What I Wish I Knew Before Becoming An Instructional Designer with Luke Hobson, EdD

Luis Malbas  
Hello, everybody. Welcome back. Let's see what we've got our third session of the day Road to L&D from teaching to instructional design. Very honored to have this next speech speaker in our in our broadcast today. This is Dr. Luke Hobson. He is from MIT. He's an instructional designer, Program Manager instructor. I've seen him all over the place on LinkedIn and everywhere, just because, you know, Heidi speaks highly of him. And he's always posting really incredible resources over there on LinkedIn. So I'm so glad that he's a part of this event. He's going to be talking about what I wish I knew before becoming an instructional designer, which is one of my favorite questions, something that I regularly ask people in our Member showcases, and I'm actually going to post a link to that because I think that this is a really cool resource for folks that are looking to get into instructional design. It's just all these different people that that I've interviewed over the last few years about their journey in l&d. So check that out. It's all free and posted on YouTube. And with that, Luke, I'm gonna let you take it away.

Luke Hobson  
Awesome. Thank you so much, Louis, is want to make sure can everyone hear me? Okay? Give me a thumbs up. Give me an awesome, there we go. Well, thank you so much. Once again, Louis. And hello, everybody. It is so fantastic to be with you here today. I've been waiting for this for weeks. So I'm absolutely so excited to get nerdy with you, and to talk about everything that I wish I knew before becoming an instructional designer. That was Louis mentioned, my name is Dr. Luke Hobson. I'm a senior ID and pm over at MIT. I also teach online and I produce a lot of content on the internet about instructional design, a blog, a podcast, a YouTube channel. And recently I wrote this book called What I wish I knew before becoming an instructional designer. Now I had absolutely zero plans to write a book I never really thought about it happening is that the more I'm more I talked with folks like yourself, the more and more I kept on hearing the exact same questions. And it started to get really repetitive. I kept on sending over a message. And I was like, You know what, that's to be a better way to answer all these questions. So instead, I took all the most Top Common Questions, I put them in a book. And that's what I ended up becoming. And that is what I'm going to give to you today is a summary of everything from the book and the top five questions that I keep on hearing about. And now we are going to dive on into some of these questions that have been popping up everywhere on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and everywhere else. And a lot of them are pretty complicated. So I want to be able to dive on in with you and share everything that I know. So please allow me a second to share my screen over here.

Now, alrighty, boom. Can everyone see everything? Okay, actually, it's gonna pop in here. Once again, thumbs up. Awesome. Fantastic. Here we go. Alright, folks, we are going to go through now the top five questions that I'm being asked about instructional design. So number one, what does an instructional designer do? Now this is what's so funny to me is that every time I talk to somebody about instructional design, what I keep on hearing about is that they're like, Wow, this must be so cool. It's brand new. I've never heard of this before. And I'm like, Well wait a second here, instructional design. It's actually not new. It's only recently, but the spotlight has been shining upon us in instructional design land. But if we go back in time and open up the history books, instructional design, we can trace back our origin to World War Two, yes, with the army and a university out of Florida, coming together to find a way to be able to train all of the troops that is like the really the very first origin we can actually think about. But then from there, we fast forward a little bit in time, somebody finally had an idea about writing all of this down as far as we're talking about, and documenting the learning process, which came from Benjamin Bloom back in 1956. Now all of a sudden, educators, psychologists and researchers are coming together to figure out more about these learning theories are beginning to emerge. From here though, we dive on in to the very first type of an elearning, if you will, from Plato from 1980. That was a computer based simulation training program. And then if we jump over into the year 2000, that's when online learning really started to begin. This is when you start to see all of those commercials that you just constantly kept on seeing over and over again from the University of Phoenix, ITT Tech and many others that you certainly know. Then we jump ahead of time to 2020 and all of a sudden this thing called a pandemic happens. And then all of a sudden emergency learning, remote learning HyFlex learning all of these things started to emerge. Now as many of You probably know this is not online learning. This was emergency situational learning, with people doing the very best at what they could do with the resources at hand and time, energy and everything else that was available. So what I am calling this era that we are still currently in is from 2020 to 22, which is the instructional design, boom, I'm just making this up. But this is what is currently happening is that right now, more jobs than ever are being posted about instructional design. And every single type of organization is hiring for an instructional design role. I've seen them from Apple, Google, Tesla, Twitter, Spotify, you name it. And then of course, from everything in higher ed, every single type of school is currently hiring for instructional designers. So let's go back to this actual question here. Now that we've had a brief history lesson, what does an instructional designer do, and this is what I say, when I introduce myself to somebody like a subject matter expert, or a professor, or someone who just has really no idea why it is this field actually is, what I say is that I understand how people learn online. And I use this knowledge to work with a subject matter expert or a professor, and I extract the knowledge out of our