Four Ways to Stay Flexible with Instructional Design Language
Practitioners of Dialogue Education (like me) can sound as if they’re speaking a made-up language filled with quirky turns of phrase when they talk shop in closed circles. “Learners” (as opposed to “students)”, “learning tasks” (as opposed to “exercises”), and “learning events” (as opposed to “workshops” or even “classes”) — these little shifts in phrasing are important to instructional designers who aim to make their curricula more action-oriented, engaging, and immediately relevant to people on the receiving end of their work.
But these same phrases can confuse and alienate clients, employers, and collaborators who aren’t steeped in the traditions of Dialogue Education or the wider world of adult learning. I find it helpful to know how these words and phrases relate to one another and appreciate the implications of swapping them around under different circumstances. In most cases, it’s OK to be flexible with phrasing if you know what you are — and, just as importantly, are not — talking about below the surface.
Here are four examples:
Content and Media — Content and media are easily confused with one another. That’s ok, as long as instructional designers know they can use different media to present the same piece of content. For example, “Ten Steps for Making a Delicious Omelet” is a chunk of content that lends itself to a written medium — in the form of a recipe. But an instructor could just as successfully present the same content as a video, a narrated audio recording, or a live cooking demonstration. Different contexts will call for different media to convey the same chunk of content.
Content — and the media that make it available to our five senses — has its own independent existence as a vehicle for sharing knowledge. Remember, adults learn directly from media all the time, without the intervention of a curriculum (humbling as that may be for an instructional designer to admit). We read books, watch videos, attend lectures, listen to recordings, and observe experts in practice, and we test our fluency with these new skills, concepts, and perspectives in our daily lives.
Some clients will see the practice of instructional design as little more than putting together a list of media and inviting a student to make of it what they will. This approach can lead to content hoarding, with instructors stuffing more and more skills, concepts, and perspectives into a course just to “cover the material” before the clock runs out. Although making a laundry list of media doesn’t make a curriculum, it can be the first step in crafting an effective instructional design. Indulge your collaborators in a moment of content hoarding to get a clear and full picture of all things they believe are needed, and then work with them to edit down to the essentials.
Exercises, Activities, or Tasks — I love Jane Vella’s definition of a learning task: An open question put to learners who have all the resources they need to respond. This little sentence is bursting with meaning for anyone who has spent time exploring Dialogue Education, but it can bewilder clients and collaborators with relatively little background in instructional design. Even the word “task” can lead to confusion, with its negative overtones of drudgery and unwelcome work.
I’ve made my peace with talking about learning tasks as “exercises” or “activities,” and I welcome you to do the same. You might even try calling them “parts” of a curriculum, or “steps” — or even “modules” if you’re designing for a virtual program. For some adult learners, opening a workbook and seeing a series of “exercises” might bring back anxiety-inducing memories of grade-school lessons. Others will find comfort in the familiarity of the phrase, knowing that an exercise or activity is something you do to learn.
I’m an orthodox believer that tasks (or whatever) must prompt students to act. Dialogue Education tells us that you shouldn’t have an “add” without an “apply” (more jargon!). In other words, any introduction of a new skill, concept, or attitude should carry along with it an invitation for students to do something meaningful and tangible with it as a means of achieving familiarity, fluency, and eventually mastery with it. If you’re going to introduce the “Tens Steps to Make a Delicious Omelet,” make sure there’s a way for students to crack some eggs.
Classes, Workshops, or Learning Events — What’s the difference between a class and a workshop? A symposium and a seminar? A tutorial and a clinic? A module and a unit? In my experience, these words get used interchangeably to refer to “learning events,” or moments in time with a clear beginning and end during which an intentionally designed learning experience takes place. I love the phrase “learning event” because it avoids ambiguity. A learning event is just that — an event (we all know what an event is!) when learning is happening (or so we hope). But like “learning tasks,” I’ve found that clients and collaborators can bristle at the simultaneous plainness and unfamiliarity of the phrase.
Even the dictionary struggles to differentiate between a class, a workshop, and any number of other similar words (go ahead, look them up and see for yourself). So, again, I welcome you to worry less about the label and focus instead on the substance. To me, a course, workshop, learning event (whatever) is, at its core, a moment in time made up of one or more learning tasks that have been thoughtfully and intentionally sequenced. Or, to use plain English, a class is series of exercises. And each of those exercises is made up of a bit of content paired with some instructions for students to do something with that content.
Courses, Certificates, or Learning Journeys — By now it should be apparent that I’m building up a hierarchy of concepts in instructional design, and a string of classes will lead us to the next level in the system: a “course.” The phrase “learning journey” has grown more popular over the past ten or twenty years, but rarely as a replacement for “course” or even “program.” In my experience, when a designer talks about a learning journey, they’re referencing a sketch or outline of the route a course will eventually take — a roadmap they scribble down for themselves at the start of the design process that shouldn’t be confused with the end-product itself. I think “course” is a perfectly good thing to call a string of classes; students and instructors course from one class to the next like water coursing through a stream bed.
Many workplace and professional association-based education programs refer to courses as “certificates” (not to be confused with certifications, which are an entirely different topic). In my experience, the only real difference between a course and a certificate is the intentional distribution of a legal-looking document at the end attesting to a student’s satisfactory completion of the program. Credential stacking and skill-based talent management are creating a massive demand for certificates, and students often need some tangible proof of their learning to share on social media platforms like LinkedIn.
