Connie Malamed Instructional Design Expertise for Independent Professionals

Connie Malamed helps experienced professionals understand how instructional design makes workplace learning actually work. 

With 25 years in the field, she is the author of Visual Design Solutions and Visual Language for Designers, and runs Mastering Instructional Design and The eLearning Coach.

Connie explains the difference between instructional designers and trainers, why most online courses fail to engage learners, and how user experience tools like personas and empathy maps create learning that sticks. 

She covers aligning learning solutions with what people actually need rather than what is easiest to produce, and why interactivity, real-world scenarios, and audience research are the foundation of effective e-learning.

The conversation is relevant for independent professionals who create courses, training products, or knowledge-based content as part of their practice, and for anyone who has sat through bad online learning and wondered why it had to be that way.

Wisepreneurs explores how women over 50 monetize expertise and build sustainable solopreneur practice.

Books by Connie: Visual Design Solutions, Visual Language for Designers
Book mentioned: Make It Stick by Peter C. Brown, Henry Roediger, and Mark McDaniel

Mastering Instructional Design masteringid.com

The eLearning Coach theelearningcoach.com

LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/conniemalamed/

Transcript

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Instructional Design and Learning Art

Nigel Rawlins 0:36

Hello, and welcome to the Wisepreneurs podcast . My name is Nigel and I work In this podcast, I'll be interviewing a range of guests who will be able to tell you how . Professionals they've themselves . in their field . They're often 50 to 60 years old and want to start their own business . Others who have done it themselves who will give you hints and ideas and tips and maybe the confidence you need to others who will give you hints and ideas and tips and maybe the confidence you need to go out and start your own business . She's She's had 25 years of experience, and she's going to talk to us about effective learning strategies, the intricacies of tacit knowledge and how to create engaging, dynamic learning environments . go out and start your own business . I'd like introduce Connie Malamed , who will explore the art and science of instructional design . Connie's been a pioneer in the field . This episode is incredibly appropriate for anyone who's interested in the field of learning and development , maybe ,welcome wto wto a career in it or you just want to see what's involved in the potential of effective learning design . Welcome , Connie , to the Weisspreneur's podcast . Could you tell our listeners something about yourself and where you're from ?

Connie Malamed 1:44

Okay , sure , and hi , nigel , and thank you for having me . I am from the east coast of the United States , which I'm guessing you can tell from my strange accent , and I have been working in the field of instructional design , which is often called learning design or learning experience design , for 25 years . And are you wondering what an instructional designer does ? An instructional designer or learning designer learns how people learn . Then we come up with the best strategies that we can for helping people in the workplace improve performance . Now , some instructional designers work in higher education or K through 12 , working on educational projects .

Connie Malamed 2:34

I have worked in the workplace environment most of my career , so instructional designers may use their skills to create training products that someone may give like during stand-up training . Nowadays it's more likely to be used for self-paced e-learning that's created with authoring tools . It can be for videos , for podcasts , for articles , for learning portals . There's probably an infinite number of ways that people learn and with instructional design , it can just make it happen more . As someone said , that I'm quoting more expeditiously than if people do it on their own . People learn on their own all the time , but if you want to do something systematic and reasonably and perhaps faster than instructional design is good as the basis Right .

Nigel Rawlins 3:36

So what's the difference , say , between an instructional designer and a trainer ? Are they the same thing or different ?

Connie Malamed 3:44

They can be the same or they can be different . So an instructional designer often works with a team or a loan on a computer . Actually designing and developing learning products For a trainer would be slides , perhaps a participant manual and an instructor's manual . Come up with all kinds of activities , interactions , things like that . The trainer is the one who actually gives the course . It may also be a facilitator or thought of as a facilitator , and they can give that course in person or virtually . But often a trainer has instructional design skills and will create their own materials , which I'm sure is better than using someone else's material .

Nigel Rawlins 4:29

I pay for a lot of online learning across a whole range of things , and some of it can be pretty damn ordinary . I had to say you can see that it's been cobbled together . So how would instructional design skills make it easier for people to learn using some of these courses ? Or maybe the instructor should maybe do something ?

Connie Malamed 4:50

I 100% agree with you . Frequently , online courses or in-person courses are not very exciting . They may not be geared towards learning effectively . Sometimes they are made by instructional designers , so it's not like we're perfect , and sometimes we have horrible deadlines and don't get to do the best job that we could , or zero budget .