heads and form an equal partnership with them in order for us to create a meaningful learning experience. This then leads us together to designing and developing curricula, resources and materials. And of course, we need our students to know and our learners to know why they are taking these courses in the first place. So obviously, they need to show transparency and a link and align to course outcomes, to competencies and to skills, please feel free to steal that and use that however, you may because it is going to come up as you're becoming an instructional designer. And if you already are an instructional designer, I'm sure you've had to say something like this many, many times over. So let's think about instructional design as well. And you've probably seen online about how instructional designers wear many hats. Because it's true is there's not just like one thing that it is that we do. We are the learning experts. But we're also the relationship managers are working with several other different types of departments and subject matter experts around the organization. We're also the project managers, we have to make sure that we are hitting our deadlines and that we are staying on budget and on task. And also, we are the researchers, we are the Tech Wizards. That is what we do. We need to be innovative, we need to be one step ahead of the game, and constantly in the know. And this type of sphere to me, is an instructional designer. Now, what are the pros and cons of instructional design? Because of course, I love instructional design. That's why I'm currently on this call of 100. And something of you who are currently on here, which is absolutely fantastic, by the way to hear so much interest in this field. But I also I want to be real with you. It's a job. And just like with any other job, there are some goods and of course there are some Bad's. So let me level with you here and talk more about both as first talking about the pros. The Pro by far is that your creative opportunities are endless. In what other worlds can you get paid to do a job where you're designing a type of learning experience for someone. It's so cool. It is by far the coolest thing I've ever done and why I love this field so much. And of course, you get to work with a subject matter expert and be able to figure out well, how exactly are we going to design this? Is it going to be scenario based or project based? Is it going to be a team? Is it going to be gamification or simulation? Are we using XR? What exactly are we doing to make this relevant and engaging and meaningful for our learners. And that's what's something which is so fascinating to me about this job. Now, to give you an example, one of the courses I was recently developing was a course in a leadership program on critical thinking. Now this course was just starting to come up right as the pandemic was emerging in 2019. And I could see the writing on the wall, right? Was this like, oh my gosh, this is what's going to happen. This is going to become a thing for a couple of years at least. And sure enough, it still is. But what I was seeing though, is this like well, we're all going remote, what's going to happen to an organization that has never gone remote before? What are they going to do? Um, a light bulb moment went off inside of my head of doing all this research and I was like, You know what, I'm going to make an assessment, I'm going to make a scenario based problem. And I'm going to ask these new future leaders to put themselves in the position of somebody who's been assigned to a committee and this committee is going to determine when it's safe to go back to work and if they want to make remote working a permanent option. Now of course as all this just started to happen everything for people that they were submitting the assessments for it was just on fire people felt very strongly about working from home one way or the other. And it was so crazy to see and then as I was doing the exit interviews with my learner's because I absolutely have to do that as a part of everything that you should be doing as well as talking to students getting getting their feedback, as I was talking with them. I was like, so you know, what do you think? And they're all like, how did you know we're gonna work from home, like, we didn't even know that was gonna be a thing. I was like, Well, I was doing the research and looking around, and I figured you might be encountering this. And that is when I know about learning is taking place, and that people were super engaged with everything for the process. Another pro to me is sneeze. Actually, I know, if you read online, sometimes you're gonna read things about how there's some negative perceptions about sneeze out there. And really, I've worked with some incredible people, and maybe 1% of the time, the PSNI I worked with was really not so great to work with, these are going to become people who are going to become your allies, they become your champions, because if you do a fantastic job, well guess what they're going to tell another person in the organization and then another and then another admin, sure enough, you're going to be seen in a much more favorable spotlight throughout the organization. And mass is going to help you to advance in your career over time. Now also, you're a lifelong learner, you're always going to be learning, I work at a super mega nerd school, so many engineering courses, so many courses that I knew literally nothing about, until I started to research and more talk with experts kept on diving on into the content. So I've been able to make some crazy courses on 3d printing and cybersecurity and like, you know, you name it, all these crazy, awesome new types of tech courses are coming about. And this is something that I love to do, always learning more and using this knowledge and just the day to day and thinking about this as far as for a transferable skill. One of the reasons why I actually got this job over here at MIT is that previously, I worked at Northeastern and I partnered with them to make an accelerated degree program with General Electric, hey, a whole bunch of engineering courses. Now all of a sudden, I'm like, hey, I can put this into my tool belts that I know how to design these courses. And then when the opportunity MIT Emerg, that's