At some schools, the educational developers and instructional designers are part of a single campus center for teaching and learning. At other institutions, these learning professionals are homed in separate organizations, with IDs in academic computing units and EDs in CTLs.

Across the U.S. postsecondary ecosystem, there is an active conversation going on about the wisdom of integrating these learning professionals into a single organization.

In this piece, I provide arguments — both for and against — putting EDs and IDs under a single campus learning organization.

Arguments for ED/ID Integration

• The distinctions in the work that educational developers and instructional designers do on campus have largely eroded. Both learning professionals collaborate directly with faculty on course redesign, both run workshops and faculty development programs, and both read the same learning science research. Integrating these two groups of learning professionals within a single campus organization only matches and mirrors the evolution of the professions.
• On many campuses, educational developers have historically worked most closely with faculty who teach face-to-face courses. In contrast, the growth of instructional designers has been driven mainly by the development of new online programs. Integrating EDs and IDs into a single group can help ensure that the capabilities developed through creating and running online courses get translated into face-to-face teaching. At the same time, faculty teaching online would benefit from the resources and expertise of campus educational developers.
• With the growth of flipped, blended and low-residency courses and programs, the traditional dividing line between “face-to-face” and “online” courses is fast disappearing. Almost all education nowadays integrates technology in some way, and every course taught can benefit from being designed around learning science and core instructional design principles. Given the evolution of teaching and learning in higher education, it makes sense to create integrated campus learning organizations that allow faculty to draw on the expertise of both educational developers and instructional designers.
• Integrating instructional design and educational developer professionals within a single campus organization is a faculty-friendly move, as it provides a one-stop shop for professors to visit. In instances where the learning capabilities are spread across separate campus organizations, it can be unclear to faculty where they should go for assistance in their teaching, or where departments or schools should look to partner.
• Integrated campus learning organizations can run more efficiently than separate units, as the overhead of both management and support can be streamlined. Rather than needing discrete structures for reporting and administrative support, integrated units can invest scarce campus dollars in learning professionals and programs to support teaching and learning.

Arguments Against ED/ID Integration

• While there is undoubtedly a growing overlap between the work of educational developers and instructional designers, it is essential to remember that these are separate and distinct disciplines. Educational developers are part of a cohesive community of practice, as instantiated in the POD Network’s professional conferences and resources. Similarly, instructional designers are integrated into their own communities of practice and professional associations, such as OLC, ELI and WCET. Educational developers and instructional designers have divergent paths of training and professional advancement, and the skills and abilities of EDs and IDs should not be thought of as substitutable or fungible.
• The hands-on, day-to-day and on-the-ground work that educational developers and instructional designers perform significantly differs. At many schools, it is the instructional design team that is the service unit that must be responsive to immediate and urgent faculty requests. IDs work closely with professors on utilizing a suite of learning technologies, from the LMS to classroom response systems (clickers) to lecture-capture platforms. While instructional designers work to meet the objective of building long-term relationships with instructors while giving faculty skills to self-service on the technologies they use to teach, it is also true that much of the work is still responsive and just in time. In contrast, educational developers tend to prioritize deeply planned workshops and the facilitation of faculty learning communities.
• To the extent that instructional design teams are integrated with campus information technology units, IDs enjoy the benefit of working closely with both colleagues in the campus IT unit. As much of the work of instructional designers is mediated through digital platforms, there are substantial advantages in having close ties with the IT group. Digital teaching and learning platforms must be integrated with campus systems (authentication, SIS, etc.). Campus IT units are also often in the best position to pilot new technologies. A campus reorg that combines the ID and ED groups will almost always entail the instructional designers leaving the IT unit, as educational developers are unlikely to join IT.
• In theory, joining campus learning professionals into an integrated learning organization sounds like a great idea. In practice, the experience of schools that have attempted this sort of reorg has been messy. Educational developers and instructional designers come from different traditions, have different training and have different professional communities. While there is overlap in the goals and values of these two professions, they are not identical. Merged groups are likely to suffer through a period of organizational imbalance and cultural discomfort. In an environment of growing needs and scarcer resources, the benefits of a reorg are unlikely to be worth the costs.