Connie Malamed 5:18

But in an ideal world , an instructional designer might make things , might really get to know the audience . Who is this audience ? How do they feel ? What do they think , what are their challenges ? How can we improve their performance at work ? And we would try to make it extremely relevant to those individuals . We would let people test out from things that they already know so they don't have to repeat that boring course every year . We would try to make it extremely interesting , with lots of interactivity , real-world scenarios , and you get that kind of information by actually speaking , interviewing , surveying and observing audience members . So we use a lot of user experience tools like building personas , creating empathy maps . So we use a lot of tools that can help us in an ideal world that can really help us get to know that audience .

Nigel Rawlins 6:17

A lot of places . Now you have to do the training because there's legislative requirements that you know this stuff . Most of that's pretty boring . You have to do roll your eyes . But I have done some where they teach you something and then they give you an assessment and the assessment doesn't match anything and they've left out bits .

Connie Malamed 6:38

That is so frustrating and that really is instructional design 101 to make sure that you have performance-based learning objectives and that all of your test questions are based on those objectives . So anytime you come upon a situation where the assessment has nothing to do with the course , you can be pretty sure an instructional designer was not involved . Because that's the kind of things I'll get from my clients . I often do medical e-learning and they will give me the tests and I'll say , well , where was this taught ? And then they go back and go oh , I guess it wasn't . I don't know why , but apparently it's very common for people to come up with test questions that weren't taught . I have no idea why . Well , tacit knowledge is the knowledge that you learn through experience , and it's very difficult to put it into words , and everyone who was an adult has quite a bit of tacit knowledge . It could be how to raise children , it could be how to cook , it could be expertise at work , it could be your hobby . There's just so many ways that we have tacit knowledge , and it's the kind of thing when you're teaching someone how to cook teaching a child and you say so flip the pancake . You call it pancakes in Australia . I can't remember when I was there there were so many words that were different than what I used . I loved it . It was really fun If you would say , flip the pancake and they say , well , how do you know when ?

Connie Malamed 8:38

Well , you just know when . Then you stop and think how do you know ? You have to go back and back and try to figure out . How do you know ? Oh well , there's some little bubbles on it . That's how you flip it . Or you wait two minutes and then you flip it . You have to go back and actually think how do I solve this problem ? How do I know how to do this ?

Connie Malamed 8:58

So the hardest part is not teaching what's tacit , it's getting that tacit knowledge from what we call SMEs or subject matter experts . That's the tough part because they might hand me slides , let's say , for a medical situation , and I'll say well , how can someone know that this patient isn't getting enough oxygen ? What if they never taught it ? And the doctor or nurse would have to go back and think about how do I know that ? And you have to ask a lot of questions and sometimes you know it's like pulling teeth . You're pulling and pulling and pulling , trying to get tacit knowledge from them . But when we do get it , it's wonderful , it's fulfilling , and then we can pass on those hidden ways that experts solve problems . So it's pretty exciting .

Nigel Rawlins 10:27

Two of my boys are tradesmen one's an electrician , one's a carpenter and you can see from when they started their apprenticeships to now they're obviously grown up and their expertise is incredible . And I might try and do a little job . Well , I wouldn't try and do an electrical job , but I might try and screw a couple of bits of wood together . My youngest son would look at me like I was an idiot . It's just hard to get that perfection . But these guys and tradespeople , they have that expertise , but they have to learn it over a period of time . That's probably where the tacit knowledge is , and I know they talk to each other . If one of them can't figure out how to do something , they'll ring a mate who knows or borrows the equipment .

Connie Malamed 11:10

Well , you know , that's their personal learning environment .

Nigel Rawlins 11:14

We began to talk about that , weren't we ? So let's talk about personal learning , then , because I was a teacher and I quit 25 years ago . So I taught for 16 years before I quit and I had a degree and I also did part of another degree , but I've been in marketing services now for 25 years and I'm basically self-taught and I'm continuously learning , so I'm creating my own curriculum . So is a personal learning environment something like that ? How does it work ?