when everything kind of just made sense for me to go from one area to another. Now let's talk about the cons. And this is definitely kind of like a it depends clause, I guess I'll say because it's not for every single type of instructional design job. But this is what I encountered though, in the years that I've been an instructional designer. First and foremost is the schedule, depending upon the month, the week, the day, your schedule could be drastically different. I have never had a schedule that is always smooth sailing. And totally normal, something is coming about sit there is going to be a brand new course launch or a marketing push. Or if I'm running courses, say more in a maintenance mode, but I'm dealing with like 12 courses at a time, my schedule is usually not the same. That's why sometimes you're gonna see me post early in the mornings, and sometimes late in the evenings, because my schedule is kind of nutty. Also, you need to be able to adapt to change, and quite a bit as a matter of fact, because you're going to be working with so many different people, I communicate with the marketing department with the student success team, with folks and accounting to different subject matter experts and faculty members and other IDs. And people in the learning management team. And you know, you name it, I constantly have to adapt as far as your with who I am working with, and also on what project. So if that's a thing where you're like, Yeah, I really don't like change that much. Well, that's something to definitely think about as far as for what organization you're trying to work for. And just making sure about it is exactly what you're looking to do. And then last but definitely not least, is being caught in the middle as far as like being the the middle person, if you will, where no one really told me. But I'm going to become the person who was like trying to make the peace treaty between a really aggressive subject matter experts, and somebody else on the team. And I keep on finding myself kind of being in the middle of trying to solve the problem. Because as an instructional designer, I am a problem solver. It's what I do by nature. And I want to make sure that everybody is playing nice in the sandbox. So usually I have to try to step in if something is really amiss, and fix the problem. This is definitely a far and few between situation, but it has kind of come up over the years. And it's not really that much fun to deal with. Now, last but not least, I'm going to call this section kind of like an in between, I don't know if it's going to be a pro or a con all depends upon you. But what I'm calling this is that that's not in my job description, question mark, because what's going to happen is that you're going to get new ideas, and you're going to want to talk about them. So you bring it up about maybe something new for the learning experience, or something else is going to enhance something as far as supporting students or learners or you know, whatever the case may be. But what's going to happen is that you're going to mention this suggestion. And then you look around the room and you're like, well who who can actually do this, who's the best person for the job? And then lo and behold, well, it's you, you are going to be the best bet. And this has happened to so many of my friends and colleagues who had an idea. They pitched it out to the organization. And then sure enough, they ended up taking ownership about it. And that's this kind of is what it is. To give you an example we do webinars over here at MIT for both marketing and obviously for the in the course types of webinars. And what ended up happening is that there was kind of like an Emergency SOS call that went out one day, our person who was going to do the webinar for the marketing material ended up not being able to do so our backup plan actually fell through the team and I got together and we're like, so who's going to be the person that actually do the webinar? Because currently we don't have anybody, the communication already went out, somebody has to step up and do it. And then I'm like, Well, I like talking. I have a podcast, I have a microphone. I'm like, I, you know, I designed the program, I could probably do it. And they're like, great. Congratulations, Luke, you were now doing our webinars. I was like, Okay, fantastic. So I'm scrolling through Facebook one day, and then all of a sudden I see this. And I'm like, I that's Oh, that's me. Okay. All right, I guess we are absolutely advertising this, and I am going to be the person who do the webinars now come to find out, I actually loved it, it was a ton of fun. I have done a bunch of webinars since that first suggestion. And that was something of the stepping outside of my comfort zone of doing something that I really wasn't too sure if I was gonna really be able to handle but it went great. And it was something that I owned. And that's why it's kind of like an in between section to me, because it's super awesome. I love it. But also, of course, I just added more work to my plate, which is something that is fairly common within instructional design land. All right, the next question, which is super difficult to answer, but I'm going to do my best is should I work in a higher ed, or corporate? And what I want to ask of you, is to do some self reflection here. And I want you to think, where do you find the meaning in your work? Because there is no absolute right answer when it comes to picking one sector over another. Are there additional types of benefits from one to another? Sure, there are some general rules that absolutely do apply. If we're talking about corporate, typically, the salary is going to be higher, not going to lie. But if we're talking about the benefits of higher ed, I really have never seen any other type of organization out beats any of the benefits I've had at the three different universities I've worked at, they have all just been absolutely ridiculous. So you need to be able to weigh out the pros and cons and figure out exactly where you want to be able to go. But most importantly, once again, what are you going to enjoy, because if you're going to be able to enjoy such as like with education, and you love learning, and you love seeing students succeed, it's across that finish line at the