Teaching vs. instructional design

Is there a difference and does it matter for faculty development?

This week’s post is a little bit more philosophical.

It is my strong preference to design the classes I teach, or at least to be part of the design process. When I reflect on why I have this very strong preference, I realize that it is hard for me to to explain the relevance and purpose of the activties to students if I haven’t had some role in shaping them. Maybe I just like to feel in control? I’ve started to consider the question: What actually is the difference between “teaching” and “instructional design,” and does it matter? As a faculty developer, I have often pondered this question while trying to figure out how to guide instructors. Would the challenge they are trying to navigate or the goal they want to achieve be better served by a design approach or strategy for simply working with the design that they have.

One perspective is that “teaching” and “instructional design” are simply “two sides of the same coin.” I think this perspective could be useful in a few ways. One way is that it acknowledges that teaching is always somewhat dependent on design, whether that “design” is just the thinking you do about your class session on the way into work or an intensive process of setting goals and objectives and aligning class activities with them. Another way this framing is useful is to avoid thinking of “good teaching” as primarily about personality or charisma, and to recognize the detailed background work that tends to make teaching effective.

Even if these two practices are significantly overlapping, it is undeniable that they can be separated enough for one person to “design” a course and another to “teach” it. This situation can exist in a formal way, in which an instructional designer designs a course with the help of a subject matter expert and a separate instructor teaches it, or a more informal way in which the instructor “inherits” a syllabus or course shell from another instructor who designed the course originally. I once had a consultation with an instructor who was teaching an asynchronous course that had been designed by a separate instructional designer, and they expressed a lot of surprise at how much “work” teaching it was. Even though every single “instructional material” and module was pre-designed for them, they encountered and successfully navigated many challenges related to moderating the discussion boards, supporting students one-on-one, responding to questions about the materials or expectations, and giving feedback on assignments.

So, this could be another way of answering my question: The skills, ideas, and behaviors that are unique to “teaching” (rather than instructional design) are related to the live or asynchronous unfolding of events and actual interactions with students. This collection of things might also be referred to as “facilitation,” a term sarah currie works with in her dissertation and which she describes at one point as “marrying specific context considerations to inclusive execution strategies.” Teaching consists of both design and execution. One thing I have noticed about the way teaching and learning centers tend to work is that if you look closely, many of the programs they offer for instructors focus on instructional design. “Course design institutes” are common, as are workshops about syllabus and assessment design. Indeed, the importance of accessible and inclusive design strategies, such as Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and the TILT framework, are rightly gaining recognition as important factors in student success.

My experience, and I am curious if readers agree or disagree, is that there are relatively fewer opportunities for practicing facilitation skills as an instructor in higher ed through typical faculty development channels. I would say the main exception to this is programming intended for graduate students, postdocs, and occasionally beginning faculty. There seems to be an idea that graduate students are more in need of opportunities to practice “planning lessons,” (the actual flow of a live class), “facilitating group discussions,” and similar topics. Perhaps there is an assumption that graduate students are not responsible for creating the syllabus or making most of the major design choices for the course, but are often responsible for labs, discussion sections, and other course elements that involve a lot of facilitation. But also, I think the usefulness of practicing facilitation skills as a non-novice instructor is sometimes overlooked. If you have been teaching for a few years, when was the last time you did a “dry run” of a class session and got feedback from peers? For me, it has been a pretty long time.

A couple years ago I wrote an article about how to incorporate UDL and accessibility into faculty development programming, and a reader commented that they really appreciated my inclusion of the UDL idea of “opportunities to practice self-regulation” as part of the recommendations. While I don’t love “self-regulation” as a term, I have certainly benefited from opportunities to actually practice saying and doing things I need to do in the classroom and getting feedback. I am curious about the extent to which CTLs are thinking about “instructional design” vs. “facilitation.” While writing this post, I visited the UConn CETL website and noticed that under the resources tab there are menus for both “designing your course” and “teaching your course.” While I could come up with arguments for why each topic might actually fall under the other or both categories, I did appreciate the acknowledgement of these two areas of practice. 

I hope you enjoyed this discussion, and I am always open to feedback and or critiques.

What are your thoughts on the differences and similarities between “instructional design” and “teaching” or “facilitation”?

Do you think the campus(es) that you are involved with are providing a good balance of “design” and “facilitation” support?

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Cover image by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash.