility too.

Luke Hobson (00:48:29):

Absolutely. Deia, are you back?

Holly Owens (00:48:32):

Nadia's back and she's

Nadia Johnson (00:48:34):

Clear you're back. I think the problem, I figured,

Holly Owens (00:48:40):

I figured it out

Nadia Johnson (00:48:42):

And this is why closing your tabs is super important. Friends, like close your tabs because I think I had the guest tab and the audience tab open at the same time from earlier just testing

Holly Owens (00:48:56):

Out the

Nadia Johnson (00:48:57):

Tab and it was like trying to compete with each other. And so I think that was the big issue. So that was my fault. Sorry. Close your tabs. Everyone close your tabs.

Holly Owens (00:49:11):

Oh my. Something. So simple. Something so simple. Well, we've been having a wonderful conversation. I want to start wrapping things up here in the last eight minutes that we have together. I know all of us could talk for five hours about this stuff, but I'm going to bed early tonight. So the job market, this is something that I focus on a lot in my LinkedIn posts with my job postings, but instructional design has taken off three years ago pre covid, finding instructional design in higher ed. Corporate was very far and few between, but now we can do job postings Twice a week I do eight. Multiply that by the a hundred and some I've done. That's all the jobs that have become available. So for people looking to get into this industry and going through and all of these jobs are available, how do they navigate this space, whether that's an ed tech, higher ed or corporate, where do they start and what's the best advice you can give them for finding a role in instructional design in your sector?

Nadia Johnson (00:50:21):

I'll go since I've been in the corner. Well, I think the biggest thing, because I've had to navigate this job market recently, and I think the biggest thing is kind of like, I want to say the resume obviously gets your foot in the door, but it doesn't help you to land the role. And obviously what your skills are and how you can sell yourself really is what's going to land you the role. And I think the biggest thing is ditching imposter syndrome. And in order to do that, you really have to do, I think that's the biggest thing I've learned just in working with idle courses, academy action, doing the work, learning upskilling, being involved in the space, networking, learning from others. That's really going to give you the confidence to go into an interview and sell yourself in the space. So I think the biggest thing is ditching the A posture syndrome and for transitioning teachers, stop viewing yourself as a former teacher.

(00:51:26):

Yes you are. Yes, teachers are amazing. We love teachers. I love teachers. I still support teachers, but you have to stop seeing yourself as a transition teacher or a former teacher and see yourself in that role so that you can sell yourself in that role. No one, if you don't see yourself there, you can't convince someone else that you're supposed to be there. So I think the biggest thing is just kind of, especially when the interview, the interviewing piece, you have to be able to sell yourself and you're not going to be able to do that unless you're actively within the field learning and building that confidence with those skills. So that's my piece of advice. I think the resume gets you there or gets you in front of someone, but it doesn't get you the job. So I think that's important to keep in mind.

Luke Hobson (00:52:18):

Imposter syndrome never goes away, by the way.

Nadia Johnson (00:52:21):

No, it doesn't.

Luke Hobson (00:52:22):

I don't want to throw that out there for all people who are like it goes away by the time it

Nadia Johnson (00:52:27):

No, it doesn't.

Luke Hobson (00:52:28):

We still encounter it, even feel on top of the world sometimes you're like, what am I doing here? What's happening right now? And that's a real thing. To add to all those fabulous points, what I'll say is a couple of different pieces of advice about things. For one, you should absolutely, positively be connecting with as many folks as possible. Learn as much as you can, absorb that information. For masterminds, I love masterminds. And if you don't know what that is, essentially you were creating a group to help support one another with their goals. You check in every single week, share what you worked on for your progress. You talk about out loud what you're going to be working on next week, share some tips. And you just keep on repeating that every single week until you hit your goal. I have used masterminds for everything.