end with finishing their program or getting their diploma or whatever it is, well, then yeah, hire is probably for you. On the flip side, if you want to be able to go and invent something brand new and be the leading cutting edge as far as with workforce development, and to see employees turn around and make their organization go from one point in time and over to another and see that progress before your very eyes. That may be corporates for you, you need to really be able to decide that for yourself. But the other thing that's not really talked about so much, too, is that there's more sectors, this is not just one or the other. I didn't mention anything about nonprofits or government agencies or freelance opportunities, or even OPM or online program management organizations. Right now, those are taking the world by storm, if you Google to you, or Emeritus, they're absolutely dominating. And they're like an hybrid, because their clients are higher ed organizations, but at the same time, it's from the corporate perspective, because they don't actually work for a school. So there's definitely a lot more opportunities out there. But you might think about, so what can you actually do in order to figure out where you want to be able to go. And let's do a little bit of a mental exercise here. So here is currently a very generic job posting from higher ed, I just took this from somewhere on LinkedIn jobs, and that's where it really came from. Now, what you're seeing is that if you read this in higher ed, it talks about needing a bachelor's degree, which is standard, it talks about working with faculty members, employees and students, it talks about doing workshops and trainings and teachings, which is also normal. They also specifically call out UDL Universal Design for Learning. In higher ed, you're going to see a little bit more of these types of learning philosophies and theories actually being called out. Because there are certainly quite a bit of learning science that goes into the higher ed world as far as with making sure for accreditation, and with everything that you're actually talking about is inside of the course itself, and that this learning is taking place. They're also looking for someone who can teach online who are knowledgeable about learning theories. And they also have their preferred recommendation as far as for an instructional design model, which is backward design, which is fairly common in higher ed. Now if those speak to you with anything that you have for your past experience or your passion projects, then maybe that's the road you want to go down. Now let's look at a corporate job posting once again, random generic one I found on LinkedIn and this is what it's it's going to look like it was asking for a bachelor's as well which does make sense. This one in particular actually wanted somebody to have some experience in the field that they were hiring for, which is also fairly Comment, if you're going to be looking at a job, say at Google? Well, they're going to want you to know about some types of Google specific things compared to something else that maybe not so much. They also want you to be able to have a technical background, which does make sense. They're calling out specifically talking about an elearning portfolio in a lot of different types of authoring and design tools, which is also fairly common. Within a corporate, it's also common within higher ed, but it's certainly more common within corporate type of position, talking about communication, of course, then they use Addie. So overall, if any of those things make sense to you, if you want to get more of your hands dirty of using tools, and being in a specific type of field and trying to be able to do this, then maybe corporate is going to be for you how I would narrow down the search, though, if you were to ask me point blank of like, well, what should I pick? My question to you is going to be what? Where do you see yourself in five years from now? Because everyone I'm currently talking to is this applying for instructional design jobs like No, tomorrow, they're going for anything, there's no direction, there's no approach, it says, I'm going to apply for everything. And hopefully, I'm going to get an interview, or someone's going to email me back. So the thing is, though, is that five years from now, if you still see yourself working at a school, or a higher education institution, or maybe you see yourself leading a team of other designers, or whatever it is, think about that, because that is going to be your north star that you can go to, and then work your way backwards from that to determine what makes the most amount of sense for you, at this moment, a time but also planning for your future. Now, one of the tools I would highly recommend that you use is glass door. Glass Door is an amazing type of job site that allows you to read reviews of organizations to see about the culture, about the leadership, about the benefits about the pay, which is all there for you as well and documented. And you can even do something as far as we're comparing different types of institutions. So if I hypothetically wanted to leave MIT and then go work for Harvard, I can actually go and put up a comparison between MIT and Harvard, Eben see what people are currently saying, and try to be able to decide if that's right for me. And also the answer is no, and I'm not leaving MIT just to be clear, because this is a recording. And number four, do I need an instructional design degree? And the answer is well, yes, no. And maybe the answer really is once again, it's so depends. It absolutely depends upon your work experience, your history, what you're passionate about your current training, well, you might have already for your background education, because I know what I'm talking to many, many teachers right now. And many of you probably already have a bachelor's and a master's within education in some shape, way or form. And if you already have that type of a degree, does it make sense to go back for a whole nother Master's or whole number bachelor's? Probably not if I'm being honest. And just to be clear, 1,000%, absolutely, positively, you do not need an instructional design degree to get an instructional design job. That is just the truth. Many of the speakers who you're listening