2: What I Wish I Knew Before Becoming an ID with Dr. Luke Hobson

Dr. Luke Hobson  0:00  
So, my little quick pitch that I give to people is that I understand how people learn online. And I work with subject matter experts and professors like yourself. And I'm great at interviewing and extracting information out of your heads and then applying what I know from learning sciences to put it together to make an online course, and I'm able to link together course outcomes, competencies. and skills.

Heidi Kirby  0:31  
Hello, friends, and welcome to the BLOC, the Building Learning and Organizational Culture podcast. I'm your host Heidi Kirby. On this episode, we talked to Dr. Luke Hobson, who is a program manager at MIT. We talked about Luke's latest blog post called "What I Wish I Knew Before Becoming an Instructional Designer" and discuss some of our own stories from the field. I shared a link to his website, which includes his blog and his podcast, on the Summary Notes for this episode. So definitely check them out if you like what you hear. Enjoy this episode after a brief word from our sponsor Verasana.

Verasana Narrator  1:11  
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Heidi Kirby  1:40  
Well, hello, Luke, thank you for joining me on the BLOC. How are you today?

Dr. Luke Hobson  1:45  
I'm doing fantastic. How are you doing?

Heidi Kirby  1:48  
Great, great. I'm good. So if you could just tell me a little bit about yourself. For our listeners here career education, anything else fun. You want to throw in

Dr. Luke Hobson  1:59  
How much time do we have?

So my name is Dr. Luke Hobson. I'm a program manager for MIT. And as we're going to get into today, talking about different things for titles later on the episode with Program Manager means in my speak for higher education is that I'm basically like a super instructional designer, I still do everything a normal instructional designer does as far as for designing of courses, programs, outcomes, competencies, all that good stuff. But at the end of the day, I'm also involved in everything else as far as for with marketing budget, communicating with a lot of other teams. And then at the end of the day, I actually own the programs once they're done. So making sure as far as for operating, maintaining, and all that good stuff that all falls underneath my responsibility. And the programs that I oversee range really drastically from either 3d printing ad manufacturing programs going all the way to technical leadership development programs. So I have a wide variety of different kinds of programs. And besides that, I also teach part time for SSH you I teach grad courses, marketing grad courses. And then I also have that podcast and blog, which is how you found me. So just a lot of things besides higher education because I really am obsessed with working and this is how I got to where I am today.

Heidi Kirby  3:27  
Yeah, okay. Okay, so then, let me ask you about the fun part of life. 

Dr. Luke Hobson  3:32  
Please do.

Heidi Kirby  3:33  
What would you say is your favorite hobby number one and then number two? What is the song that you can't stop listening to right now?

Dr. Luke Hobson  3:42  
Oh, man, okay. I was not expecting that. Well. favorite hobby is that I am obsessed with health and fitness. So stay for that. One is that I do work out six days a week and that's not the brag or whatever it is more of I realized early on when I was writing my dissertation. But the more I worked out, the more creative ideas I had. And that in turn, just kept on firing new things and making me realize I should continue to keep on doing this to hit more goals and milestones. So health and fitness stuff all day long. I'll absolutely talk about that. And then as far as for a favorite song, I just heard of a blink 182 cover of all the small things, but it's a new version from a game on fire. Yeah, so I'm throwing me back because that song came out when I was 16 maybe. Okay. So, so that's mechanical listening to that all the time.

Heidi Kirby  4:37  
Nice. I'll have to check that out. I haven't heard it. Okay, so you published what is turning out to be a pretty popular blog post that you brought to my attention called "What I Wish I Knew Before Becoming an Instructional Designer." Can you tell me about this little mini study you did?

Dr. Luke Hobson  4:56  
Yeah. And mini study is an absolute great way of saying it because I - so I started writing this months ago. This was in months and months in the planning phase. But essentially I was thinking about how every single time I listened to a podcast - because I'm an avid podcast listener from everything from fantasy football to smart passive income, I listen to a wide variety of podcasts. But no matter who is being interviewed, who is a successful person, this question is always comes up as far as for - What do you wish you could have known before starting off as XYZ type of position? And it just got me thinking about like, well, what did I wish I knew about being an instructional designer before I started? And I actually went to go find these answers out years ago, early on in my career working at Southern New Hampshire University and working at Northeastern University, is that I would always offer to buy someone a cup of coffee or buy him a beer after work and just say, like, just tell me what you know, whatever it is, I just want to become better. So I consider myself right away, I'm going to be a forever student, lifelong learner, and just tell me everything that I need to know now so I can start preparing for this career because I never plan on leaving, being an instructional designer. And that's what eventually led to me just being able to collect and gather all this information, use it for my career, And then now fast forwards when we're dealing with the pandemic and COVID-19. And I'm a part of, as I know you are too, a bunch of different Facebook groups and LinkedIn groups for instructional designers, and the same common questions keep on coming up again, again, and again. I'm a first time instructional designer. What should I do about this? I am a K through 12 teacher, I'm trying to transition over into this online higher ed space. How do I do blah, blah, you know, so I was like, You know what, I'll just, I'm gonna search for this. And I went and looked online. And sure enough, I could find two things to talk about it. One was a video from Ant Pugh. And one was a blog post that really wasn't even written that well, so I was like, fine. I'll do the research. So I contacted 50 of my instructional designer buddies from text, email, LinkedIn message, you name it called them, and I just gathered all this information asking that question, "What do you wish you knew beforehand?" And I tallied up all my answers. And at the end of the day, I was like, "Okay, here's a list of one through five." And then on the blog post, I just added my own personal commentary experience of what I've learned along the way. And that's how that blog post was born.