Connie Malamed 11:42

I thought your boys calling their friends , their mates , to get answers to a question or a problem that they can't solve is a great example of a personal learning environment . So the way an instruction designer might define a personal learning environment is the strategies , the tools , the environment and perhaps the people that might be your personal learning network that you use for self-directed learning , because adults are always doing self-directed learning and the reason we may be particularly interested in this in my field is because some people in their companies and associations and organizations will actually help people develop and design their own personal learning environment . Because we're on the computer all the time , it's so easy for us to try a new app , a new tool , but for people who are not on the computer or their phone 24 seven , they may not really know how to create a personal learning environment . Sometimes in an organization that's something that people teach . I'm not saying it's the most common thing in the world to teach , but it's the kind of thing where you may not think that anyone needs to learn it .

Connie Malamed 13:07

So there are a lot of academics in my field and a lot of people theorizing and one of the models that I really like that seems so simple . It's called the seek sense share framework and it's a model for personal learning environment . So seeking is going out and searching for something that you're interested in and exploring . Sensing is making sense out of it and personalizing it and reflecting it . And I think we do a lot of this unconsciously or not very consciously . So , oh , that does that make sense ? Well , yeah , that kind of makes sense and you stop and think about it and then you figure out how it fits into your network of knowledge and then , in an ideal world with the Internet , is sharing something that you've learned .

Connie Malamed 14:01

And a lot of people are shy and won't do that , but many , many people do . I do and I find it extremely fulfilling . You share , like some great finds , like I'm . Recently I've been researching and getting more into the visual design of accessibility and so if I find a great site , I'm going to share it and people are going . Thank you , this is great . You know , it's kind of fulfilling to help people who are stuck solving the same problem that I was stuck trying to solve and now they have an easy path for doing it . So it's seek , that's search sense , make it meaningful to your personal world and share , be altruistic with it . Remember I bet I know you can remember this , but it seems like so long ago there was actually a time , up until the Internet became big , where people didn't share their knowledge . People tried to hoard it , and I can't even imagine that mindset now . I just can't even imagine it .

Nigel Rawlins 15:02

Because I'm in marketing and sales and things like that . Salesmen who used to go around to the different companies used to have a lot of information that they knew , so in many ways they were well-combinant because they could tell you about what's happening out in the market , whereas nowadays they don't have that knowledge . As you know , when you're going to buy a car or something , you've already got your knowledge , you've already figured out everything and you obviously sometimes know more than the salesperson , whereas in the past it used to be reversed . They were very expert on a lot of things and that's the difference .

Nigel Rawlins 15:37

The only concern I have about this searching bit is there is so much information out there . Now how do you navigate your way through all the noise ? And again

Navigating Online Learning and AI Tools

Nigel Rawlins 15:49

, with all the online courses , there are people and I met you on LinkedIn there are people on LinkedIn with 50 or 100 or 200,000 followers and they've got the best next thing and they can dominate that space . Now I have paid for some of the courses . One of them was just not from LinkedIn , but it was a Twitter one . It was about AI and it was abysmal Compared to another one I paid for half . The price was brilliant .

Connie Malamed 16:15

Wow , isn't that interesting ? Well , I think part of the seeking of your personal learning environment and PLN personal learning network is to have trusted sources . So you're right , I will see things on Twitter and I think I do not know this person . I have no idea if what they're saying about AI is correct , but I do know enough people worldwide because we can get in , be in touch with anyone who I do trust . I've either met them at a conference , I've read their articles and I trust them . So you do have to have a network of trusted resources and if you don't know someone and if you're not sure , I think you just try to corroborate the facts .

Connie Malamed 17:00

We know you can't trust chat , gpt for accuracy , but there are people that you can trust and often when I write something , I'll say something . Let's hear your opinion and on LinkedIn too , and I'll get people who will say I wrote an article about AI tools that instructional designers are using and a few people had the opinion that we shouldn't be using them , that it robs you of your creativity , and I find that interesting . I think one of the things is when you're at least this is the other end of it when you're sharing is you just can't be particularly attached emotionally to your viewpoint , like I thought . Well , you know , I kind of agree with this person . Thanks , you can open up your mind enough to hear someone's point of view and possibly agree even a little , or if not , it's just like okay , you can have the opposite point of view . I'm not trying to convince people , I'm just putting information out there .