to today do not have instructional design degrees, I do not have an instructional design degree, I have a doctorate in educational leadership. It's not instructional design. So that's going to be the thing is that as you're looking at all these different job postings, observe and see what they're asking for. For many of the ones that I have seen, they just talked about an educational degree, or something in tech, or something in HR, or something similar, so you probably don't need to do this. Now, of course, though, if you are passionate about education, which I'm gonna assume that many of you are, who are teachers, and you love to learn, and you want to go back to school to feel more prepared, by all means, I am certainly not going to stop you, I have three degrees, I love school, I absolutely get it. Now on the flip side, I have three degrees, therefore I have student debt. And I don't want you to go into student debt if you don't need to. So if there are other different types of substitutions out there, I do not want you to feel forced that you have to go back to school for a degree. And this is one thing, but I want you to absolutely be into your heads is that right now you hold the power, you have all the power more than ever, because all these other different institutions right now are creating instructional design degrees to keep up with the job demands. Now, because of that, I do not want you just to go and apply to any school but you find on Google, I want you to be well informed and to know what to do. But just to really illustrate my point here. Let's look at this page on Google before I hopped over into this call. And you can actually see this, by the way, if you go into Google afterwards, is that I just took a screenshot of the first page on Google after I typed in instructional design degree. These are all the things that pops up before I actually got to a normal page. So all of these universities are current Paying for Google AdWords and trying to get you to click on their link. And that's absolutely fine. Well and good. That's how you promote and get marketing out there and make sure that other people know about your institution. But that's something to is is showing you that right now, all of these places are offering degrees. And more and more and more are currently coming out with not just agrees, but also with certificates and other different forms of trainings as well, too. So that's something I really want you to consider. So if you want to go down this degree pathway, though, this is currently what you are thinking about, I have three steps that I want you to be able to follow. Step number one, I want you to go on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter and find the current students and alumni of those programs, reach out to them, network with them, talk with them, and just ask them some simple questions like if they'll have like a virtual coffee chat with you, or you can send it over in a LinkedIn message if they agree to do so. And to simply ask them, Are they satisfied with the program? Are they happy with what they've gone through? What have they accomplished? Do they feel like they're working towards their goal? Or they're close to their goal? Or perhaps they already hit their goal? Would they recommend the same program to you? What I have found for talking with many people online is that they are very honest. And I've heard from some people saying like, actually, it's great because the faculty members are awesome. But you know, it's kind of outdated and I'm finding myself teaching more and more things from other universities. I've heard the exact flipside of they're like, I was ready and good to go, I got a job in six months I've even graduated yet. It's like, fantastic. Those are the things that you need to be able to hear from the real students and from the real alumni that should inform your decisions. Now step two, is that you should be researching the curriculum, the outcomes, the goals, and everything that they have intended inside of their program of what you're going to be learning about. Now, if you're saying, Luke Well, what should I actually be looking out for here is the bulleted list of things that if I were to go back to school right now, for a degree, this is what I wanted to be able to learn about, obviously, the basics, the fundamentals course design, you need that same thing of ID models and theories, you also need that as well. But then I want to be able to dive on into learning science and learning analytics behind everything. I want to want to learn a little bit more about the current authoring tools and what's to come. I also need to know about the human skills working with people tell me how to work with subject matter experts tell me how to lead a team tell me how to manage a project. I also want to know about research to to make sure that I'm still well informed I know what to do. In order for me to properly evaluate everything with the course and how to implement student feedback, need to think about the future VR XR and everything else that's coming about the metaverse is going to be here before you know if you want to know exactly what to do with this technology, when it finally does come to our doorstep, obviously, gamification, evaluating the courses for everything for learning. And then last, but not least, and this is where I am really irked with some programs out there, because they don't do this. And then people find themselves kind of stuck. So please make sure if this is in there for your degree program is one building a portfolio, having something to show an employer of your accomplishments and what you've done, and being able to walk them through the process. And then also having some kind of work experience, internships, externships, whatever, just have something for you to be able to get your hands dirty, and to work with someone to know what it's like. There's a lot of people right now who are designing their courses on their own, and they don't work with a subject matter expert, because that isn't readily available. But instructional design, it's more than a one person job, you need to be able to work with others, and to walk a potential employer or an interviewer and walking them through how you did this. Because I guarantee on your interview, if you