Heidi Kirby  7:29  
That's awesome. Yeah. And I'd love to talk about these five things because I'm sure we both have plenty of stories. 

Dr. Luke Hobson  7:36  
Oh, absolutely. For sure.

Heidi Kirby  7:38  
So thing one, which is probably my favorite - explaining what an instructional designer does.

Dr. Luke Hobson  7:48  
(laughs) It's the weirdest thing to think that there is a career with thousands of people, yet not everyone knows what we do.

Heidi Kirby  7:57  
Or you get the I'm sure you've got gotten the "Oh, my cousin just had her living room redecorated."

Dr. Luke Hobson  8:04  
Oh, yeah.

Heidi Kirby  8:06  
No, no, no instructional designer, right? (laughs)

Dr. Luke Hobson  8:10  
Yes. And I've also had to, that means graphic design. And it's like, no, but there are some designers that do become instructional designers and like, you're getting there, but we're not there. And it wasn't until that I had actually like one moment in particular when I was at Northeastern, and we just started working on a new program. And it was a challenge-based learning degree program between GE and between Northeastern. It was a really cool, awesome program. But what that basically meant is that we had a lot of folks from the industry who are coming into this room, from retired folks and other folks who have been there for working there for a number of years and a whole bunch of other people. Then, we had the academics from the deans, SMEs, professors, whatnot. And we're all sitting in this round table, and I still remember clearly to This day that everyone went around the room and talked about who they are what they do. And then we got to me, and then I'm like, "Oh, I'm Luke Hobson, and I'm instructional designer." And everyone's like, what? There's just blank stares is looking at me like, okay, so now I need to figure out how to explain this in a way that makes sense to people in both industry and academics. Because, you know, it was something that I really never thought about trying to explain because I started off working at Southern New Hampshire University, and they were the latest technical innovation as far as online higher ed. So naturally, we had instructional designers, so leaving that bubble and going through a different school and talking to industry folks, it was like, oh, I didn't realize this was a problem, and it clearly is still to this day.

Heidi Kirby  9:44  
Absolutely. Even just explaining it to family and friends. You know, you're at the the family barbecue, the family picnic, they're like "How's work going? What do you do again? Are you still a professor?" I'm like, "Oh, no, I'm an instructional designer now." (Luke laughs) You know? And for a while there - I worked at NASA for a year, and for a while, my mom was telling people that I was making training handbooks for NASA. And you know, I've gotten that one too a lot where people just think - I don't know what they think training is - they think that we just make these manuals I guess? - It's like, no, it's not like IKEA putting together furniture right? Like, so yeah, it's it's been very interesting to try and explain it to the people we have to work with. But then also the people we don't have to work with, right? Like nieces, nephews, kids asking me what I do at work, you know, so...

Dr. Luke Hobson  10:44  
It's true. So what is your quick elevator pitch when someone asks you what it is that you do?

Heidi Kirby  10:48  
So typically, depending on who I'm talking to, I will say, "Have you ever, you know, taken a college class, online?" Or  like with my nieces, I'll say, "you know, like the lessons that you have when you go to school every day? That's kind of what I do is I make those lessons." So I try to, you know, contextualize it to whoever I'm talking to, like give them okay, where is an experience - a lot of times with corporate, "Hey, have you ever taken those boring sexual harassment trainings? Yeah, I make those but way cooler"

Dr. Luke Hobson  11:23  
Got it. So the way that I try to figure this out is that - so my audience, who I primarily even still work with is - I work with a lot of professors and subject matter experts and industry professionals who've been doing something for 40, 50, 60 years. So now coming in, and it's just like, alright, how do I explain an online learning experience to someone who has never thought about this in a million years? So my little quick pitch that I give to people is that - I understand how people learn online, and I work with subject matter experts and professors like yourself. And I'm great at interviewing and extracting information out of your heads and then applying what I know from learning sciences to put it together to make an online course. And I'm able to link together course outcomes, competencies, and skills. And that's why I say every time and it's - that was very close to what I also wrote in the blog without reading it - very close to that because I've said that now so many times again, and again and again. And usually, that starts off the conversation right by them being like, "oh, okay." I follow along, and then I can actually show one of the courses or what I built, and then it like, it all clicks together, and then we're good to go for moving forwards, but right, that needs to happen, or else I'll just be like, uh, who are you?

Heidi Kirby  12:45  
Absolutely. Yeah. I think that a lot of times, even just interviewing for different positions that even the hiring managers or you know, I can't tell you how many times I've been asked in an interview if I had coding experience. I'm like, "No, I - yeah, I'm not a coder."

Dr. Luke Hobson  13:05  
It's it gets really tricky too with that. Because when you look at an instructional designer, and when you look at a job posting, depending upon the organization and what they're looking for, there absolutely could be coding elements. Obviously, not everything is going to be looking for that one, but I know - but that was also it didn't make the top five list, but it was right up there as far as for like, What do you wish you knew? And HTML and coding was in there from a lot of folks. And it makes sense that like, I taught myself some of the basics. I never plan on being a coder, but it has absolutely helped me in my LMS.