Nigel Rawlins 17:57

I'm very curious . I've got hundreds of books here that and I'm constantly reading . I'm trying to get through two or three books a month if I can . I've gone to the Kindle Now . This is where it's going to get interesting and it'll be interesting to see your viewpoint about this . I use the Kindle , I make highlights . It feeds into a relational database which I then go through and tag and I use that to feed into chat sheet PT to help me write my articles , and then it's an eight hour process .

Nigel Rawlins 18:29

But you mentioned before tools that people use on chat and you can't really trust it because what they're doing is they're asking it to write something and trusting the GPT without what I call feeding it with good content and then using their mind . In the past , when we wrote something , we wrote it on paper and we read books and we might have scribbled on the books , so there was a physicality to it , whereas now it's all on the screen and you're using chat GPT . I think it does change things . So , going back to what you mentioned about you asking people and they were saying you should use it or you can't trust it what are your thoughts on that that we've actually moved away to using screens rather than the physicality of the space and the tools around us .

Connie Malamed 19:14

I mean I kind of agree with you if you were saying that perhaps there's something missing with the not writing and scribbling notes which you can do on Kindle . You can take notes , but there is something about the tactile nature of note taking and there's nothing to stop you from doing that . If you're reading a Kindle , you can still , if that's your preference , take notes in a notebook . I know it's not quite the same as being right on that in the margins of your book , so I think that's a personal choice . There was some research that showed that students who took notes on paper , the act of writing made them remember it better than if they take notes typing . So I thought that was kind of interesting on their computer .

Connie Malamed 20:02

I think what I have picked up on and the way I use AI tools is and it's not just chat , gpt , there's hundreds of them usually as a starting point and not as the end point , because of the hallucinations with the chats , with the inaccuracies , and also it just doesn't sound right . It's not personalized , it doesn't have your voice and your voice is pretty important . So as a starting point it's great . I personally I'm not using image generators because the companies aren't compensating the artists but they're stealing their work and not compensating them . In the US there has been a little bit of improvement , but not enough . But it's also taking away jobs from voice actors , so I try to be sensitive to that and not harm others while I'm using this . So , yeah , it's like walking a tightrope . It's not an easy time to be doing this .

Nigel Rawlins 21:04

I think it's pretty exciting . It's roaring along . It is roaring . Yes , I would use AI all day , but I wouldn't use it to put information out there .

Nigel Rawlins 21:19

If I'm writing an article , I might feed it with my notes and say , look , this is my viewpoint . I want you to give me an outline , which it will do , and then I'll say , okay , using my notes , fill that outline . And that's the point . I have to go to work and I might pull out a sentence and I say I really wanted to say this , help me say that . And we might go through five drafts . So it's an intense process and at the end of all , I might put it through Grammarly and then it goes back in . So it can be an eight to a 10 hour process just to write one article , Whereas I think the lazy thing is write me an article about this without feeding it notes . That's the whole point of my reading . The only problem is I'm galloping off in many different areas that I'm interested in . It's not always about marketing anymore . So did you ever read the book Make it Stick ? Does that sort of influence you ?

Connie Malamed 22:12

I know who you mean it was two brothers .

Nigel Rawlins 22:14

Yes .

Connie Malamed 22:15

But I can't remember their names . It was .

Nigel Rawlins 22:17

Make it Stick the science of successful learning by Peter C Brown , henry Rodeger and Mark McDaniel .

Connie Malamed 22:25

Oh , okay , I thought you meant another book that was by three academic research . It was fascinating . Yes , it very much influences me . It's geared towards higher education and students . That doesn't mean that it's not somewhat relevant to workplace learning . However . Many of the examples have to deal with how to study and unless you're in medical school , like when I'm making a course for a hospital , it's somewhat relevant because there are medical students and residents there . But certainly some of the things are relevant , such as spaced learning .

Connie Malamed 23:03

Now , adults in the workplace often do not have to memorize as much as a student does . On the other hand , there are quite a few fields where you really do Medical fields you do In sales . You have to know your products very , very well . So in those cases I especially found their research helpful and one of the items was , instead of cramming , spacing your learning is very important . So I did find that book pretty interesting . There are other ones that are even more relevant to the world of training and workplace learning and I probably depend on them more . But anything that tells us and helps us understand evidence-based learning practices and teaching practices I find useful .