(00:53:14):

They help me to stay on track. That also helps me to follow my plan too and to hold me accountable because if I tell people that, Hey, I'm interviewing for this job, I'm going to report back to you by next week, then that's what you're going to be sharing. We're going to be expecting to hear more about what is it that you've actually done. And of course, inside of these different forms of groups, you can share what's working for you and what's not working for you. Because not every single tip is going to be working for people. I'd highly recommend to keep on building out your network. By the way, the more you can learn from those, from following them, seeing their posts. You have three amazing people right here. You should be following all of them to read more about what they're constantly posting and sharing about with things.

(00:53:48):

Include yourself in that. I'm fine, I'm okay, you can find it, whatever. But the point is, follow these amazing people. And then also heavily utilized Glassdoor if you haven't done so already. It's a type of a job website for reviewing and posting anonymous things as well, talking about the organization. If there are organizations that, there was one in particular I can think of in the Boston area that was hiring 12 instructional designers all at once. And I was like, either they are doing awesome or they're the worst place humanly possible to work. And I found out from Glassdoor that there was a new leadership team that came in and everybody quit. I was like, yeah, you don't want to work at that place right now. Give that some time to settle in waving

Holly Owens (00:54:29):

That red flag, right?

Luke Hobson (00:54:31):

Corn wide, no, we don't want to work there. So make sure you're reading those reviews. Yes, take it with a grain of salt, but there are some people who are not going to be happy and leaving those reviews understandably. But for the most part, video shed some light on the interviewing process, talking about the culture, talking about leadership, the benefits, everything of a sort like that. And just try to be able to learn from there. It's definitely going to help you out.

Heidi Kirby (00:54:55):

Great

Holly Owens (00:54:55):

Advice. Absolutely. Heidi, how do you feel navigating this space?

Heidi Kirby (00:55:00):

Yeah, I think one of the important things is everything in moderation. And I think that that's what Luke and Nadia were getting at, right? Study a little bit of the foundational theory practice what you can meet with people, but all of those things need to be combined and you don't want to go too far down the rabbit hole into any one of those things. I remember seeing my friend Sarah posting about don't have a million coffee chats. At some point you're having way too many virtual coffee chats. You're not doing anything productive that's going to help you in an interview. Everything kind of has to have a balance and you kind of have to make a plan for yourself and really be self-aware of where do I need to upskill? Look up common instructional design interview questions. What are the questions you can't answer and what are you going to do about that?

(00:55:55):

And also know that you can absolutely all the things for free. I know that everybody on this call has something that we offer of value, and there's nothing wrong with paying to upscale or paying to be involved in a certain program, but know that you also don't have to and know that if you do, you're making an investment and you need to be really conscious of who you're working with and who you're collaborating with and just really be okay with being picky about that and really know what your goal is because every different professional development service has a different purpose too. So really figure out what you need to upskill in and then go ahead and invest in yourself or plan accordingly.

Holly Owens (00:56:45):

Yeah. I feel like once you find your niche, that's when you start the investing of paying people for their expertise, but this level of awareness where you're at the 30,000 foot view, you don't need to pay for certain things because then you're, again, you're just piecemealing stuff together and you're like, oh, the next shiny thing, the next shiny academy or thing that's happening. But once you zero in, that's when you should really start investing in these different opportunities. For sure. That's what I tell people. I'm like, they say, do you do coaching? Do you do this? I'm like, well, have you figured out where you want to be yet? And they're like, no, I don't know. And I'm like, well, you need to go check out these resources first and then come back to me when you have more of a focus area, because otherwise you're just going to be all over the place. You're going to be wasting money, and I don't want to do that. I want you to meet your goals. Yeah, and

Luke Hobson (00:57:35):

If they just take your money right away from that, then that's a red flag.

Holly Owens (00:57:39):

Yep. Absolutely.

Luke Hobson (00:57:42):

Got to be some checking process in there to make sure it's right for you. Yeah.

Holly Owens (00:57:47):

Well, this is good segue into the final question I want to ask all of you is what are some of your favorite resources that you can share with people who want to be aspiring instructional designers? Please plug all your stuff that you have created because I know, and we all know we're all content creators, that it has taken a lot of hours and a lot of times. So please plug your stuff and just tell us what are your favorite things? Where can people go? Where can they find you? Tell us all the things. Who wants to go first? Who wants to gloat first?