Heidi Kirby  13:42  
Probably, if you don't have an elevator speech, you should practice one.

Dr. Luke Hobson  13:47  
That's also what I said to in the blog - It's just like, here's mine, but absolutely, take it, craft it, practice it, make it your own. And honestly, my my piece of advice to that one is to actually practice articulating it - saying out loud because it's gonna come up time and time again, I guarantee it. And you can think about it when it's already written down. That's one thing. But then when you're trying to think of and speak a lot at the same time, you're fumbling over your words, you don't sound so confident. And it's at this point in time too, but you're almost trying to sell the purpose and the exact part of being an instructional designer and why this is so significant to making the project successful. And if you sound like you don't know what you're talking about, not really setting you up to be successful.

Heidi Kirby  14:32  
Right. So the second one is learning project management skills. Tell me a little more about this one.

Dr. Luke Hobson  14:40  
So this is one that of course, makes a lot of sense. But when you say project management nowadays, I know that a lot of people keep on posting about how they have PMP and some other certificates from - whatever it is, but the moral of this entire story  and the point of this one Is that you as the instructional designer, you are what's making this project work. And if you do not communicate effectively, with all the stakeholders and everyone else involved for those departments, then the project's gonna go off the rails. It's gonna fall apart because you are the person who is literally controlling how this works. You are the ones setting the deadlines, you are the one establishing the check-in points, the quality assurance processes - it all goes through you. So if you don't know how to manage your own time and manage a project with other people, it is not gonna go well.

Heidi Kirby  15:34  
Yeah. And to that point, it's in every letter of ADDIE, right? From the analysis to the implementation and evaluation, that is your baby, whatever the learning project is, that is yours. And, you know, I've been in a couple situations throughout my career where people wanted stakeholders, SMEs, whoever, wanted the instructional designer - just make your pizza and go away. And I'm like, "Oh, no, no, that's not what we do here." You know, we need to make sure that a number one, this request that you've made, right, when someone comes to you and says, I need training, or I need any course, it's our job to make sure that that's actually what you need. You know. So from that very first idea, It's on us to kind of take the responsibility for each of those pieces.

Dr. Luke Hobson  16:32  
Yeah, it all goes through us - every single part. I mean, I think about my own job right now, as I communicate - and we always say the SMEs are professors because they're like the main contact point, but also at the same time too, though, communicating with marketing, the customer support team, the advisors, the TA - the whoever else there's far more stakeholders than just one or two people involved with this one. So when you do have those type of the project kickoff calls, initiative calls, whatever you you - your organization would call them because everyone has different roles for them - that's when it's time to establish everything right then and there that like, okay, here's the project, here's our timeframe, here's our deliverables, here's what we really need to do to get this thing done, and to focus and make sure that the student experience is gonna be the best it can possibly be. And if not, then you are scrambling and running around and it just becomes a gigantic mess.

Heidi Kirby  17:24  
Right? And on the other end of that, doing the work at the beginning is super important. But then at the end, I'm sure you've had it happen, where you've got stakeholders who try to throw in everything but the kitchen sink to the project, and you're like, no scope creep, no more.

Dr. Luke Hobson  17:42  
Always, always. And that's why I always go back to those documents too. Because I say like, okay, let's look at the outcomes. So get the skills, the competencies, like what did we draw up in that initial blueprint? And if you're telling me now that you want to do this random task, does it fit in? No - Okay, well, then that goes away. Same thing too is thinking about the student who's taking the course - if you're promising them that this is going to be, let's say, three to five hours a module, and then you have someone who's just like, oh, it'll be better if I add in more and more, more, more. And then you're like, yeah, this is 10 hours, the students gonna quit. You know, we can't we can't physically do this and to get this done. So now, and I mean, even with everything going back to COVID-19 talking about that one, too. I am so glad that I had these project management skills in place because that basically just took all my projects and threw them out the window. And we had to quickly adapt as far as for like, how are we going to do this? And one of the things that I love to talk about is that I met up with our multimedia team, and we were talking together as far as brainstorming of well, how are we going to record professors if we can't bring them to campus? And we have we have a really nice lab, you know, we have everything set up for our own studio. And the thing that we did in a really fast turnaround time is our producer, Chris, made some excellent training resources. And then we started to practice to see if this would work. And it did where we actually sent microphones to professors to clip onto their shirts. And then we were in their ears actually talking with them providing guidance and feedback when they recorded their videos at two different locations from the iPhone and from a laptop, but then just to be safe, we also made sure that it was transcribed to their phones when it records just via the audio. So we had everything set up just worst-case scenario, but without project management skills of saying like here was the original deadline of what I want you to do for videos, but now oh my gosh, all these other things are happening. your actual real courses are getting punted down the road too, so how do we do this without any of those things? The pandemic could have completely crushed all my programs and all my projects, and luckily they're gonna be launching on time in a couple weeks.

Heidi Kirby  19:58  
Yeah, there is an element to project management that is being flexible and being able to problem solve. What do you think a good first step is for an instructional designer that doesn't have any project management skills?