Nigel Rawlins 23:54

Okay , so let's go back to a couple of things . You've written a couple of books on visual design solutions . Why is that important ? The visual side of design .

Connie Malamed 24:06

Okay , the visual side of learning .

Nigel Rawlins 24:07

Yes .

Connie Malamed 24:09

When I wrote the first book , I really did a lot of combining . I did a lot of research and combining cognitive psychology

Visual Design's Role in Instructional Design

Connie Malamed 24:17

and visual design , and the reason it's so important is because much of what we do is e-learning , and e-learning is a visual medium and instruction . Designers and anyone who's creating presentations or trainers who are creating slides need to know how to make these slides aesthetically pleasing and easy to understand and often with no training , it's not that hard . You don't have to be an artist . That's the great thing . All you have to do is learn the principles of visual design and then practice them and over the years you'll become better . I can't stand to look at my previous work from a few years ago . I'm almost always unhappy with it , so you just keep plugging away and trying to get better and better and better and better . So the first book was a lot about cognitive psychology and visual design , the combination of them . For example , here was one of the principles . It was just those principles the research and what to do about it If you want people to get some information quickly . And that , by the way , that first book was from a graphic design publisher , so they'd never heard of instructional design . But I was thrilled to write a book for them , so I did it .

Connie Malamed 25:37

If you want someone to get an idea quickly , whether it's learning or an advertisement , you're going to want it to be as clutter free as possible , with visuals that are not very complex , because it takes the brain a while to figure out what a complex visual is . Icons are just great . They're minimalist , they're simple . So those would be the things that you think about . It's like signage when you're thinking about I want people to get this quickly . And then , on the other end , are things that well , when things are complex , sometimes people find that more interesting , but on the other hand , if it's too complex like a very complex information graphic they just give up . They get too frustrated . So you really have to try to find that fine line . And again , going back to the audience , one of the only ways you can do that is to test your work with some sample audience members , which I guess you do in marketing too .

Nigel Rawlins 26:31

I suddenly realized all the websites I've designed . There's got to be an easier way to very clearly state it without the clutter . And the unfortunate thing is I do work with medical specialists and medical clinics and they want to put all their messages on , and other places want to put all their messages on and it's just a clutter of things . And I'm thinking , you know , I have to say no at some stage and just say , look , can we design this and simplify it so people know that they can see the button where they make a booking ?

Connie Malamed 27:03

Well , you know what it is . I think many people have trouble putting themselves in the place of the audience , perceiving the world as the audience does , and that's just like there are so many careers where that's important and often your clients don't know that . In fact , they might say , well , I'm paying for this , so fill it up with all the messages I want , so that's a problem . Anyway , the second book is the book I really wanted to write the first time . It's for learning professionals and it's geared towards the kind of work that we do e-learning , information , graphics , just some basic visual design principles contrast and color harmonies and visual hierarchies , so those things that , whether you went to school for instruction design or you've learned it on the job or from a community like mine , you probably didn't get visual design training although I do have that in my community , but most people don't . So how are you going to know it if you've never been trained in it ? You can have a good eye , but that doesn't mean you're going to understand how to create a visual hierarchy .

Nigel Rawlins 28:15

I totally agree . That's what I'm starting to learn . I'm fortunate by old age . Even now I'm thinking there's a better way . So you've got a community , Explain your community .

Connie Malamed 28:25

Okay , so the community I started in 2019 , I've been in the field for so many years and I just kept having this idea that I was going to create online courses . I had the idea maybe for five years before I opened the community , but then I realized I saw from my experience and from what I know about social learning is that taking a course and then going away it's not the best way to learn . It really helps if you can have discussions with people , ask questions , post in a forum , try it out in real life and then come back and say you know what ? I tried that technique and it didn't work . Then we tried to debug it and figure out why didn't it work , because I don't know everything . I might have taught something that wasn't 100% accurate . I can't guarantee that something's going to work with every human . So I decided that a community was a more kind of honest way to do teaching . So I have self-paced courses , but people are welcome to ask questions in the forum , and it's a community for people who want to improve their instructional design skills or learn instructional design from scratch . I give live courses to and people like them , but if they're really long and involve people tend to peter out because they're not getting college credit . So I'm learning how to keep things kind of short .

