Skip to content
ADVERTISEMENT
Sign In
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Events
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle On-The-Road
    • Professional Development
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
  • More
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Events
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle On-The-Road
    • Professional Development
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
    Upcoming Events:
    College Advising
    Serving Higher Ed
    Chronicle Festival 2025
Sign In
News

Instructional Design

Demand grows for a new breed of academic

By Dan Berrett February 29, 2016
Instructional Design 1
Eric Petersen for The Chronicle

Rolando R. Garza’s job stands at the convergence of several forces transforming higher education.

As an instructional designer at Texas A&M University at Kingsville, Mr. Garza works with hundreds of faculty members, helping them translate their in-person courses to be offered online.

To continue reading for FREE, please sign in.

Sign In

Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.

Don’t have an account? Sign up now.

A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.

Sign Up

Rolando R. Garza’s job stands at the convergence of several forces transforming higher education.

As an instructional designer at Texas A&M University at Kingsville, Mr. Garza works with hundreds of faculty members, helping them translate their in-person courses to be offered online.

The job requires technical ability, design skills, pedagogical knowledge, and a deft interpersonal touch. “We’re on the same team,” he often reassures academics when he begins working with them. “I’m here to tell you how to teach using distance learning.”

Jobs like Mr. Garza’s are increasingly important and sought-after in academe. Membership in the Association for Educational Communications and Technology, which is composed mostly of instructional designers at the postsecondary level, has grown by 50 percent over the past decade, to more than 2,400. The number of instructional designers attending conferences on teaching online, such as Educause’s Learning Initiative, has grown substantially in recent years as well, as have job postings.

The push for instructional designers reflects a number of broad trends: the growing pressure on colleges to improve teaching and substantiate learning; the maturation of online courses; and the increasingly sophisticated technology available to reach and engage students and analyze their behavior. But that growth has occurred largely under the radar, in part because the job is as multifaceted as it is hard to define.

TAKEAWAY

Instructional Designers at a Glance

  • Colleges are increasingly using instructional designers to improve the quality of teaching, whether in online, in-person, or hybrid courses.
  • The growing use of online learning, increased technical capabilities, and pressure to raise the quality of teaching and learning are combining to drive colleges’ interest in the designers’ positions.
  • Their jobs call on them to be technically adept, fluent in design, knowledgeable about pedagogy, and diplomatically skilled.

“We’re usually behind the scenes, and no one knows what we do,” says Penny Ralston-Berg, a senior instructional designer for Pennsylvania State University’s World Campus, an established provider of online learning. Some instructional designers focus on graphics, while others are technical experts. Increasingly, many are expected to be conversant with learning theory and pedagogy.

However it is defined, at its core the job has the same goal. “Proving that objectives are met: That’s what designers do,” says Ms. Ralston-Berg, who is also chair of the Quality Matters Instructional Designers Association. Only three years old, the association already has nearly 600 members.

The roots of instructional design date to World War II, when the armed forces needed to provide technical training to large numbers of people efficiently. Companies now use instructional design to develop training materials for their employees.

Colleges have long relied on instructional design for their distance-learning and extension programs, which tend to appeal to nontraditional students with family and work obligations. As the proportion of those students increases, online learning has grown more popular, and with it the need for instructional design.

[[inlineframe url="//datawrapper.dwcdn.net/MGDRx/2/" align="left” size="half-width”]] [[inlineframe url="//datawrapper.dwcdn.net/tO9V9/2/" align="left” size="half-width” height="100"]] [[inlineframe url="//datawrapper.dwcdn.net/TXlYr/1/" align="left” size="half-width”]] The share of students taking online courses has nearly tripled, from less than 10 percent in 2002 to 28 percent in 2014, according to the Babson Survey Research Group. During a similar period, Babson also found, the percentage of academic leaders who see online learning as critical to their institution’s long-term strategy went from about half to nearly two-thirds.

ADVERTISEMENT

Meanwhile, technology has embedded itself in the everyday classroom, in hybrid courses and through the learning-management systems used in face-to-face settings. The lines between technology and teaching have blurred, says Malcolm Brown, director of the learning initiative at Educause, the higher-education-technology consortium.

Once, technology was a world unto itself. Now, he says, it’s seen as a tool to serve teaching and learning: “The question,” he asks, “is, What are we going to do with it?”

The answer doesn’t come easily to many instructors. “Many faculty are uncomfortable and don’t know best practices in online education,” says Albert D. Ritzhaupt, an associate professor of educational technology at the University of Florida. The Association of American Colleges and Universities recently reported that only about a third of chief academic officers said most of their faculty members effectively used digital learning tools.

That sentiment may reflect deeper skepticism in academe. Many academic leaders and faculty members see online offerings as inferior to face-to-face courses. It isn’t unusual for instructional designers to have to allay anxiety and suspicions among instructors. The designers’ job is also still being professionalized. A recent analysis by Mr. Ritzhaupt found that 70 percent of job ads for instructional designers didn’t require a graduate degree.

ADVERTISEMENT

Instructional design also has a way of playing into larger concerns about shifts in educational practice. Many theories of instructional design are based in systems thinking, a form of analysis that came out of engineering and focuses on the interplay of components within a larger environment. Instructional design can be seen as a force for standardizing education and its processes, placing efficiency above the individual relationships that are at the heart of teaching and learning.

