Before the internet explosion and during the birth of CBT and e-learning roles were much easier to define. I worked in several e-learning development teams that consisted of

Researcher, Programmer/Author, graphic design, technical person, intstructional designer

over time the roles began to blur, the number of people required for each skill changed, programmers learnt photoshop and graphic designers learnt HTML and basic code and this led to much more flexibility, a good thing!

So has the same thing happened in Instructional design, its a term that I still hear but I’m not sure that I know what it means any more. Social media, interactive media, CD-Rom, web, podcasts, sim, games are just a few of the learning technologies that we are working with - I’ve not even mentioned iPhone! Maybe the job title is the same but the role and skills that are required have changed substantially. The instructional designer role is now much of an interactive designer, applying their thoughts, ideas and skills to a range of interactive media. At Real Projects we’ve thrown another set of skills in by using games designers on e-learning projects who bring a whole raft of new ideas and skills including Game Theory..

I’m never comfortable with the idea of keeping people firmly in their role, agile development and the rapid pace of technological changes means that was as well as being an expert in your field you need to have an understanding of what is happening in all the other development areas. Its no use putting forward a design that won’t work technically or isn’t making use of the amazing new technology that is out there. Check out PaperVision for an example. In our office we regularly exchange websites, articles and videos that we’ve seen to others in the team and everyday we seem to find something new.

What next for the instructional designer? I think they still have a vital role to play but the composition of what’s needed is going to change. They are going to need to be able to work on a range of media taking a little bit from game design, graphic design, instructional design and learning design. They could be the members of your team that actually being everything together.

We have just finalised our link up with the Computer Games Degree at NUCA. We have agreed to take a student from the second year for a semester at a time. Sam is our first lucky student! The aim of the link is to provide the students with an insight into e-learning and learning technology and they help us to develop more games based learning within our own projects.

I’ve been interested in games development for sometime and have posted articles in the blog and visited several courses so its great to get the link up sorted. I view the link as a two-way process as I think there is a great deal that the students can teach us about Games Design.

As e-learning developers we are always looking for ways to improve and use new technology and innovations. This link up should allow us to do this. We’ve been talking to Caspian about using their new development tool and the students were very excited about the possibilities of working with the tool.

…finally….during the interview process we asked the students what their favourite game was and why? I can’t afford to buy all of the games that they mentioned but we are going to look out for monster hunter which is something of a classic in Japan!

After talking to the team at Norwich University College of the Arts we are close to setting up a link with the Games Degree. I’ve been interested in Games Design and how the skills of games developers might transfer to e-learning for some time. I’ll have more news about what we are planning in the next few weeks but the RP team and NUCA are excited about the link up. Thanks to Rod Green over at NUCA for helping to get everything set up!

More news on this soon….