Dr. Luke Hobson  20:12  
That's a really good question. Because I also learned to basically from baptism by fire because I had something go wrong really quick. And I was like, Whoa, never doing that again. And what I think what I would say to do, and this is, you know, we're gonna start with the basics here before going obviously into like these advanced methodologies or talking things about this, but the simplest thing I found to help me out just from starting is I would set a calendar reminder for once a week do a specific thing with on the project. And that way, it just reminded me of every Thursday, check in with me to see if they reviewed something, and every Monday, go into the Google Doc to see if they actually have done anything over the weekend. Just those small tricks will pay off in a long, long way. If they do that. What about you, what's your favorite trick?

Heidi Kirby  20:57  
Whatever method works for you - whether that's Word - Some people think in Word, some people think in terms of Excel, some people think in terms of PowerPoint. But whatever that is for you - start writing stuff down, you know, start writing stuff to the process down, that you are in control of who you need to talk to what the deadlines are because then it gets you in the mind frame of keeping track of everything, right? And that's kind of a good, good first exposure to project management, I think.

Dr. Luke Hobson  21:26  
And you bring up an excellent point too, which is something that I still do to this day. So I still use Google Sheets, no matter what - I always have, I always will until I die. And the reason being is not because - and I keep on seeing this, which is why I want to bring this up as everyone keeps on talking about the latest shiniest, flashiest, coolest project management software there is. Now, the problem with that is nothing with the product. It could be fantastic and awesome and make your life better. But the problem is for most instructional designers, you are then going to be sharing that with other people. And if I'm going to be sharing that with my professor who has been teaching the same course for 50 years, and I can't get him to understand what LMS is, you really think that I can get him to go into a Monday.com or a Trello board and be able to review something - there's no way - impossible - it's gonna take me hoursfor onboarding and training. So instead, just make it simple. So that way, anyone who views the document or the sheet, whatever it is, they know what to do. There's no training until we have it make sense.

Heidi Kirby  22:27  
Yep. Okay, so this one is fun - developing a brand and a portfolio and like you, I have heard so much chatter lately about, "I want to get into ID, but I don't know where to start with a portfolio."

Dr. Luke Hobson  22:43  
Yeah, and this one's really interesting too, because I kept on see - I tallied up both of those answers. And even though these could both be separate, because a brand is one thing a portfolio is another but I was just like, they do go hand in hand as you continue on your career. But the thing is that right now, more and more, people are going to be looking into becoming an ID, which is - clearly we're seeing this on LinkedIn, Facebook and everywhere else under the sun. And if that's the case, and now we're going to have more and more talented people come into this pool, what is really going to separate you from being an instructional designer compared to somebody else? And for that, what I wrote about was really just finding your specialty, finding what you are great at, what you're passionate about. And just keep on going into that area because you do not need to be this master expert where your portfolio or your brand is showing that you know everything about everything. Like I am - I'm the first to admit when it comes to learning theories and methodologies that I have one that I really love, and I love backwards design. I'll keep on using backwards design - that works for me, it works for my clients, life is good, but for sure, you don't need to all of a sudden be like oh, I use backwards design and SAM and ADDIE and this other new one that I just came up with, you know, you don't have to show all of that in a portfolio or in a prayer, just find what you're amazing at, and dig deep.

Heidi Kirby  24:06  
Right? And that goes back to point number one. You just had to explain what an instructional designer does to the hiring manager. You don't need to show them that you know every single thing about ID, right?

Dr. Luke Hobson  24:20  
No way - No, not at all. And the most valuable thing that you can show to someone to really are those steps of how you actually do start at like the very basics and then you walk someone through how you build something along the way and now you have a finished product. That's what people really want to see. However you do it is fine, as long as you show that it makes sense and have evidence to back up the claims then that's what you need to do. And what I'm seeing so far for the brands - because I am also like - I'm consider myself into this part of like a developing a brand section because I had no intention of building a brand. This was not planned in any way, shape, or form to have a blog or a podcast. This was just more of I kept on answering the exact same questions over and over and over again. And I finally said, What if I put somewhere where all my answers are in one spot, and I can just send you a link? That's how the blog was born. And then this became people really sharing the blog and saying, like, wow, this guy knows what he's talking about. Then people were coming to me for questions and answers was like, Oh, that was unexpected. Okay, what do I do now?

And after talking to a couple of friends that they were saying, like, yeah, you should try to build and capitalize on this more because there aren't enough people who are talking about how to actually take the real tangible steps of how to design something - it seems very much and I'm sure you've been to many conferences and webinars to where it's like, you just hear this theory all the time. Someone's great at talking about a theory, but then the last two minutes of the webinar, last two minutes of the conference, they start telling you how to actually do it. And it's like it should have been the flip side - do the whole conference of showing me step by step how to do something. I'll read the theory on my own time and that's what I try - that's what I've been doing with the blog and the podcast is really just to show someone "here is exactly how I do something." If you want to know how to make scenario-based learning courses, here is exactly my steps of how I put myself into the position of a student verify this with the professors, SMEs, here's my example. Here's the reflection question you know, like, building upon all those things just to really show someone and that now has in essence actually like become my brand is like the tangible skills guy for design. Cool, that works for me!

Heidi Kirby  25:50  
Your brand kind of finds you too.