go into an interview process, there's going to be a question talking all about so Hey, tell me about a time you worked at a difficult Smee? What did you do? How did you handle the situation? How did you influence them? That is definitely going to be an interview question. Fun fact. And then step three, is connecting with the people who work there, the professors, the directors, the deans and anyone else, what can they do for you? Once again, you hold the power, why should you go to their school, this is something that is fascinating, because some places are really doing everything to try to be able to help you and to convince you to go to their institution, which by the way is wonderful if they want to go above and beyond from a customer support standpoint and fantastic. Let them let them shadow a quote like you sorry, let you Shadow Of course, talk about your transfer credits, are they willing to accept more from one institution compared to another? I've actually heard that quite a bit, as far as being able to persuade somebody to join is that they would take more from their bachelor's going into a master's or from one existing masters to another so really interesting to be able to think about and of course, what are they proud about talking about the students the program a success rates, their partners, whatever it is this have them be able to go and To talk up their program and why they loved it. Now I did all of these steps. And I picked my school as far as for my doctorate, because I knew I was just like, well, I have the power. Every school offers a doctorate in education, why should I go to this school and this is what I actually did. I ended up connecting over with the director at the time, she allowed me to come in, I was able to shadow a course, I was able to talk to others from both the first years and all the way to the people who are ready to graduate. And that's what informed my decision of like, I should go here, people are happy professors seem great. The content makes sense for what I want to learn about, this is going to be my school. And I want you to be able to do the same thing to make sure that you're making this right choice because it's an investment, potentially a year, two years, four years or more, make sure that this is going to be right for you. And then last, but not least talking about the human skills a little while ago. And I really want to once again, make sure I hit this home is the question of how do I work with sneeze, or for those of you who don't know is subject matter experts sneeze obviously, I mean, this to me, honestly, could be number one, because of the fact that everything that we do with our job involves working with another person, and you need to be able to know about if you don't have the power in the relationship or the situation, how are you able to influence them to negotiate, to persuade to get their buy in to convince them, you need to be able to make sure that this person who is the key decision maker is going to be on your side. And that is no easy task, especially depending upon the personality, the background, the program, this is something that you need to build up over time with experience and have this kind of become like a tool in your toolkit to know that if something does occur, you're like, Okay, I got an idea This worked before in the past, I bet I can use this in this situation, it's going to help me to get over this hump, and then move on to the next part of the project. Overall, what you are trying to aim for what you're shooting for, is to be able to establish an equal voice in a partnership, I have seen some relationships with sneeze where the instructional designer came in as a bulldozer. And instantly as Smee is this like, okay, I'm good. Like, I don't want to do this anymore. And I've seen the other side where the Smee comes in assuming that the ID is like this lowly peasant, and they're gonna send them over all their PowerPoint slides, and they'll just fix it. And then of course, that's not how you do it either. You need to be able to have that blend and know how to be able to work together. So let me give you some tips as far as for what I currently do. And what I've been doing for years. And this has really helped me out with trying to be able to have these incredible relationships with my sneeze. Because my thing that I found out is that as I've been working at different places like SNHU ne or now MIT is that when I'm working with these professors, and they see me and I'm coming in here being like, Hey, I know about learning. They're like, yes, so do we, and we've been teaching for twice as long as you've been alive. No, like, Hmm, good point, it's okay, what am I going to do to convince you that I am the right person for the job. And this is what I started to do is that I came into this mindset much more with, I have this online learning experience background, I know how I can take your in person course, add in some ideas, and to make it better in the online formatting fashion. And eventually, we got through with the end goal. But to get to that end goal. First and foremost, I had to start with the very beginning of making a good solid first impression. And that's what you were currently seeing. So inside of here, what I would do is that as soon as I was assigned with the subject matter experts name, I would simply go online and try to be able to think about them more as far as for like, what where are they coming from? What is their background and their mindset? What is their education? Where do they go to school? Have they written anything as far as for articles or blogs or papers? Do they have anything on Google? Do they have a LinkedIn account? Can I read more about their courses on a school's website, I wanted to dive on in and just to learn more about these people before I met them. And this is actually an example of one of the cases that really did go into such a much better fashion after I did this is I was working with a subject matter expert on business strategies, which is super vague, and I'm like, I have no idea what we're going to be talking about. And I was like, you know, what I'm just gonna do is I'm gonna go on to LinkedIn, I'm gonna look them up. Then from there, I saw that he had his own personal website. I clicked on that. And then all of a