I have been looking at some of the training programs that are being offered for aspiring Instructional Designers (ID) in India. I looked at these courses from the perspective of:
- An aspiring Instructional Designer who has no clue about Instructional Designing and wants to quickly gain instructional designing skills
- An Instructional Designer who has started with Instructional Designing at work, but has lots of queries and needs lots of inputs to improve his/her instructional designing skills
DO YOU THINK?
- These courses are really giving the kind of training and information aspiring Instructional Designers need to do their tasks well in their workplace
- Aspiring instructional designers will be able to sustain their interest for such a long course duration such as 15 weeks
- The training programs for IDs in India are very academic and focus more on instruction design theories
- Aspiring IDs or fresh IDs actually retain and use the information they gain from these training programs
- There is lot of information overload in these training programs for IDs
- In-house training programs for IDs in companies in India are useful
If any of you have actually found any training program on Instructional Designing useful, please share your experiences.
If any of you have ideas on improving training for Instructional Designing in India, please share them.
Please leave your responses in the comments section.
I would love to hear from you all.
First, do we really have good training courses in India that help the aspiring IDs to hone their skills? From my experience so far, all the IDs who are currently working are either from journalism or english litt background with little or no experience in formal teaching. All of us who are in this profession today learnt things on the job or looking at various resources on the Web (thanks to Google). Though there are a few courses offered by some private agencies, I don’t think they are upto the mark. I believe these agencies are cashing on the lack of expertise available in India. I strongly feel there is a need for Indian universities (those in the public sector) to introduce a formal course in ID leveraging the talent within the industry.
Isn’t this paradoxical? Learning specialists are unable to design and produce a learning initiative that works!?
What sort of a message does this send out to those who look to us to develop their learning solutions?
What now fellow IDs? what now?
I work for a reputed MNC as a training manager with several years of experience in the E-Learning vertical. We outsourced some of our E-Learning programs to a couple of reputed E-Learning companies in India and they did a shabby work. We had to spend a lot of time educating the instructional designers on the strategies and they never learnt. Finally, we gave up and started designing courses on our own. Now, we outsource only the development keeping the ID with us. So, the point I want to make here is, as Rupa mentioned, in India many people focus more on the learning theories rather than the practical application of instructional design. Not our fault…it is our educational system that needs to be blamed. There are a lot of things that we still need to learn from the West.
Interesting read. Am working as a trainee ID in a Hyderabad based company. I found this job profile quite interesting and wanted to pursue a degree in the same. But to my utter surprise there are no institutes/universities in India to provide any formal course barring SCDL (distance mode). Ram has rightly commented that most of the aspiring IDs are from journalism or Eng Lit background (me too) without any formal teaching background. People are not aware of this job profile. First of all people (students) around need to be made aware of ID as a career option. Only if people get to know about it, a need will arise, which might compel the educational institutes to offer courses and degrees on ID. I personally feel IDs learn on-the-job more as compared to any other formal training, but in order to get the basics right one needs to undergo formal training as well.
Rupa, i think you’ve raised a very valid point and that got me really thinking. I had initially evaluated a one of the ID training programs from Symbiosis at a stage when i was conceptualizing and understanding ID and trying to write out processes for my team. It was an interesting find to see that most of the course was a dump from the internet and i had myself been to all those web sites and seen the same or similar content.
I agree with Abhinav that the situation is really paradoxical and we don’t seem to have anyone that has taken an active interest in designing good and effective elearning courses for IDs themselves. Ironical indeed.
Now, given that looking from other perspectives, it seems like the ID community in India has survived and evolved immensely only through what we call today, as community based learning or elearning 2.0. The fact that you and so many others learn from available resources and blog, create your own websites etc. itself is an indicator of how much ‘more’ passion, enthusiasm, and innovation the aspiring IDs and the experienced IDs of the ID community in India have. I have a lot of respect for them, for the simple reason that we are here because a lot of ‘formal’ learning resources were unavailable or inaccessible. We just learned on our jobs with our own initiative. Also shows how much initiative is needed to get where we are and the fact that all of us are here because of initiative.
It’s really an interesting discussion and we can rant on and on. But to answer your question, there do not seem to be many reputed training institutes that can get an ID ready for the job that they need to do. I only know of NIIT and TIS who have formal training camps and train fresher IDs in boot camps and stuff. People i have met from these companies do seem to have pretty good fundamentals in ID stuff!
Hi Sreya
You have put in good points here.
Even I think there are no real good training programs for IDs in India.
Hi Rupa,
Sreya has made good mention of the companies that churn out good IDs. To add to that list, Aptara (formerly Maximize Learning) andBrainvisa provide quaiity training to all those fresher and aspiring IDs.