The world needs more teachers

Well, maybe it doesn't need more teachers... but it certainly does need more people who recognize that not everyone was born knowing what they know. And sometimes the knowledge that other people need in order to understand your area of expertise is not the same as the knowledge you need to succeed as an expert.

This instructional design job has been pushing me to the limits of my intuition and practical sense. I've actually been grateful for my age, and my life experiences (even the less pleasant ones) in working this job because I really don't know that someone fresh out of university in their early twenties could actually do this job the way it is structured. That's because I am so frequently required to draw upon my own experiences in interpreting the material provided by experts in order to present it so that the user can understand it.

I've worked on two projects from start to finish and have started about a dozen more that are in various stages of stagnation, searches for funding, or slow and steady progress. And in pretty much every case, the information that I'm given in the beginning of the project is very sparse.

Most of the time when I create an outline for a course, I'm relying upon my own sense of what kind of information might need to be transmitted to a user. In some ways, there's an advantage in not knowing anything. As the designer, I'm in the same position at the beginning of a project as the user - usually knowing nothing of the topic - which means I've got a good idea what the user will feel like going through the course. But that doesn't make it any easier to create the course.

Sometimes however, the group or person supplying (or not supplying) me with information about the course, goes so off target that it takes me a while to realize that what they're telling me about their area of expertise is something that the user will not need. It might be a set of skills or knowledges that the expert uses everyday, and so he/she thinks the user should know about it too. But it really just muddies up the picture.

I just spent several hours figuring this out for one of our projects. The outline the client gave me for the video component of the course is poorly organized because it's not in chronological order. For someone who works there, this would not be confusing, but for me, it took a long time to figure out that the last dozen scenes they had mapped out actually belong earlier in the sequence.

You can also tell there are several "hot button" issues for employees in this organization, because they continually return to these issues in the outline, but there's no recognition that
a) the user has no interest in issues that do not affect him/her, and
b) revealing these issues and inside jokes (yes, there's some kind of joke about a sheep that I just don't get) will just tarnish their reputation with the user, which would counteract what they're trying to do in the project.

I realize it's my job to organize the content of the course for the best delivery and in the most useful manner for the user, but it really is rather astonishing how narrow some people are when contemplating what their work might look like to outsiders.

I'm willing to bet that the person who wrote the document had some senority in the organization, but frankly, I would've had a much better idea of what users need to know if they'd had the guy who was hired a week ago do it. That fresh perspective would've created a document more in tune with the average user of the program and been a far more effective tool for me in helping them create an online program that will educate users about the organization.

After all, someone took a lot of time to put together a power point presentation and a twenty page outline of the course, without thinking for a moment what the user needs to know. All the producer of this document thought about was how their work is affected by this issue. But it's the user who is the focus of the project, just as the student should be the focus of classroom pedagogy. That's what I mean by the post title - the world needs more people who can think like teachers rather than practitioners.

LATER: So I create this post out of minor frustration at a current work project. I finally muddle through an outline for the elearning component and decide to move on to working on my dissertation (yes, I know it's Friday night, why do you ask?). I'm reading up on metaphor, since part of my argument in the dissertation will be that clones and cyborgs are metaphors for other things, and I come across this passage in an interaction designer's thesis:

One of the challenges of being a designer is the difficulty of working in unfamiliar subject areas. Designers are often thrust into domains where they have little to no background knowledge. Traditionally, the way to overcome this is to utilize the help of a subject area expert. But this too can be problematic, as the expert might have too much knowledge and things that seem obvious to him or her are not as apparent to the designer.

Kinda interesting to read of someone else's similar frustration (which is a much nicer description than mine), and in a different line of work - still design, but a different kind of design. There's some solace in knowing other designers often pull their hair out too!