Dr. Luke Hobson  26:49  
Absolutely

Heidi Kirby  26:50  
Right? You know, depending on what projects that you have to work on for work or what classes you take in a program - if you're in a program. Your brand starts to find you. And it's almost funny how that happens. Like, I taught college English for five years before I became an instructional designer, and I like fell sideways into corporate instructional design, you know, that wasn't necessarily the intention. It's just how it kind of happened. And so, you know, becoming a leader in that space then became something I wanted to do. So then leadership development, as far as instructional design, you know, you just have to kind of find what you like in the space. And then it also gives you a really good network of people that have a lot of specific knowledge about different things. So if you do come across a project that you're not familiar with, oh, you know, Luke knows tons about that. Let me go call him or you know, this person knows a ton about that, let me - I gotta pick their brain. And so it really creates a really, I think, a strong network when you really dig in and pick your niche.

Dr. Luke Hobson  27:56  
Absolutely. And that's why I've spoken to those same people because I've wrote down a few names on there where it's just like, you know, Peter Shea has made a 7000 plus instructional design online learning community. If I want to make an online learning community, I'm going to talk to him. Same thing if I want to talk more about universal design for learning. I read Dr. Katie Novak's book and Tom Thibodeau. And same thing I'm going to - I'm going to ask them like they know - what to do. So absolutely. And then like you said to it's actually funny because I talked to Dr. Robin Sargent from IDOL Courses Academy the other day, and I asked her about like, how does she become like the corporate ID specialist in this field? And exactly what you said is what she told me, "I fell into it and it found me. I never planned like this, but happy it worked out in this area." It's absolutely true.

Heidi Kirby  28:44  
Yeah, the other good piece of advice I was told about building a portfolio was unexpected, but I'll share it because I want to get your thoughts and see if you agree with it. Someone once said, "Do not put in your portfolio the first ever thing you design in Storyline? Keep working at it and then use some later stuff for your portfolio. Because if you put the first thing you ever designed in Storyline into your portfolio, it will look like the first thing you ever designed in Storyline."

Dr. Luke Hobson  29:18  
Yeah, yeah, that does make a lot of sense because with our jobs is that we are basically trained on how to learn. It's what we do. So the more and more skills that you pick up, the better instructional design you're going to be. And I could easily say that if I busted out my portfolio from 2016, you know, it's gonna be awful compared to what I've done recently, there's no way. So yeah, always being sure to update that one. And the other thing I would say too, about a portfolio is that it goes back to being able to talk very thoroughly about how you have designed something because I keep seeing portfolios of someone being like, here's my finished product. Yeah, cool, but then unpack that for me. Tell me how you got there. What problem was trying to solve? What skills were you really aiming for who was a target audience, you know, just basically reverse engineer it and show me under the hood that is far more valuable for someone who is looking to hire an instructional designer. Compared to this, here's this nice shiny object that I made.

Heidi Kirby  30:18  
Right. Give us the context. Give us the story. Yeah. What do you think about owning your own dot com? Having your own website?

Dr. Luke Hobson  30:27  
I mean, I have it. So I agree to it.

Well, one thing that I found that has been nice is that it because I own my own brand I have my own website - is it's something that I just know, really well now. I'm constantly updating it and I'm adding new things and I always feel like the portfolio that I had before was always like, just dusting it off because it you know, I haven't touched it or in two years, I need to revamp it. And now when someone says like, Hey, can you send me to your portfolio, your personal site or whatever? And it's like, yeah, I am confident that if you do go to this website, it really speaks to my authenticity, it really speaks to who I am. And it's not just some random fluff a past project, I can't remember what I did, like, no, I wrote all these recently. I'm confident you can figure out who I am from looking at my website.

Heidi Kirby  31:17  
And it's actually a pretty affordable investment compared to certifications, grad school associations. It's a pretty affordable investment to buy your dot com and get, you know, a website builder to build out your portfolio.

Dr. Luke Hobson  31:35  
Yeah, and that goes into actually the next point. So let's let's dive into the next one because I don't want to lose off of what you just said there. So the next point for those at home or listening or potentially reading at the same time, I don't know that's cool if you are, is that knowing instructional design is a career and is worth pursuing. Now, before we get into the rewarding experience, and all the greatness that comes with what we do and why we love everything about our jobs is that the latest things people have been sending me is that, "hey, can you review this instructional design program? And tell me should I go for this? Or should I go for this new degree, two year, four year...?" Whatever it is. And for some of them, I say, "Yep, that makes sense. Go right ahead." But then when you speak to more people, because I'm not sure about your undergrad or anything, but for my undergrad, I actually deeply regret it because it was a degree that was for four years, that taught me skills that were valuable, but could I have taught myself those skills and worked really hard for six months and found a mentor and then got my own externship and something probably and that would have saved me from thousands of dollars of student debt. And as a millennial who will probably be in student debt for forever, this is something that I am a strong advocate against, is going back to school for four years. For 30 to 40 grand a year for a degree that will get you a job that will maybe starting pay 50,000 a year maybe depends where, you know, it just doesn't add up and make sense. So I'm really glad that people know instructional design is a career. That's fantastic. I'm glad schools are paying attention and after catching others of how to get into this field and the right skills, so that makes me super happy. But to know that somebody could potentially be robbed of almost $160,000, for something that really, you could just find some other training and a mentor and get some real life practice from working underneath someone you know, in the field. Yeah, it's really tough to juggle and it depends upon everyone, their skill set their background experience, yada, yada, yada, but just want to throw that out there for that bullet point, because I didn't write that in the blog, but it just goes exactly what you said for your points. So I didn't want to miss it at all. 