Luke Hobson (00:58:20):

I'll go whatever. I'll be the bad guy. Hi, I'm Luke. I make content on the internet about instructional design. No, so the best piece of content I can probably give for you who are transitioning right now into instructional designers is there is a blog post that I wrote that's called, so You Want to Become an Instructional Designer? I'm turning it into an ebook. It's like 110 pages long. Literally everything humanly possible I can share with you is inside of that one thing. Feel free bookmark and you can go and find that thing and then just keep on going down that road if you want to actually read a little bit more of a different type of insights about things I wish I knew about beforehand. I have a book on Amazon called, so he Wants to Become an Instructional Designer. You can find that as well. But really, if you just Google Dr. Luke Hobson, my blog, podcast, YouTube channel, all that stuff will pop up, and if you really want to dive in deep, I do have a seven week long course that does do that over at Instructional Design Institute, so that's one thing you want to be able to consider. You just wrapped

Holly Owens (00:59:15):

Up. You just wrapped up a cohort, right? Another cohort's the next one, another

Luke Hobson (00:59:18):

Cohort. Start another one starting up in December.

Holly Owens (00:59:21):

Okay. Yep. Just keeps on. We're going to put everything in the show notes that you just mentioned. It'll all be there for people to go out and find. I appreciate the reminder, but, but those are all my stuff. My stuff's in my things. I, Nadia, what about you?

Nadia Johnson (00:59:41):

Can you hear me? I think, yes, you are

Holly Owens (00:59:44):

Clear and we can hear you. It's wonderful.

Nadia Johnson (00:59:48):

So yeah, I would say if you're kind of just starting and want to build a portfolio or, I know that Tim Slade had some awesome resources for building out portfolio. I did mine on Google Sites super easy, and that was awesome for me. I would also say iSpring our sponsor for this episode or this live event. They have great, awesome free resources that you can download and utilize in your journey into id and then as well as LinkedIn. I would say LinkedIn was the biggest piece that helped me to network and learn, and I've been able to chat and learn from others within the field, which has been an awesome experience thus far. So I would say just tapping into your network at LinkedIn and seeing what resources are provided there. Lastly, I'll also say the edup EdTech podcast in which I'm a co-host of. We are always sharing new insights, so keep joining us for all of these awesome conversations and episodes, and you can find me on LinkedIn at Dania Johnson. Yeah,

Holly Owens (01:01:06):

Good ones. I like all of them. Heidi,

Heidi Kirby (01:01:12):

Wrap us up. Tell us all your stuff. The best way to find all my stuff is just to connect with me on LinkedIn, but I'll break it down a little further and say, the website get useful. Stuff com is a place where you can find useful resources for l and d professionals at the time of this recording, though, if you're listening live, it's down temporarily. It'll be up shortly, so don't panic. If you go to it right now and it's down, but coming soon, within the next couple of months are going to be hopefully some self-paced courses and cohort-based courses for L and D professionals to upskill and things like podcasting and id fundamental scenario-based learning, things like that. I also have a podcast called the Building Learning and Organizational Culture or Block podcast, and then the learning Consultancy. I've just joined@realgoodlearning.com. In the next couple of weeks, there's going to be a podcast launch, and the Good Learning podcast is like case studies of people creating good learning. So it's going to be a really, really good one for spending.

Holly Owens (01:02:19):

Oh, I'm excited. I'm

Heidi Kirby (01:02:22):

Excited too. I'm very excited.

Holly Owens (01:02:23):

Yeah, put it on the list. Put it on the list. Awesome. I love everybody in this space, in this community, and I can't thank the three of you enough for taking the time. We did go a little bit over, but I know the audience appreciates you. I appreciate you and all the expertise and all the things that you share for this community, so thank you so much for coming on and sharing all your knowledge and all your tips and your tricks. It's been a lot of fun. A lot of fun. I love this stuff. Thank you for having

Heidi Kirby (01:02:50):

Us. Yes, thanks for hosting.

Holly Owens (01:02:52):

Absolutely. Anytime. I love to host some fun parties.