Instructional Designer Competencies
From The Foundations of Instructional Technology
Timothy W. Spannaus, Instructional Technology, Wayne State University
Instructional design is a key component of the field of Instructional Technology, and defining the competencies of an instructional designer[1] has been a long-running effort of the International Board of Standards for Training, Performance and Instruction (ibstpi®)[2] along with efforts by ISPI [3]and ASTD [4]for related roles in human performance technology [5] and workplace learning and performance[6] respectively.
This chapter is written (2009) as ibstpi is revising and updating its Instructional Designer Competencies. While the revised competencies cannot be included here yet, the discussion is certainly relevant to that effort. Note that I am not involved with the revision except as a reviewer of the draft competencies.
The changes are a response to changes in the context in which the competencies are used. These changes include technologies, our understanding of the role of an instructional designer vis-a-vis other actors in the learning space, and changes in the learners themselves. Others, including ASTD[7], recognize these changes and respond similarly.
This chapter will discuss the background and recent history of designer competencies, changes in the environment, and finally offer some recommendations for future competency studies.
Contents |
Background of Instructional Designer Competencies
This section offers key definitions, differentiates between instructional designers and related roles, including that of the learner and instructor, and includes examples of competencies from the most recent ibstpi definition while establishing the ibstpi competency model.
First, we must define our terms. These are based on those in Richey, Fields & Foxon (2001).
Competency: "A knowledge, skill or attitude that enables one to effectively perform the activities of a given occupation or function to the standards expected in employment (p. 31)."
Instructional designer: "Those persons who demonstrate design competencies on the job regardless of their job title or training (p. 36)." Further, note that, "Few instructional designers, regardless of their levels of expertise, are able to successfully demonstrate all ID competencies (p. 40)."
The instructional designer is one actor among many in the learning or instructional context. Paquette (2004) identifies five actors or roles in learning, including learner, trainer, manager, designer, and content expert. More than one person may serve in a role in a given learning system and conversely, one person may take on more than one role. Nor are the roles static. Sims and Koszalka (2008) and Dela Teja & Spannaus (2008) agree with Paquette that the learner may take on more of the instructor/trainer or designer's decisions in the web-based learning environment, selecting and organizing learning resources to suit individual objectives and preferences.
Other related roles include, among others, performance technologists or performance improvement professionals (Guerra, 2003) and workplace learning professional (Bernthal, 2004), evaluator, training manager, and instructor.
ibstpi
The International Board of Standards for Training, Performance and Instruction (ibstpi) has defined competencies for instructional designers, evaluators, instructors, and training managers. For the 2000 ID Competencies, ibstpi used a competency model beginning with the job role. It then proceeds to identify job behaviors, accepted standards and a vision of the future, to validated knowledge, skills and attitudes. The result was four domains, comprising 23 competencies, each supported by up to nine performance statements (Richey, Fields & Foxon, 2001). A key differentiator of the ibstpi process from others is the validation step. Draft competencies, prepared by the board and reviewed and revised by an expert panel, are then reviewed and revised by hundreds of designers, recruited worldwide, using a web survey.
The 2000 ID Competencies further identify specializations within the ID role, of Analyst/Evaluator, E-Learning Specialist, and Project Management Specialist (Richey, Fields & Foxon, 2001). Ibstpi later defined Evaluator as its own role in a separate set of competencies (Russ-Eft et al., 2008).
Typical of the ibstpi ID competencies would be this one, from the Professional Foundations domain:
Competency: 1. Communicate effectively in visual, oral and written form. (Essential)
Performance Statements: a) Create messages that accommodate learner needs and characteristics, content and objectives. (Essential) b) Write and edit text to produce messages that are clear, concise, and grammatically correct. (Essential) ... i) Facilitate meetings effectively. (Essential) (Richey, Fields & Foxon, 2001; p. 46-47)
Note some key features in this example. There is a three level structure of domain, competency and performance statement, at increasing levels of detail. The competencies and performance statements are indicated as to whether each is Essential or Advanced, though in this particular example none are Advanced.
Other definitions
The standards or competencies from the International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI) and American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) overlap those from ibstpi. With somewhat different job roles in mind, the competencies serve different purposes.