What do you think? Have you experienced the integration of ED and ID teams into a single unit? How did it go? Are you contemplating merging your campus ID and ED groups? What are your reasons for doing so?

Since the publication of my book, Free-Range Learning in the Digital Age: The Emerging Revolution in College, Career, and Education, in mid-2018, and after a year of listening, learning and reflecting, I would like to explore and look at the future of learning and work with refreshed eyes and new understandings. I am writing not as a critic but as a friend and longtime observer of higher education, learners, learning and opportunity.

I have, however, been fundamentally changed by the book and its aftermath. Looking past American postsecondary education’s amazing achievements, I now want to focus on those people who have not benefited, those who have remained marginalized and underserved, and to look for ways that disruption in the education and work space can be harnessed to bring them opportunities that have, heretofore, been beyond their reach.

That will be the theme running throughout this series. Disruption of the campus-based model brings with it the potential to fundamentally reframe education and employment opportunity. The development of “opportunity pathways” through higher education to good jobs has been very successful in the years since the GI Bill was passed. A majority of Americans, however, are still denied the higher education opportunity by campus models, traditions and values coupled with broader societal norms. For them, the higher education opportunity pathway was, in fact, an opportunity monopoly that operated beyond their reach.

With that in mind, there are five distinct topic areas that I want to address:

• First, I want to examine how we got to where we currently are regarding the role of higher education and its contributions to opportunity and work. In these blog posts I will discuss the stages of development that higher education, as a driver of opportunity, has gone through since the passage of the GI Bill and where we are, roughly, in 2019.
• Second, I want to discuss some of the essential lessons we can learn from Clayton Christiansen’s theory and examples of disruption. Much has been written, and more said, about Christiansen’s theory. I believe that Christiansen’s analysis contains two to three critical lessons that, if we harness their power, can reframe the education-opportunity debate.
• Third, I want to evaluate the current state of postsecondary education and lifelong learning as the core opportunity driver in America. We have had notable successes. But there is much work left to be done. I will describe the hidden social and economic costs of our current “opportunity structure” in higher education. Yes, it may be the best ever, but is it the best it can be?
• Fourth, turning to the solution side of the coin, I will discuss how disruption can add value to the opportunity proposition and redefine great teaching and learning in the process.
• Finally, I will present examples of new practices and new knowledge that are contributing to the redefinition of opportunity through disruption. There are myriad new services, practices and applications, all technologically enhanced and data driven. Using current examples, I will describe how some of those innovations, riding the crest of the disruption wave, can change the world of learning and work opportunity for the better.

As I write, this seems like a tall, indeed daunting, order. And these will be blog posts, not academic articles or whole books. This is my effort to make sense out of where we are and where we need to go. I hope it will be a conversation that you will join as it unfolds.

In a diverse democracy, education ought to be about learning and building relationships across lines of difference. Does invoking the concept safety help facilitate either of those goals?

Those of us who work in digital learning believe that our work serves a larger social purpose. Our belief system has at its core the idea of education as an engine of opportunity creation. We see digital technologies as a set of tools and methods that can, when properly utilized, be leveraged to expand educational access and increase quality.

Spend time in places where those who work in online learning and educational technology congregate, and you will find a shared commitment to opportunity creation. This belief that technology can be a fundamental force in support of progressive educational values is widely shared across the profession.

This commitment to social justice within the ed-tech and online learning community, however, just may be blinding many of us to the costs of digitization of higher education.

We may be in the situation where technology is driving, rather than ameliorating, educational stratification.

Educational technology and online learning as a cause of educational inequality are not part of our profession’s collective sense of self. It is not supposed to work out this way. Blended and online learning methods, platforms and techniques are supposed to create opportunities for the many, not just the few.

How might digital learning be doing more to concentrate higher education privilege than delivering widespread educational benefits? Evidence for this disturbing conclusion may be found in how both blended and online education are operating across the postsecondary ecosystem.

With blended learning, the idea is to integrate residential teaching with the affordances of digital tools. Traditional courses built around professors teaching students in a room are augmented by the introduction of digital platforms and resources.