Heidi Kirby  33:57  
Yeah, yeah, for sure. No, I agree. I think that as someone who got two masters degrees, and very much regrets the second one (laughs), sure, you know that, "oh, let me just flush 40 grand down the toilet here." You know, if I had known what instructional design was at that point and was able to dive right in, I would have done it, you know, and save some time, but you don't know what you don't know. And I think that it just depends on what you want to do with it. Right? So I'm pursuing my PhD in instructional design, because that big, high-level dream job someday for me is chief learning officer, right? I want to get as much knowledge as I can because I want to be a leader in the field. Not everybody wants that. Some people want to just do the design work for the rest of their career. There's no problem with that. We need people like that, right? We need people who are going to keep innovating and creating learner experiences. Do they necessarily needed a degree? Depends.

Dr. Luke Hobson  35:04  
Yep, it's true. And it's just completely different depending upon the background of corporate versus higher ed. or something else that's gonna probably pop up from everything with the pandemic on what new sectors and it come about, right? I'm sure something is gonna come - revolutionary changing things. So yeah, absolutely, because I know some folks who are in the corporate sector, and I actually never thought about - to this bullet point is that when I thought about instructional design, learning and development, from a corporate setting never really crossed my mind because I worked at a school. So I always thought you're going to work at a school. So that's what I kept on doing. But then I hear from friends who are in corporate or they left higher ed to go to corporate, and they like it for different reasons. And they're like, Oh, it's a new challenge. It's better or like I'm making significantly more money, working less hours. It all depends, clearly, but it's like, I'm glad to know that someone found out that they could use their skill set in a variety of ways of whether it's going to be teaching typical online students or for someone who's just trying to do important trainings that really do matter.

Heidi Kirby  36:04  
Yeah. And I would just say to people applying for jobs into hiring managers, you know, don't don't be a degree snob when it comes to instructional design because we, I think, we as a field are still pretty split down the middle on whether you need a degree or not. And I think that it truly is something that's very case by case.

Dr. Luke Hobson  36:26  
Yeah, it's really tricky to think about because also I do not have a background in instructional design for a degree because my doctorate is in education. So it's like it's one of those gray areas to and that's where those degrees kind of come into play of like, where do education degrees fall into because when you look at job postings, they will say what they're looking for for a degree and typically, some kind of educational degrees on there, somewhere have a general sense, or it could be real specific with instructional technology or whatever, you know, it could all definitely vary. But it's yeah, it'sI mean, I'm even divided, like even now - as someone who is, has been doing this for a while, and I keep on thinking about like, well, if I did go to school for four, maybe even now like what you just said, as far as you're with a PhD and what you want to do, that makes total sense, because the end goal says that a PhD is going to absolutely help you out in the long run, so clearly. I felt the same way for my doctorate, I knew that it was going to take me to where I want to go, it did. So that makes the right sense. But bachelor's - totally wrong, did not - missed that mark completely! (laughs)

Definitely does matter for sure. What I would just say though, is like just to cap off this bullet point, at the end of the day is that I really do find our jobs to be like the most rewarding thing I have ever done. Because I love the fact knowing that I am able to change a student's life. I am able to take an online experience and make it into something fun, invigorating, exciting, but at the same time, it's still informative and you're still learning skills. So when you read different things from those student testimonials that you get to hear about or if you collect survey information where students tell you about, like every module or the course and their experience with it, those are things where you're like, wow, like I really made a difference in this person's life. They don't know who I am. They'll never meet me, but my words that I put onto this course and everything that I designed actually really helps someone. So yeah, it's it's a rewarding

Heidi Kirby  38:27  
100%. So I want to hear a story about a difficult SME that you have worked with.

Dr. Luke Hobson  38:34  
Not a problem. I got plenty. I can talk all day about this one. This surprised me. I really thought this is going to be number one. 

Heidi Kirby  38:42  
Agreed. Yeah. 

