Since instructional designers work in a variety of professions (see careers), the nature of the work instructional designers engage in can vary significantly from one work setting to another. In this section, I'll briefly characterize some major considerations an instructional designer must often have with regard to aspects that tend to be specific to an environment or culture.
An instructional designer working in Business & Industry is not necessarily the project manager, subject matter expert, media developer, graphic designer or computer programmer, scheduler, marketer, deliverer or evaluator. This individual probably works collaboratively to creatively solve instructional problems that meet stakeholder & end user's needs within constraints of the project whether as sole designer or part of a team, and as an employee or contracted laborer. The instructional designer must be sensitive to broad societal and cultural values and behaviors.
In Military Education & Training, an instructional designer must address the needs of the military & the individual receiving training. The designer must effectively employ learning theories and use instructional strategies, and must understand military culture. This designer may create high-stakes instruction that takes place in a classroom or in combat environments, and works on a budget with the tools available to trainees that may be called away at any moment.
Also creating high-stakes instruction is the instructional designer working in Health Care Education: training & educating health professionals (including mandatory continuing education), paraprofessionals or consumers in or for medical schools & centers; government, regulatory & non-profit agencies; pharmaceutical & biotechnology companies & foundations; professional societies & health associations; or hospitals, clinics & other caregiving institutions. This designer understands principles of problem-based learning emphasizing case studies over deductive reasoning based on hypothetical situations, and they use advanced computing technologies like digitized bodies & virtual reality 3-D & multimedia imaging to create realistic trainings & simulations.
Instructional designers in K-12 Education must principally consider how to integrate technology into classrooms. They must be versed in instructional design models, strategies & tools for enhancing instruction with technology, and standards for students achievement & teacher performance while working with available resources, institutional requirements, cultures of institution and subject matter.
In Higher Education, designing instruction tends to be an individual effort, often done by an instructor, a subject matter expert who has no formal training in principles of pedagogy, much less instructional design. The length, depth & breadth of a college course requires the instructor do more than merely pass along information; the instructor/designer must try to affect change in the learner, motivating them to succeed through teaching strategies and learning activities that lead the learner to competence in course objectives, and assess student learning.
An American instructional designer would not find the field to be consistent if they were to move to another part of the world where technology for instruction has been embraced to varying degrees. In Europe, for instance, instructional design is not a stand-alone field but resides as interest groups within the various educational, developmental & technological disciplines that contribute to it. As of 2018, use of instructional design in business & industry and vocational training was minimal, and in K-12 classrooms, using technology for drills, "flipped learning", and applications that monitor student progress was popular. Distance learning & e-learning are important In European higher education, especially Spain, the United Kingdom, France & Germany where MOOCs are built with video lectures, computer-marked assignments, peer assessment, supporting materials, badges or certificates, and learning analytics. Some countries, such as Japan, despite their high-tech and well-developed digital infrastructure, have little standardization in instructional design, a relatively new field there, while in Korea, instructional design is an important feature of the booming corporate world, higher education, and schools.
Learning analytics, the tracking, extracting & analyzing data to improve instructional design can help an instructor deliver interventions to increase engagement, such as identifying and supporting students with a high risk of failure. Learning analytics also raises a host of significant concerns, making it an important issue. Data collection raises ethical concerns about the purpose & use of the collection, and whether having the data makes the instructor obligated to act; legal questions about privacy and ownership of collected data. Ethics in instructional design isn’t limited to the area of learning analytics, though. A code of professional ethics holds instructional designers to standards of obligation toward learners, society & profession in all professional activities.
Open Educational Resources is movement in education that supports freely available resources for classroom use, reuse, revision, and redistribution. It helps to make knowledge accessible to all, rather than be commercialized and sold for a price. There are benefits to the classroom: an instructor drawing from OER will have more diversity of learning activities they can customize than what would come from a publisher’s textbook. The benefit to cash-strapped students is also undeniable.
The first step in creating an effective learning environment and materials is to understand as much as possible about the parameters of the project. Who are the learners? Who else is involved? What are the instructional goals? What tools are available? How complex is the content? How long will the instruction last? What kind of interactions will take place? What platform will be used to house the course? Will learners be enrolled in the course as a cohort that moves together? Answers to these questions are important in creating an environment and materials that are appropriate for the intended audience & purpose.
In creating the instructional environment & materials, aim for consistency and clarity. In online learning situations when the physical cues for expected behavior provided by a physical classroom are absent, the course itself must explicitly lead the learners. All instruction (such as audio, video or text), practice opportunities (quizzes) and application of new concepts (projects) should be appropriate to the instructional goals & the learners, and mechanisms for feedback should be built in, whether showing correct/incorrect answers on quizzes, giving specific feedback for incorrect answers, or offering guidelines for when human input will be expected, as appropriate to the activity.
During the time of delivery, if learners will be engaging in the same period of time, the design should allow for easy monitoring of student progress by the instructor to ensure students are on track, engaging with the material, and showing evidence of reaching learning goals.
Tracking questions and issues that arise during course delivery, and a survey of student perception of learning are valuable in revising and refining instruction to streamline a path to learners reaching learning goals, increase effectiveness of the instructional environment & materials, and reduce learner confusion.