sudden, all these articles popped up in the last six months about his philosophies on strategy. Like oh my gosh, perfect. So I download all my read all them as much as I could. And once again, I was thinking about trying to be able to talk shop with him from his terminology, his perspective, and his mindset around everything. And what was so crazy is that the first time that I actually went and I met with them, we're sitting down, and it was something awful, by the way, like Friday 4pm he's ready to go out the door and he's like, Oh, God, I have to teach this guy all about business. Alright, here we go. And he started to talk to me. I could tell the tone of his voice. And he started to mention more about his strategies now is this like, hey, actually, I read your articles. He looked at me, he's like, you did. This is like, yeah, actually, I got this idea from the strategy, I bet we can do this and this online way in this fashion. And he's looking at me, and he's like, I never thought about it like that before. Like, well, good. That's why I'm here is to help you. And then all of a sudden, after that conversation, his tone 1,000% completely changed. And he was just like, cool. I like working with this guy, he's gonna help me, he gets it. And after that our relationship was fantastic for going forwards. And I've been working with him for years. And I started to do all of these different types of techniques with all of my sneeze, the Mater, Professor, faculty, industry, expert, Dean, whoever it is, and has absolutely helped me out over the years. And this is something that I want you to be able to take with you as well. So what I want you to be able to think about too, when working with sneeze, just in general, is that if you're coming into this type of meeting and working with somebody, I know, as an instructional designer, you're going to be plan methodical and organized. And that can actually hurt you, I want you to have an open mind, go into some conversations, not really announcing your agenda, I want you to be able to listen to the subject matter experts figure out their wants and their needs. And their pain points are already going through something right now. And this is just one other additional project, but they don't have time for and they're really going to need assistance. Well, that's going to be a very different direction. Compared to somebody who says like I cleared off my schedule, I got 40 hours a week to work with you. That's an entirely different type of conversation, you also want to be able to address any different types of misconceptions that they might have about the projects. As we saw from the timeline, a lot of people still don't know about online learning and the proper way to actually design things. And because of that, there's a lot of misconceptions out there. And I have found that a part of this meeting with these people is to be able to actually address all these misconceptions, to be able to help better inform them, provide some more suggestions and make sure that we're on the same page before we actually start and dive on into this process. And then finally getting to know them, just the person, the human being, how do you prefer to work? Do you like nights? Do you like weekends? Do you like during the day? Are you thinking about trying to do this now like, let's say Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, but then they're thinking in their mind, like actually, I can only do this on a Friday, once a month, very, very different approach, if you're trying to be able to work with these people. So keeping an open mind listening to them, and figuring this out, is absolutely going to help you. And then last but not least explaining the project. This is something that a lot of people don't do, which is certainly a harmful part about all of this. But when you first meet somebody, and they don't know when instructional design actually is, you really just don't want to go and just start talking and talking and talking and hope that somehow they're going to get it, you actually should be able to just openly discuss each of your roles on the project of like, Hey, you're a subject matter expert like Yes. Do you know what that means? Probably, they're gonna be like, Nope, I teach your course in person, you're like, fantastic. Well, this is what we're going to do is I'm coming from this background, you have all this awesome ideas about how to do this. But I'm here to help this and try to mold it in a little bit of a different direction. And this is where I'm coming from. And this is what I can do for you. Setting those types of open types of explanations about everything is so crucial, because now you're on the same page for some sneeze before come into this thinking that they're going to do literally everything and sometimes even the opposite. So you need to make sure about that time expectations. If they're thinking this is gonna be a five hour week thing, and your thing is going to be a 20 hour a week thing. Yeah, it's really not gonna go so well. demoing a course it still boggles my mind that people actually don't just show off what they're capable of doing. Because everyone has misconceptions about online learning. If you show them a proper course of online, learning how you designed it, and what it looks like, and give them types of student feedback and data, it's a lot more convincing, instead of you just trying to imagine about what it's actually going to do. And of course, setting expectations and giving feedback because everybody needs feedback to get better. I needed the sneezing and everybody needs it. Just knowing exactly the appropriate times of when to give that feedback, setting deadlines, setting expectations, and once again, making sure that everybody is on the same page. And that ladies and gentlemen, that is a very fast summary of my book, and what I wish I knew before becoming an instructional designer, I know we don't have much time left but I'm happy to stick around for as long as you need to, to go through any of the different types of questions and I really hope that was helpful. And if you haven't already, please feel free to add me on LinkedIn that's kind of like where I go to talk with people. So feel free to connect with me over on there but thank you for coming to this presentation.