With fewer statements covering a broader field ISPI's Standards for Performance Technologists (2002) are necessarily more general than ibstpi's. For example, ibstpi's performance statement, "Recommend and advocate non-instructional solutions when appropriate (Richey, Fields & Foxon, 2001, p. 48)" is considered to be Advanced, and many performance statements and competencies related to instructional solutions are rated Essential. While the instructional designer role is concerned primarily with instruction, the role of the performance technologist would include other kinds of interventions as well as identifying a cause to help select interventions and strategies.
The ISPI structure is in three levels, including the Standard, Performance, and Criteria (ISPI, 2002).
The ASTD competencies (Bernthal, 2004) offer a different structure, with Roles, Areas of Responsibility, and Foundational Competencies. The competencies are fairly general, but viewed through a specific role or area of responsibility, become applicable to a particular person and context. One of the four roles, professional specialist, would include instructional designers, among others.
Guerra (2003) identified and validated 58 competencies for performance improvement professionals, finding a disparity between what respondents said they did with what they said they ought to do for the overwhelming majority of the competencies. This finding suggests that competencies may be seen as an ideal, which a practitioner rarely achieves. Richey, Fields & Foxon (2001) explicitly deal with the tension between what is compared with what ought to be by assuming that the ibstpi competencies define how ID ought to be practiced.
New technologies, new opportunities, new job roles
Standards and competencies are products of their time and context. The 2000 ID Competencies (Richey, Fields, & Foxon, 2001) attempted to look forward and incorporate trends in the field, notably growth of ID practice in the private sector, cognitive theory, globalization, technology, and the influence of performance technology. In their recent chapter, Sims and Koszalka (2008) cite technological changes, changes in learners and increased attention to constructivism.
Some of these relate to each other, particularly technological advances and changes in how we think about learning. This linkage of technology and design is explained well by Petroski (1992), who though he is writing about design in an engineering context, is really writing about design in a general sense, as solving problems within constraints (Petroski, 1992). In many situations, designers create new products about which there is as yet inadequate theory and research to conclusively prove that the design will work. In the context of an instructional designer, the advent of the World Wide Web offered new capabilities and resources to the designer, and designers rushed to exploit them. Later, researchers study the innovations to find out if and how they work (Friesen, 2009).
Similar logic links the Web and the rise of constructivism. Friesen (2009) writes about the relationship of mind and machine. Just as behaviorism brought about the teaching machine, and the computer and information processing fostered the cognitive revolution, constructivism depends on the abilities of the computer to support the construction and testing of knowledge, through "representation, mapping, and verification (p. 83)." Key functions become not data but knowledge, and not processing, but construction.
Not that the rise of constructivism has gone unopposed. Kirschner, Sweller and Clark (2006) argued that constructivism (and other strategies using minimal guidance) have failed because they fail to take into account fundamental cognitive processes (Mayer, 2004).
Spiro and DeShryver (2009) took a more nuanced position. Their insight is that cognitivist approaches are best suited for well-structured domains (WSD) and that constructivism is the approach to take for ill-structured domains (ISD). For WSD, most school mathematics or technology, for example, cognitivism works well. Definitions and rules are powerful, accounting for the vast majority of instances, with few exceptions. Constructivism and other minimal guidance strategies fail because the learner hasn't mastered the content s/he is supposed to think about and manipulate. The problem comes with ill-structured domains, in which a reasonable set of definitions and examples (guidance) work for too few real instances and omit too many (Spiro and DeShryver, 2009). When a content expert struggles to create a comprehensive definition, notes many exceptions to the rule, or simply says, "you'll know it when you see it," we're in ill-structured territory, where constructivist approaches work well (Spiro and DeShryver, 2009).
For the competent instructional designer, it is required to be adaptable, fluent in behaviorist, cognitivist and constructivist strategies, and knowing when each is appropriate.
Changes in the learner have raised similar concerns about ID competencies. Prensky (2001) wrote about digital natives and digital immigrants. Tapscott (2009), describing the Net Generation, lists these recommendations for instructional design:
"Design educational programs according to the eight norms. There should be choice, customization, transparency, integrity, collaboration, fun, speed and innovation in their learning experiences. Leverage the strengths of Net Gen culture and behaviors in project based learning (p.148)."