These digitally enabled enhancements may take the form of an inverted or flipped classroom, where the professor creates and curates learning materials that the students interact with before coming to the physical class. Professors can then use precious face-to-face time to highlight difficult concepts and to engage in personalized coaching.

The transition from residential-only to blended learning has many other potential benefits. Flipped classes, robust formative assessments and online discussion platforms can help professors create active learning environments. The availability of learning analytics should give faculty visibility into student learning prior to a high-stakes midterm or final, allowing targeted interventions. Simulations and adaptive learning platforms should complement the traditional teaching activities of the professor.

The challenge with introducing blended learning is that it is expensive. The development of blended learning materials and methods increases the number of inputs, mostly in the form of faculty time investment, of any given course.

For well-resourced institutions, the investment in blended learning is feasible. Faculty can be given release time to redevelop their courses. Instructional designers can partner with professors to design a blended course.

At schools with fewer resources, there are fewer supports and incentives to move to a blended instructional approach. Course releases to redesign courses are not available. Instructional designers are not present to collaborate with faculty.

In other cases, less well-resourced colleges and universities may use the availability of digital tools such as adaptive learning platforms and online videos to increase course enrollments. Professors with more students will have less time to provide individual attention. In some cases, the professors may be altogether replaced by technologies and tutors.

The result of all this is that at colleges and universities with more access to resources, teaching and learning are significantly improving. Wealthier schools can maintain small classes while introducing new pedagogical techniques and digital platforms.

The quality of education at institutions with relatively high levels of resources has never been better. Critics of higher education have largely missed this story of improvement in teaching and learning amid all the angst about lazy rivers and climbing walls.

At the same time, the digitally enabled improvements in student learning can get concentrated among the small proportion of institutions that can afford to make these investments. At these schools, digital technology is a complement rather than a substitute for educators.

Similar observations can be made about online education. Anyone who has ever developed or taught an online course knows that more resources, not less, go into creating a high-quality online learning experience. We are at a point where the most fortunate of schools and students can create and experience very high-quality online courses. These are courses filled with loads of faculty engagement, presence and mentoring.

On the other end of the scale, online learning can be a method to save costs by eliminating the most expensive aspect of any educational endeavor — the educator. Professors are replaced by peer-graded discussion boards, computer-graded assessments and self-paced adaptive learning platforms. The quality divide in online education is growing wider by the year.

Those of us in the digital learning profession should grapple with the unintended consequences of our activities. If digital learning is a cause of widening levels of educational inequality, then we should address this challenge head-on.

The digital learning profession, and the associations that represent us, should be placing educational inequality at the top of their research and policy agendas. This may take the form of an elevated level of advocacy for public investment in postsecondary education. Issues of equity should be as present in our convenings and writing as those of progress.

Is it time for those of us in digital learning to discuss inequality?

I’d like to share what I think I know about the professions of education developer, instructional designer, and learning designer. Then I’d like to ask your help in figuring out where my understanding is incomplete, or just downright wrong.

My goal is not to provide a complete description of the work of educational developers, instructional designers, or learning designers. Rather, I’m trying to make sense of where these professional (disciplines) differ, and where they overlap. I’m also trying to figure out if it makes sense to hypothesize that these higher education roles are starting to merge — and in particular starting to merge in the work of learning designers.

Understanding the profession (or is it discipline?) of an educational developer is where I need the most help.  While I work in a Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), I have not yet been able to attend a Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education (POD) conference. POD is the professional association for educational developers.

The academic home for educational developers is usually (but not always) within a CTL. Educational developers collaborate with individual instructors, academic departments, and larger campus units on a range of teaching and learning activities. This work can involve working with individual faculty members in consultations around teaching or educational scholarship (consultations and consulting), or it may take the form of designing and leading workshops or other programming.

The range of activities that educational developers include in their portfolios is too large to fully enumerate. They work at every level of the institution (and cross-institutionally), on tasks ranging from course development and improvement (through design, assessment and research) to organizational development. Educational developers may work with future instructors (grad students and postdocs). They approach the work with a holistic orientation towards human development and organizational effectiveness.