Dr. Luke Hobson  38:42  
Yeah, right. So seeing this was down the line and I spoke with one friend of mine who started off as an instructional designer the exact same time I did. And she was just like, number one skill relationship management - done. So yep, that's it. This is going to be something that like I never saw it as an instructional designer, someone who like outside looking in when I was an advisor, seeing IDs was just how much work really goes into speaking with other people negotiating, influencing, really playing that political game. It's an absolute real thing. Just like trying to climb the ladder for an organization and get a promotion, there is 100% this type of a mentality that you are always like bartering and negotiating with someone to be able to say like, if you do this for me on time, I will try to incorporate this into the course. And that has been one thing I've had to learn how to overcome is that I needed to first and foremost, figure out how to set boundaries, how to set right guidelines, set the right tone as far as for like I am the person who is going to get this thing done, but you are my partner, you have an equal voice at the table. I absolutely care about what you have to say. But I'm going to be here to make sure that things are in check. So being able to do that was so critical. But then there are absolutely still times where we have those folks who do what they want. And I actually had someone before tell me that - where after explaining everything, they still said like, cool, I'm glad you know what you're doing... still gonna do it my way. It's like, great. So, like instead of the SME screaming and flipping a table. I was thinking about it. And I was just like, okay, like, now's the time with this person in particular and like, just to basically have a heart to heart and be open and saying, like, "Listen, if we do this in a manner which you're going to talk about, it is absolutely going to impact the student experience. It is not going to work. It's going to make our university look bad, the brand, the reputation the program and us as individuals that we did not do our jobs correctly. So really, why do you feel like you need to still do it your way and you don't think that my way is right?"  And it's like, "well, it's not that I don't think that your way is right." What I'm thinking is that, you know, this is a totally new world to him with online learning. And he was saying that "I feel like these courses are going to replace me in the future." Hmm. And "I also don't understand how we're going from something from a duration of being I teach this course normally for 16 weeks, you're telling me you're going to make this as micro learning mini course, I don't understand how this can all come together and be just as effective." Much like many of the conversations we're having nowadays as far as for tuition pricing with being in-person versus online and versus remote and all these other conversations we've been having. But from that, though, I just told them basically to trust me, let me just do this, I promise I can deliver. And I showed them another course from a colleague that he knew that we made this awesome product and he was like, all right, like he just - he bit his tongue. He let me do my thing. And he kept on doing the typical check ins, reviews and whatnot. And then at the end, this is when we were launching a pilot for this program actually. So I gathered all of this data because I put Qualtrics and embedded them at the end of every single module to get real-time feedback right away of way at the end of the course, where they really can't remember everything. It was like those in-time, real actual pieces of feedback. And I gathered all of those. And I ended up doing interviews at the end with these learners from different types of focus groups. So I just basically gathered all these student testimonials as far as for them saying what they liked about the course. And then I provided to him in writing, because it was data and transcripts and everything. And I showed it to them and saying, Yeah, here's the reviews, read them. And he could actually see blocks of text that said, how much they loved his teaching style. They felt his instructor presence. They loved everything that he did, because he was a great storyteller. And then it was like all these things that are saying like, "you're an excellent teacher," but then at the same time, they also then said, "Oh, and by the way, I got a promotion at my job. I managed to fix this relationship with my boss and we've been hating each other for years. But I used your strategies on culture" and blah, blah, blah. And those things is what actually won him over. And then he became like my champion. He's my online learning champion of talking to other folks and saying, "look at this, like we did this thing together." It's like, "Yeah, we did." So that was that was, by far, my favorite story. And that's actually what I wrote about in there because it still is like, so cool.

Heidi Kirby  43:25  
Oh yeah, when you get a win like that, definitely. I have worked with difficult stakeholders, difficult teammates. And what I bring with me from my previous time teaching college English, and just being able to say, "look, I get that you're the expert at this. I'm not trying to say I even know anything about whatever the subject is right, changing a tire on a car even, you know, I don't know anything about it you're the expert but guess what I'm really good at making sure that you are explaining how to change a tire in a really engaging interactive way that people understand and remember." And I think that that's what I had to do when I was teaching college because I would teach people who are much older than I am, you know, and and I'd have to establish that first day of class, "you know, way more about life than I do, and I get that. I'm not here to teach you about life. I'm here to teach you about reading, and literature in English." Right? And so I think using that kind of same method has been successful for me when you get those SMEs that are kind of like, "Well, what do you know about this?" Right? You get that kind of chip on the shoulder of "What does this person know?"

Dr. Luke Hobson  44:47  
Yep. Yeah, and I've had to explain that too because of my age has definitely been a factor for some of those conversations because I'm in my 30s, and you've been teaching this class for 50 years. Yeah, I get it you know more than me. I'm not debating that. But what I am saying is that I do know more about how to create an online learning environment that does make sense, which is conducive to learning, because if you do it your way and luckily I have - honest, I'm actually trying to find something to go knock on wood - no wood here, so a lot of colleagues though where they are in situations where it doesn't go that way for their conversations, and basically the SME and the professor will actually just do like a death by PowerPoint, and I had one friend, bless her heart where she got 500 slides, and I started to go through noses like this 500 slides so why does someone think this is gonna help you learn? And those are the times where it's just like I am so sorry. And, and it gets really difficult because once again, it is that political game of like how much authority do you have over this entire project or is this other person that may come in? And I've absolutely seen things where both parties went over the heads of the other person and then they brought on battle of directors and AVPs and you're like, "whew okay." It can get messy real fast if you don't establish things correctly, right away.

Heidi Kirby  46:22 
Right. You need to have some practice having difficult conversations - having some confrontation. Definitely. There's something that you said when you were telling the story though that you kind of just said it real quick and glossed over, but I think I want to make it a bigger deal. He said, "Oh, you know, we had our regular meetings and reviews and touch points," and you made it sound like such a little small thing but for some of those difficult SMEsand stakeholders, that is huge in getting their buy in letting them see what you're working on through the process regularly instead of just saying, "Okay, I've got what I need. I'll talk to you later" Going away - doing your design, doing your development, bringing it back, finished, you know - I can't tell you how many times I've seen other people bring a finished - quote unquote -  product to someone and I'm saying, This isn't what I wanted at all, because they weren't keeping up that that communication throughout the process and I think that that's a huge part of getting a difficult SME or even a difficult stakeholder on your side, and buying in and it helps them to see that point that you made about basically make remember like a rock star right, it helps them to see - "Oh, you are making me look good."