“The learner becomes a generic factor in the planning of mechanized, scheduled knowledge brokering,” Sean Michael Morris wrote recently on the website Digital Pedagogy Lab. “The instructor, through design, becomes nothing more than a recording, a megaphone, her only nuance the occasional typo.”

Melody J. Buckner, director of the Office of Digital Learning at the University of Arizona, sympathizes with that kind of critique. She worries when systems become more important than the people they are supposed to help. As the doctorate-holding leader of a 12-person office (with six instructional designers, a pedagogical expert, graphic designers, videographers, project managers, and a quality-assurance coordinator), she and her team reflect the growing profile and scale of this work.

Although her staff has technical expertise, the real commodity it offers is helping faculty members use technology in a way that makes for a better educational experience, Ms. Buckner says.

ADVERTISEMENT

It is a laborious process that begins when she and her colleagues meet with faculty members. The first thing she does is ask instructors how they approach their in-person courses. What do they feel most comfortable doing in their classroom? How can she help them make the shift to teaching online?

Her team follows each instructor’s course week by week, distilling their goals and reimagining them in online form. Teaching online may be a different mode than teaching in person, she says, but the underlying goals are the same.

Online courses have the potential to be particularly effective if carried out well, Ms. Buckner says. “You can make online just as rich and engaging, and in some cases more, because online is more student-centered than face-to-face teaching.”

Dan Berrett writes about teaching, learning, the curriculum, and educational quality. Follow him on Twitter @danberrett, or write to him at dan.berrett@chronicle.com.

Corrections (3/2/2016, 2:04 p.m.): This article originally provided an incomplete name for an association. It is the Quality Matters Instructional Designers Association, not the Instructional Designers Association. The article also misstated the title for Malcolm Brown. He is director of the learning initiative at Educause, not director of Educause. The article has been updated to reflect the corrections.

A version of this article appeared in the March 4, 2016, issue.
Read other items in The Trends Report: 10 Key Shifts in Higher Education.
We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Tags
Online Learning
Share
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Email
berrett-edletter-portrait.png
About the Author
Dan Berrett
Dan Berrett is a senior editor for The Chronicle of Higher Education. He joined The Chronicle in 2011 as a reporter covering teaching and learning. Follow him on Twitter @danberrett, or write to him at dan.berrett@chronicle.com.
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

More News

Vector illustration of large open scissors  with several workers in seats dangling by white lines
Iced Out
Duke Administrators Accused of Bypassing Shared-Governance Process in Offering Buyouts
Illustration showing money being funnelled into the top of a microscope.
'A New Era'
Higher-Ed Associations Pitch an Alternative to Trump’s Cap on Research Funding
Illustration showing classical columns of various heights, each turning into a stack of coins
Endowment funds
The Nation’s Wealthiest Small Colleges Just Won a Big Tax Exemption
WASHINGTON, DISTICT OF COLUMBIA, UNITED STATES - 2025/04/14: A Pro-Palestinian demonstrator holding a sign with Release Mahmud Khalil written on it, stands in front of the ICE building while joining in a protest. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators rally in front of the ICE building, demanding freedom for Mahmoud Khalil and all those targeted for speaking out against genocide in Palestine. Protesters demand an end to U.S. complicity and solidarity with the resistance in Gaza. (Photo by Probal Rashid/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Campus Activism
An Anonymous Group’s List of Purported Critics of Israel Helped Steer a U.S. Crackdown on Student Activists

From The Review

John T. Scopes as he stood before the judges stand and was sentenced, July 2025.
The Review | Essay
100 Years Ago, the Scopes Monkey Trial Discovered Academic Freedom
By John K. Wilson
Vector illustration of a suited man with a pair of scissors for a tie and an American flag button on his lapel.
The Review | Opinion
A Damaging Endowment Tax Crosses the Finish Line
By Phillip Levine
University of Virginia President Jim Ryan keeps his emotions in check during a news conference, Monday, Nov. 14, 2022 in Charlottesville. Va. Authorities say three people have been killed and two others were wounded in a shooting at the University of Virginia and a student is in custody. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)
The Review | Opinion
Jim Ryan’s Resignation Is a Warning
By Robert Zaretsky

Upcoming Events

07-31-Turbulent-Workday_assets v2_Plain.png
Keeping Your Institution Moving Forward in Turbulent Times
Ascendium_Housing_Plain.png
What It Really Takes to Serve Students’ Basic Needs: Housing
Lead With Insight
  • Explore Content
    • Latest News
    • Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Professional Development
    • Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Chronicle Intelligence
    • Jobs in Higher Education
    • Post a Job
  • Know The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • Vision, Mission, Values
    • DEI at The Chronicle
    • Write for Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • Our Reporting Process
    • Advertise With Us
    • Brand Studio
    • Accessibility Statement
  • Account and Access
    • Manage Your Account
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Group and Institutional Access
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
  • Get Support
    • Contact Us
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • User Agreement
    • Terms and Conditions
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037
© 2025 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education is academe’s most trusted resource for independent journalism, career development, and forward-looking intelligence. Our readers lead, teach, learn, and innovate with insights from The Chronicle.
Follow Us
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • youtube
  • facebook
  • linkedin