Seeing a lot of hurts and clapping All right, I did something right. Always nice to know that I don't mess up

Luis Malbas  
Alright, let's see any questions anybody? Wow. I mean Man, Luke, most intense

Luke Hobson  
thing is, Louis is that my secret is that I'm talking about something nerdy, potentially kind of boring. So therefore, I talk very loud and passionately and engaging and people are more likely to listen to

Luis Malbas  
me. There you go. I want to remind everybody that all of this stuff is being recorded and you'll be able to access it later. Um, Luke's presentation, I mean, that was like, you know, five presentations like fit into one. It was incredible stuff. Um, let's see here. We got one from Nicole, any lnd roles preparing for the metaverse?

Luke Hobson  
There are there are definitely roles. We're coming out there. And actually, they already do exist. Fun fact, I just reached out to a guest on a podcast who's coming on soon. And she isn't ID at the metaverse. That's already a thing. The Metaverse is also currently hiring up a storm. By the way, if you go into LinkedIn jobs, and you just type in meta, there's a ton I keep seeing them for learning Operations Manager, Instructional Designer, technologist. There's a ton out there right now. So absolutely. Nicole, you can certainly find those.

Luis Malbas  
Just real quick when you're talking about the metaphor versus somebody who's working with like, say virtual reality or augmented reality specifically or is it when you're referring to the metaverse? Is that just with Facebook's metaverse? So yes,

Luke Hobson  
great point because there's going to be so right now we have Metaverse, obviously we have that as a whole. But of course, we're gonna have other competitors as well. So when I'm referring to the metaverse, I'm talking about how when you see people wearing Oculus, and they're actually going around and walking around, and people are currently buying up territory in the metaverse for so much money, it's just getting ridiculous. But this is where we're going as far as we're with horizons, and with teams and all these other different ones, of allowing people to actually work together in a virtual space, but still have this sense of a physical presence, which is kind of like the big thing about all this and where we're probably going with them in next three to five years or so. That's what Bill Gates thinks, at least for remote learning and remote working is that he thinks it's all going to be on there. So you know what we'll see, we'll see, this is definitely something new, you know, about your thoughts on it. My thoughts? Well, first and foremost, is that if you have never worn a headset, like all day before, by the way, give it a try. It's it's not that comfortable. So every time I hear about this, I was just like, I'm thinking more about the human behind the scene of just like, I already get migraines. I'm already staring at a screen all day. And like, am I gonna want to be able to do this, like, I don't know. But I've also seen different videos that are so cool people being able to actually scan in their desks and their laptops and have that embedded into the headset itself. And then if I want to be able to just go on for a 30 minute meeting, I'm working with a friend nearby who's potentially in like South Africa, and I want to go and hop on and talk with them and feel like he's actually next to me. And we're going to a whiteboard and doing these different types of diagrams and designs or whatnot. You know, I'm interested, that would be a lot cooler than just trying to be able to go do things online all the time. So yeah, you know, a change of pace has definitely be something that I absolutely want to do. I'm, I'm also seeing a bunch of questions. Now since we started talking. And I'm seeing from Kimberly, she is asking, please me know, instructional designers work in teams, or if it's more of a single person role. There are definitely teams by the way, when we were talking before about different organizations and whatnot as well, too. This is something that's actually a great point, Kimberly, is because there are some organizations out there that might be hiring their very first instructional designer, and they don't know, like they don't know what they're looking for. And you can tell because the person who's doing the interview on the phone screening or whatnot, you're like, Yeah, I seem to be talking about a lot of things. And there's not that many follow up questions about any particulars. And it's like, yeah, because they don't know, the very first time. Other places, though, I've worked at some universities that had teams like 50 Plus instructional designers. So by all means, it is wonderful and fantastic to be able to pick someone's brain and your team to bounce around different ideas and talking about things. And then other times, it's much more of just you working with a subject matter expert, others, but definitely, I'd say it's like a team sport, a lot of communication, lots and lots of communication with everyone at all times.

Luis Malbas  
I love it. All right. Well, I think we've got to wrap it up. We've got to prep for Tim Slade coming on the next one. Um, Tim is absolutely fantastic. Everyone. Don't miss Tim is going to be talking about portfolios, I think your portfolio is your new resume. So jump into that one. Take a quick break and go into the lounge. I've got some tables in there if you want to sit in. And with that, Luke, thank you so much for doing this. I'm so glad I got to meet you. And thank you for sharing such valuable information to our audience today. It was fantastic.

Luke Hobson  
Absolutely. Thank you once again, Louis, for having me. And once again, folks, if I don't I saw a lot of questions in here. I'm sorry. I babble on a lot about instructional design. I like this, please feel free to ask on LinkedIn or email me or whatever if you have questions I'll do my best to help you out

Luis Malbas  
all right all right thanks everybody we'll see you in the next one take care

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