As an instructional designer, it is often the case that you are not also the content expert. This typically results in sitting down with the content expert(s) and establishing what instructional content needs to be covered and in what sequence. This is what occurred last month near Chicago with one of our instructional designers and one of the content experts.

The meetings were all about establishing the necessary components for the conference without going into too much detail about how each component will look specifically. Once the framework for the instruction is established, then it is possible to develop the specific instructional modules.

Day one consisted of establishing a basic framework for each day of the conference. We had to first define our audience and objectives so we could refer back to them in order to maintain our focus on why we are doing what we are doing. Once we had the objectives and audience defined, we began to look at each day and assign times for each necessary component of the training.

The rest of our time together was geared towards looking more in depth into each component of the training and establishing what they would include, who would be involved in each component of instruction, and what still needed to be done in order to make that happen. Essentially we took what was done on day one and went one level deeper. On day one, we may have said “Kingdom Parable,” but then we looked at what parable we would be discussing and how it tied into the objectives.

To end our time together we looked back over every part of what we had discussed and assigned roles to each person as a next step for the development of the curriculum.