While the ibstpi ID competencies include analyzing the learner population (Richey, Fields & Foxon, 2001), Tapscott's (2009) analysis of the Net Gen population suggests the designer should be competent in developing discovery and student-centered approaches to learning. Clearly Mayer (2004) and Kirschner, Sweller and Clark (2006) would disagree with some of these descriptions, but others, including life-long learning, learning as fun (also in Quinn, 2005), and teacher as facilitator resonate with many designers.
Instructional-Design Theory
For the instructional designer, it is not enough to understand learning theory. Snellbecker (1974) argued that educators need, in addition to learning theory, instructional theories that integrate and synthesize learning theories. Later, Reigeluth (1999) described instructional-design theory, with these characteristics:
- It is design oriented, "focusing on means to attain given goals for learning and development (p. 6)," rather than describing what happens in particular cases.
- It identifies methods of instruction and how the designer would know when to use specific methods.
- The methods can be further analyzed to specify more detailed methods
- The methods are probabilistic, meaning that they "increase the odds of attaining the goals (p. 7)" rather than, in the manner of Newtonian physics, predicting exactly what will occur given specific methods and learning context.
There are challenges in moving from learning theory to instructional theory or instructional-design theory. Clark (2009a) observes that research findings on learning do not necessarily transfer easily into practice. In particular, constructivism as a theory of learning provides little guidance for the design of instruction (Karagiorgi & Symeou, 2005; Mayer, 2009; Clark, 2009b). Indeed, from the radical constructivist perspective, design activities center around the environment and providing a rich set of tools, rather than specifying instructional scope and sequence (Karagiorgi & Symeou, 2005).
Designers following Gagne (Gagne & Briggs, 1979; Gagne, 1977) or other cognitivists analyze the learning tasks, subdividing objectives into more detailed objectives and identifying prerequisite knowledge and skill, classify them according to Gagne's categories and hierarchy, then specify learning activities for each, based on internal and external conditions and Gagne's Events of Instruction. [I acknowledge simplifying Gagne and Briggs in this description, but even the simplified version will serve for the current purpose.]
In contrast to the design and development activities and decisions described here, even the notion of pre-defined objectives and goals is foreign to the constructivist developer (Karagiorgi & Symeou, 2005). Constructivists see the creation of a rich learning environment, including tools, resources, scaffolding, and collaboration as the goal. As seen in the prior discussion, the learning theory behind that design does not lend itself to theory-building of the sort set out by Reigeluth and Snellbecker.
New Directions
As noted above, competencies are a product of the time and context. Over the past thirty years, the lists of schools of thought in educational psychology texts has gone from a dozen or so (Hilgard & Bower, 1975) to more than thirty (Woolfolk, 2009). This explosion reflects a huge broadening of thinking about learning and instruction over that period, implying demands for a much broader range of competencies of instructional designers. The 1986 instructional designer competencies reflected the understandings of design from behaviorism. The 2000 ID competencies were derived from the rise of cognitivism, among other things (Richey, et al., 2001). The Sims and Koszalka chapter (2008) strongly argues for a shift to constructivism and an acknowledgment of the changes on the learner population.
There seems to be little argument on the changes in the population. Tapscott's work (2009), based as it is on extensive surveys, seems compelling, as least as far as it describes the population. His recommendations are not as well-supported, as they are based on the population's descriptions of what they want in instruction, with no reference to any research on learning and instruction. While we as designers certainly want to include in our recommendations an understanding of what the audience says it wants, we are obligated to base design decisions on research.
The second change is rise of constructivism. The Tobias and Duffy (2009) volume brings together a collection of chapters from some of the best researchers in the field of learning and instruction, from all sides of the constructivism discussion. Particularly strong are the chapters by Mayer (2009) and Spiro and Deschryver (2009). These chapters, from opposing points of view, acknowledge the strengths of the other position and the limitations of their own positions.