Connie Malamed 29:50

But after doing this for a few years I realized this is just me . So we have two member calls a month . I started hiring monthly speakers and that has just been great Because I know so many really expert people in the field . So if I know someone who's great at gamification and I don't know gamification very well I just hire him and he speaks to the community . So that's a great part of the community and I record those . It's kind of like community with instructional design everything you know . One thing about instructional design it's a huge and maybe marketing is like this stuff . It's a huge Venn diagram . It's cognitive psychology , it's visual design . It's an instructional design process . It's knowing how to write audio scripts , knowing how to write video scripts , knowing how to format things so that people can learn . I mean user experience design . It's pretty endless . So we pull and grab from all different fields and I put it all together in one community .

Nigel Rawlins 30:55

That sounds brilliant . Where does somebody start ? They say they've had a professional career , Like my audience . They're

Starting a Career in Instructional Design

Nigel Rawlins 31:03

older , they may have been a professional and they may think . Well , I'd like to start putting my information out there . Should they do an instructional design course first , or could they get enough through , say , going through one of your programs ? Now , I know you talked about college credits and stuff like that . The sense I'm getting out there in the learning environment is it takes too long to learn something and do something and it's too expensive , especially in America , I think , and it's getting like that here and probably most other countries .

Nigel Rawlins 31:36

Where should they start ?

Connie Malamed 31:37

Okay , well , there's two separate things . First of all , I should say that the community is called mastering instructional design and the website is masteringidcom , but people can get to know me a little bit better from my site that I've had since 2009 , with 350 articles called theelearningcoachcom and podcasts . That's a better way to get to know things . So here's what I would say about somebody who wants to create courses . I feel that my community is really for people who want to start a career in instructional design , or they already are in the field , but they want to improve their skills . That's separate from the people who just want to create a course to provide their expertise out to the masses . I think many of those people can do well without actually .

Connie Malamed 32:21

It's great to learn instructional design here . I am promoting it like crazy , but a lot of people already have an organized set of knowledge and if all they want to do is record videos , I think they can just go ahead and do it without going into my community , which is really for career instructional designers , and there are many , many online courses that tell people how to create courses . I'm sure you've seen them . People would probably be better off just doing that . It's faster they learn how to organize it a little bit better . They learn a few things how to make it interesting , how to make it engaging to people and how to interview the audience and find out what they want . So that might be a better angle for those people who just want to create some courses .

Nigel Rawlins 33:10

Now the interesting thing is I do spend a lot of money on learning . Every year I bought an older one , an older course that was cost me quite a lot of money actually , and the videos went for ages . It's like an hour , an hour and a half . With some of the other ones it might be two minutes , modules of two minutes , and it's quite interesting . Nowadays when I look at anything on YouTube , I'm looking at how long it's going to . How long am I going to have to sit here and listen to this ? What's going on there , do you think ?

Connie Malamed 33:43

Well , I'll tell you in a moment , but let me ask you what's do you prefer ?

Nigel Rawlins 33:46

The short ones chunks of it .

Connie Malamed 33:49

Yeah , chunking information is really a common approach that instruction designers use to help people remember . It doesn't have to be as short as two minutes and there's a buzz term maybe over the past decade that's been big in the world of instruction design called micro-learning , and some people think it has to do with the time . But it doesn't and what it has to do with is a lesson that helps someone fulfill one discrete learning objective , and that's probably what you're getting with that two minutes , unless the person never heard of instruction design or learning objectives . But there is a thing where people learn best , maybe in a range of 15 to 20 minutes , and then you might want to go back and review when your next lesson .

Connie Malamed 34:36

If it's linear , sometimes I make courses where you can just pick any . Like , my visual design course has 14 lessons . I don't expect people to take all 14 . They can pick out the visual hierarchy or color harmonies whatever interests them wherever they are lacking knowledge . So it is probably better for learning to do it shorter . But you don't want it to do it so short that you don't really get a point across where someone hasn't improved their skills or knowledge or changed their attitudes . So there is no one answer other than fulfill a discrete learning objective . That's reasonable , and you get a sense for this thing when you've been in the field for a long time .

Nigel Rawlins 35:19

So , connie , tell me , how would somebody enter the field ? Either they're young or they're older . What steps should they take to enter this field ?

