Instructional design is the creation of learning approaches and techniques to develop content, experiences, and other solutions to engage the learner and help them achieve the desired performance gain and facilitate the acquisition of new knowledge or skills.
It yields results and can be used to increase the effectiveness of corporate training. Instructional design can be used to customize the content and training to effectively cater to the needs of every employee.
Here are few instructional design strategies that can be used to enhance corporate training:
Story-Based Learning – Storytelling helps to captivate the employees’ attention creating an engaging and emotional experience and facilitates better understanding and retention. Through storytelling, the content can be weaved into a story to present a scenario to learners based on their previous learning to decide the outcome in a risk-free environment.
Immersive Experience – An immersive experience enhances an existing reality and immerses the learner in a real-based situation using the 360-degree space making it more engaging or satisfying for the learner.
Approaches like gamification (game-design techniques) and scenario-based learning help to create an immersive learning experience enhancing the learner engagement with increased knowledge retention and performance.
Just In Time Learning – Just in Time learning provides information in short chunks that can be digested easily without cognitive overload. As part of corporate training, microlearning has become an instructional design strategy to provide just-in-time performance support and helps the employees to learn new skills/knowledge easily and quickly.
Benefits of Instructional Design Strategy:
- Increases engagement and interaction: An effective instructional design strategy facilitates employee engagement in the training by using interactive elements such as – simulations, stories, etc. Such interactive modules keep up learners’ motivation to complete the training as well as ensure a better learning outcome.
- Makes learning more applicable: Instructional Design approach customizes the training modules with skills/knowledge that the employees can apply in their jobs. By providing application-ready knowledge, learners gain specific knowledge in the most efficient way possible.
- Better learning experience: The use of rich media formats such as videos and interactive videos and complex, branching simulations, storytorials etc. yield a higher engagement quotient as well as create more memorable learning experiences that stick in the learners’ minds.
- Learn by doing, Instructional Design improves retention – Instructional Design strategy uses approaches where the employees can learn skills/knowledge by putting them in real-life challenging situations to stimulate responses on the knowledge that they already have. Thereby developing critical thinking and problem-solving skills as well as improves retention.
Conclusion
Instructional design strategies facilitate optimum knowledge transfer according to the employees’ needs and help them to achieve the desired performance gain.
However, the important thing is to create impactful training modules and selecting the right instructional design strategy for corporate training to make the training impactful and engaging for the employees.