For the competent instructional designer, the challenge is to remain current in the research and thinking about learning and instruction. Referring again to Petroski's understanding of design (1992), designers and developers as practitioners are often working beyond the empirical data. Technologies, contexts, goals and objectives, and audiences provide opportunities and make demands on designers for which there is no conclusive research guidance. Yes, we may be able to draw analogies to previous technologies and contexts, as we did when the World Wide Web became available to us and we drew on our understanding of computer-based training. We experiment with new designs, agreeing with Petrosky (1992) that each new design is a hypothesis about what will work.
How do we write ID competencies in this changing environment? We acknowledge that competencies are dated as soon as they are published. We specify that designers stay current with research and design according to the best evidence available at the time, and extend their designs beyond the evidence, extrapolating with caution. Unlike Petrosky's subjects, as instructional designers we aren't always creating structures in which failure may result in death. We are creating learning systems on which accurate performance depends, occasionally in life-threatening situations. In low criticality situations, we may be able to push the boundaries. In high-criticality settings, we will want to stay closer to the empirical evidence. Competencies should reflect these critical differences in the stakes.
References
Bernthal, P. (2004). 2004 ASTD competency study: Mapping the future. Alexandria, VA: ASTD Press
Clark, R.E. (2009a). Translating research into new instructional technologies for higher education: the active ingredient process. Journal of Computing in Higher Education 21, 4-18. DOI 10.1007/s12528-009-9013-8
Clark, R.E. (2009b). How much and what type of guidance is optimal for learning from instruction? In S. Tobias & T.M. Duffy (Eds.), Constructivist instruction: Success or failure? New York: Routledge.
Dela Teja, I. & Spannaus, T.W. (2008). New technologies, new competencies. Really? in J. Visser & M. Visser-Valfry (Eds.) Learners in a changing learning landscape: Reflections from a dialogue on new roles and expectations. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer.
Friesen, N. (2009). Re-thinking e-learning research: Foundations, methods and practices. (Studies in the Post-Modern Theory of Education, v. 333) New York: Peter Lang.
Gagen, R.M. (1977). The conditions of learning. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Gagne, R.M. & Briggs, L.J. (1979). Principles of instructional design. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
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Hilgard, E.R. & Bower, G.H. (1975). Theories of learning. (4th Ed.) Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc.
ISPI. (2002). ISPI's performance technology standards. Retrieved from http://www.ispi.org/uploadedFiles/ISPI_Site/About_ISPI/About/Standards.pdf
Karagiorgi, Y. & Symeou, L. (2005). Translating constructivism into instructional design: Potential and limitations. Educational Technology and Society. 8(1), 17-27.
Kirschner, P.A., Sweller, J., & Clark, R.E. (2006). Why minimal guidance during instruction does not work: An analysis of the failure of constructivist, discovery, problem-based, experiential and inquiry-based teaching. Educational Psychologist, 41, 75-86.
Mayer, R.E. (2004). Should there be a three-strikes rule against pure discovery learning? The case for guided methods of instruction. American Psychologist, 59, 14-19.
Mayer, R.E. (2009). Constructivism as a theory of learning versus constructivism as a prescription for instruction. In S. Tobias & T.M. Duffy (Eds.), Constructivist instruction: Success or failure? New York: Routledge.
Paquette, G. (2004). Instructional engineering in networked environments. San Francisco: Pfeiffer.
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Spiro, R.J. & Deschryver, M. (2009). Constructivism: When it's the wrong idea and when it's the only idea. In S. Tobias & T.M. Duffy (Eds.), Constructivist instruction: Success or failure? New York: Routledge.
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About the author
Timothy W. Spannaus, PhD is Program Coordinator and Senior Lecturer in the Instructional Technology program at Wayne State University, Detroit, USA. He served as director of the International Board of Standards for Training, Performance and Instruction (ibstpi) from 1995 to 2004, and was president from 1999 to 2003. He was elected ibstpi Fellow in 2006. While on the ibstpi board, Tim contributed to the 2000 ID Competencies project and book, and was co-author of the Training Manager book. Recent related work has focused on identifying competencies for online learning, resulting in a book chapter with Ileana de la Teja.