Educational developers often, but now always, come to the work with either a terminal degree in the field, or from a traditional discipline based Ph.D. program. Most educational developers that I know both teach at the university level, and conduct original scholarly research on teaching and learning. Given their administrative, teaching and research roles, educational developers occupy a liminal position between faculty and staff.

This brief description of the work of an educational developer is no doubt incomplete. I would be interested in a similarly concise but more accurate description of the profession (discipline?) of educational developers.

My main question is where and how educational developers overlap and differ from instructional designers, and if the professions (disciplines?) are coming together in the profession (discipline?) of learning designers?

The work of instructional designers shares many aspects of that of educational developers, but with many key differences. Instructional designers often work in CTL’s, but they are still more likely to be found outside of the Center for Teaching and Learning.

While instructional designers may attend POD, POD is not their primary professional association. (In fact, it is not clear to me that instructional designers have a professional association — at least one that accredits and recognizes graduate training programs and credentials).

When I think of of the work of instructional designers, I mostly think about the integration of learning theory and course/program design. Instructional designers are fluent in leveraging educational technologies to align with the research on learning, and in support of the educational goals of the instructors in which they collaborate.

Instructional designers translate well-established methods and frameworks for learning, such as backwards course design and the use of learning objectives, into course design. This collaborative course design work often, but not always, is implemented in blended or online courses — and therefore is mediated by technology.

Where educational developers work almost exclusively for educational institutions (and within higher education), instructional designers can be found wherever teaching or training may occur. Until recently, it may be the case that most instructional designers worked outside of academe (is this true?), designing face-to-face and online training materials and experiences in corporate, government, and other settings.

The growth of online learning in the past 20 years has been accompanied by a commensurate growth in the number of instructional designers on our campuses. Nowadays, instructional designers are part of the normal fabric of university life. They work on residential, blended, low-residency and full online degree and non-degree programs. They can speak as authoritatively about both Bloom’s taxonomy and the ADDIE framework, as well as about the latest developments in adaptive learning platforms, classroom response system, lecture capture technologies, and learning management systems (LMS).

A trend that I’ve observed across higher education, and one that is certainly present at my institution, is for the title of instructional designer to evolve into that of a learning designer.

A learning designer seems to do everything that an instructional designer does, save for somewhat less emphasis on managing and supporting educational technology platforms. The emphasis is squarely on learning. 

Technologies such as the LMS, simulations and adaptive learning platforms remain important tools — but their use is analogous to how a social scientist might use a statistical package for their research. They are only tools. (Professionals with titles such as “educational technologist” are now taking over the selection, management, support and training for learning technology platforms — although learning designers are certainly still closely involved in this work).

Where I’ve observed learning designers more closely resemble educational developers is with the professions (disciplines?) greater focus on departmental / school / and organizational development.  Learning designers are increasingly working across the institution (and cross-institutionally) to advance student learning.

Learning designers are also engaged in their own teaching (as opposed to only collaborating with teaching instructors), and in creating original research. Like educational developers, they not only read the SoTL literature, they are contributing to it.

My sense is that learning designers remain more likely to work in digital environments — on blended and low-residency and online courses and programs — than are educational developers. That technology remains more at the heart of the culture of the learning design profession than it is of educational developers. But I’m not totally sure this is right.

Throughout this post I’ve written profession, followed by discipline with a question mark. The reason I’m doing this is that I’m unclear if educational developers are part of an educational development academic discipline. And I’m not sure if the field of learning design is coalescing into an academic discipline. One that offers a consistent method of advanced training and accreditation, grounded in well understood and generally recognized theoretical frameworks, and which is unified by a commonly accepted set of methodological tools and frameworks.

I know that educational developers get Ph.D.s in their fields, I’m not sure if learning designers do?

Might we see a merging of the work, profession and discipline of educational developers and learning designers?

Are we seeing the profession of instructional design forking into educational technologist on side, and the academic discipline of learning design on the other? And if so, how much does this learning design discipline overlap with that of the educational developers?

Is there a sociology of the postsecondary learning professions?

Do you consider yourself an educational developer, and instructional designers, or a learning designer? (Or all 3?).

What was your path to your academic discipline/profession?

How has your role changed at your institution during the past few years?