Connie Malamed 35:28

Okay , you know what's really interesting . I think most of the people that I meet who are entering the field are in , or want to be in , a second career . It's just amazing , and most of the programs in the United States , at least for instructional design degrees , are graduate school programs , meaning people have already been through their four years of college . There are a few undergraduate programs , and on the elearningcoachcom site I do have a list of programs in the US which anybody can go to . But why bother ? They're so expensive . Maybe they're better in your country or in their own country . But there are some great ones though , in the US for sure .

Connie Malamed 36:12

So a lot of people don't want to go back to school , just like you said . There are certificate programs in the US and probably Australia where you can just take a limited number of courses and get a certificate . That's one route . Then there are professional associations that teach courses in it , and I know AITD in Australia because I spoke at that conference . I don't know if they have courses , but I wouldn't be surprised if they do . So that's another approach .

Connie Malamed 36:40

In the US , atd has courses and programs . Then there are the private people like myself and small organizations , small companies that teach their own courses . That's another approach I've noticed . I mean , sure , if you want to go get a master's degree , I'm all for getting an education and sometimes that might be the route towards a management position , if someone is interested in that . But for people who don't want to pay the money or take the time , I do find that some of these alternate routes are working , and the key thing nowadays and it was not like this when I first entered the field is to have a portfolio . So if people have a good portfolio of engaging and interactive e-learning products and a nice big project , they show that they can run through the process and they have the documentation to show every step of the process . They are finding jobs in the field . So they learn it one way or another and then build a very nice portfolio . It's not that quick to build a portfolio . It can take months . So are you suggesting ?

Nigel Rawlins 37:51

they're better off going into a company to practice their instructional design for the employees there , or could they make a living as , say , a freelancer .

Connie Malamed 38:01

I do notice that a lot of people do want to become a freelancer . Because you're working , get home well , you know all the benefits , right ? I generally think , if you don't have any experience , that you can gain a lot from working on a team in an organization and doing that for a few years and then going to freelance . I don't think that's going to influence anyone who really wants to freelance . But that's my perspective Because I know I did that . I worked for a few companies , learned a lot . Even though I didn't have anyone to mentor me because I got into the field so early . It still was very helpful to have the support of an organization and to go on those sales calls with a team . There was just a lot that I was able to pick up and learn . But I know if someone has their mindset to be a freelancer , they will and they'll just go and do it and they'll just have to learn along the way .

Connie Malamed 38:56

This is after you've already taken some courses somewhere and learned the process and built . I mean I don't like to even think in terms of courses , because a course doesn't solve every problem . It could be that you need to curate articles for experts and that solves the problem of scientists updating their skills . There are just so many solutions nowadays . It could be that 20 podcasts is the solution . So I don't mean to think in terms of courses , it's just that so often that's what we end up making . Yeah , there's so much happening .

Nigel Rawlins 39:28

And just so much coming at us nowadays it's hard to see the way through it . So , Connie , this has been a fabulous conversation . How would you like people to connect with you ? I can drop you my email address .

Connie Malamed 39:41

Okay , I'm at thee-learning-coachcom . That's where I publish articles and my podcast , but it's also on all the sites like Spotify and Apple Podcasts . And if anyone is interested in a career in instruction design , they can go to masteringidcom . And I also have another site called breakingintoidcom . It's a free 10-lesson or 12-lesson email course about the career . It doesn't teach you instruction design , but it teaches you about the career . I'll give you all the links . I'll send them all to you , yeah , and I'll put all those in the show notes and also you're on LinkedIn , oh right , thanks .

Nigel Rawlins 40:18

And Twitter

Links, LinkedIn, and Subscription Discussion

Nigel Rawlins 40:18

at e-learning-coach and I'm on LinkedIn .

Connie Malamed 40:20

Sure , a message through LinkedIn is great .

Nigel Rawlins 40:23

Yes , okay , so that's probably the first point of contact , because we're dealing with professionals here to connect with you on LinkedIn . So that is fantastic . Thank you very much for taking the time . I know you're busy and I very much appreciate it . So thank you , connie , and thank you for asking me , nigel .

Connie Malamed 40:43

It was a pleasure to speak with you . Thank you for joining me on the .

Nigel Rawlins 40:46

Wise of a Nurse podcast . I really do hope that you're enjoying it . I'd really appreciate if you would subscribe . It would be fantastic and I'd love to hear any feedback .