With technology making great strides in the last few years, it has also changed the way we learn and the way we impart education. Educational technology has witnessed some great enhancements in the last decade and instructional design is one of them.

The need for an instructional design company

There could be numerous reasons to hire a company that specializes in designing instructions. Some of them are:

• You are new to eLearning and want full-fledged help with online training content development
• You have a small in-house team and find it difficult to hire a permanent instructional design team
• You are finding it difficult to bring together all the resources, and project manage a team of instructional designers, graphic designers, videographers, narrators, illustrators, and technical writers
• You have a tight deadline and need to finish the project on time
• You want to focus more on training your employees for organizational success
• You want to launch a new online course for your university or college in an engaging way
• You want to bring new ideas and perspectives to your education delivery program

Why instructional design matter?        

• Provides a clear roadmap
• Maximizes learner engagement
• Assigns the right content at the right time
• Evidence-based methodologies to help students learn
• Delivers measurable results

When it comes to choosing the best instructional design company, there is no magic equation that can help you rate instructional design companies from best to worst. Here are 10 qualities of an experienced and reliable instructional design firm.

1. Learner-centered Viewpoint

First and foremost, your online course should act as an advocate from the learner’s perspective. It means it should be create keeping learners in mind and not instructors. Instructional designers achieve by understanding learners’ needs, desires, motivations, and preferences.

The instructional designers you choose to work with should be able to understand how people learn and the ways to improvise learning. They should be able to recommend a wide range of instructional tools and procedures that can enhance learning. In other words, they should be able to create content that can be easily learned, recalled, and applied.

Also, how does the instructional designer consider the evaluation of a learner’s understanding and command of a topic? Expectantly, they look consider assessment more than a generic multiple-choice quiz at the end of a course? When it comes to changing the behavior, they should be able to manage timing, feedback, spread out repetition, culture, along with many other elements. Your instructional designer should formulate your audience throughout the course, for the time they apply the task in real-life scenarios.

2. Strong Expertise

While choosing an instructional design company, you need to ensure they possess the appropriate capabilities and experience required to complete your project successfully. One way to do that is to check their list of existing clients and the types of projects they’ve worked on so far. Have they worked with similar size businesses? Having worked with organizations similar to your industry domains is a big plus. This tends to bring fresh knowledge, thoughts, and best practices to use for your online course.

3. Strategic Perspective

While online course developers should focus on project-specific requirements, skilled instructional designers look at the bigger picture. Finalizing learning objectives for your new online course is great. However, knowing how they can align with an organization’s primary business objectives helps take a possibly good course and makes it engaging.

By knowing the prevailing organizational issues and performance breach, they should help you solve the issue rather than just create a course. Even if, that means telling you that a fresh course isn’t the most active way to go.

4. Well-Defined Process

Developing an online course is a strategic process and there must be an established process for the same. This would help your project proceed along a well-defined set of steps. Moreover, you would feel confident that the instructional design company you’ve chosen has been on a well-defined path.

5. Tech-Savvy

Creating instructional content asks for a high level of tech knowledge and expertise. Therefore, it is necessary that you hire a tech-savvy instructional design company. You need an expert who can decode the technical terms for you, and your team, in a generalized, understandable manner. You don’t want the archetypal tech geek. Although you do need a person who understands what’s conceivable, and who has access to technical pros for any challenges that may emerge.

Nevertheless, you will go to a firm that has experience with the e-learning tool you use. If you’re not firm on any specific tool to use, then you need a person who has experience across various e-learning tools (such as Articulate Storyline, Captivate, Moodle,). That way you can expect to get the best advice for which tool to use.

The same in the case with LMS (Learning Management Systems). The instructional design company should feel easy to work on the LMS you decide to work on. If not, they should even be able to suggest which LMS to choose given your specific requreiments and specifications. All this can be done only if they have unmatched technical prowess.

6. Team Enhancing Skills

You want to choose an e-learning course development company that is trustworthy. A firm that is going to level up the skills of your in-house team. For example, you might want your team to sustain the course content and keep it up to date after it has launched. Similarly, you may want to have a person trained at your place on how to develop additional course modules. Otherwise, you may want to continue to pay the associated instructional design company to do this so you can focus on your core competencies. Either way, you must get into the conversation and understand the current costs and requirements.

7. Dedicated Project Manager

In an eLearning course development project, there could be hundreds of elements. Some of them include inputs from SMEs, content collation, design and branding, combining comments and revisions from stakeholders, consulting graphic designers, narrators, illustrators, videomakers, LMS experts, and marketing people. This can be followed by getting adequate levels of executive sign-off. At the same time, you want the best outcome that meets your organization or training objectives. Plus, you also want it delivered on time and budget.

This is where having a dedicated project manager makes a difference in meeting and missing your project deadlines. One such expert is in the best position to determine what’s important and what can be done another way.

8. Talented Analysts

A great instructional designer will also be a skilled analyst, who possesses critical thinking skills. He will never hesitate to ask several questions and will listen courteously to you while capturing notes. Then, they will come up with even more incisive questions. They remain more interested in the key tasks involved so that they can figure out the best instructional strategy that will support the learning activity.

It’s not just about capturing instructors’ notes and putting them digitally. Instructional designers should ask you about blunders that people make as an outcome of a lack of training. Besides, they will want to understand the repercussions of those mistakes. Understanding how to use training to avert possibly harm to a business can lead to treasured learning opportunities.

Conclusion

When it comes to designing and developing focused instructions, one needs to have a distinctive set of skills, qualities, and experience. In the market, there are both good instructional design companies and not so good ones. By checking these given qualities, you can increase your chances of hiring a great instructional design company for your course development project.

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