Dr. Luke Hobson  47:41
You know, but of course you care about their presence, you hear about the teaching presence - instructor presence - like all of that comes into play. So yeah, and that's still why like I was going -saying before about using Google Sheets. I still I use Google Sheets, because it shares automatically, so you can see in real time, what I am doing - when I'm going through what you have given me and showing, you know, giving it to you back for the reviews and pinging you and letting you know and tagging you and everything - or calls whatever, you know  - whatever checkpoints that we have set up. It all depends on their style and that's probably never a good thing to talk about who is just to really understand their communication style and also how they work because not everybody is going to thoroughly enjoy you checking in with them every single week at Fridays at five (laughs), you know, whatever it is. You need to be able to understand their best way of doing so and there are some SMEs where I had to never get with them on the phone. They were great in email, they wrote a ton. I wrote a ton back, and we made it work just fine. And there are others where no, we are going to have a phone call every Tuesday and Thursday because we got a tight deadline, and you're not doing what I'm trying to say and vice versa. So we're going to find some middle ground and make this thing work real quick. So being able just to have that open conversation and going back to the project kickoff call and establishing all these things. If you don't, it's just  disaster. But most people are very open, when you ask them like, "how do you like to work? what's your typical schedule like?" If you're telling me you teach classes every single Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday from a normal nine to five schedule; then, hey, we're not going to talk those days. You gotta figure that out and know them, and then you can make sure that everything is smooth sailing going forwards.

Heidi Kirby  49:29  
Well I'm really excited about this blog post, and we are definitely gonna post a link to your entire website on the summary page for this episode. But the last question I want to ask you. to kind of wrap everything up: what is one book, or one YouTube video, or one infographic one piece of media, right, that new instructional designers can consume that will help them better understand how to be an instructional designer.

Dr. Luke Hobson  50:01  
You've got it, and without even thinking about it, it's definitely UDL in the Cloud. For those who haven't heard of UDL before, and I said it really quick at one of the parts with Dr. Novak and Tom Thibodeau is that they essentially wrote this book that was called UDL in the Cloud, and it talks about how to make your online courses flexible and it talks about how to overcome barriers. And that book was the first book I ever read as an instructional designer, and I asked a mentor of mine and I just asked her like - the exact same question you asked me, "what book should I read to get good at this?" And this is what she recommended, and I still use this to this day. And just to give you an example of why this is such a powerful tool is that when you were designing your online courses, you're constantly thinking about the student experience and you're thinking about all kinds of students, and what potentially they are going through. And the point of this framework is to say that if it's good for one students, it's going to be great for all students because they know how they learn best, and if you can provide any type of resource to supplement that then wonderful your course is going to be fantastic. To give you a couple of different examples of what I've done... so at MIT for that leadership program, I absolutely used UDL all over the place for everything for that program and how we did it is that we structured it in a way where there is going to be a pilot launch of the program, and then an actual real official launch after I collect enough data, and then being able to go and change this. And how I did this was that I did both a quantitative and a qualitative phase, so I took those Qualtrics links that I was talking about, and I embedded them at the end of every single module. And then once I collected all that data, I scrubbed through them for discrepancies and to see if there are things that I didn't actually plan out. I assumed that the data was going to show me one thing, talking about - and some of the questions, just to give your audience a sense, is I was trying to make sure that everything that I wrote about connected with them, because the point of what you're doing, the point of my job of professional development is to be able to show this is going to be used in a real-world application. So being able to demonstrate that what you're reading about and learning about has a purpose. And it's not just theory or fluff, or whatever; you know you're actually going to be able to use it at the end of the day for your education, as you should with all education, but that's beside the point. So then once I've looked for all those discrepancies, I then was able to pull in different types of focus groups. So, I had small focus groups where I hosted Zoom interviews. And then I was able to ask more thought-provoking questions on these discrepancies to say like, "Hey, you know like 99% of you said that they felt that this didn't connect with them, but I was really thinking it would. Tell me more about it." And we just built those questions on that. We had about four different groups per course, so this was more of like a - at the end of the day this is like a six-month long project to give someone an idea, but really, we're trying to make sure that we we hit it out of the park here because it was going to be our brand new program. So by doing that, though, and utilizing UDL framework, I was able to learn how other people wanted the material to be presented. So I heard from some learners that they were saying like, you know, "I really take notes when I'm on my lunch break, and I'm trying to do this and it gets really complicated, and I need some help here." I was like, "Okay, so what you're telling me is that if I made a template for you that had the outcomes and the objectives and some of the key subjects for the week, you would use that to take better notes." "Absolutely." So, okay, done. So I made that and I made it a Word document because I want you to type on it. I don't want any PDF files you can't use it and lock it or something silly like that. And then I heard from folks as well they were saying that they learn best when you know they're constantly listening to podcasts on their commute. They're like, okay, so you're telling me that if I made a podcast episode per course. you would be thinking about the course more, which is fantastic because I want the spacing effect to be real of you do the coursework on Monday, but then you're out and about on a Wednesday and you're driving and listening to the course, and it just allows enough time for the storage information and retrieval and that whole process. And they said, "Yeah." So I was like, "Okay, done." So,  I made a storytelling interview kind of podcast that I had people come in, and we talked about things for different weeks, and I embedded that into there as well. I heard from other people that they wanted more of an actual download to be able to have a visual of what tools they were learning about because they learned about so much so quickly and they're like, "I know that there's a bunch of different tools that link to the outcomes and such, but like, what is it again? What's the name of it again? Can you give me a description?" So it was like, "Fine." So, we made a downloadable toolkit that had a really nice infographic that was able to expand and actually tell you more about what you learned about from that week and from that tool in particular and how you can use it in the real world once again. So it was all these things that makes common sense of how someone else is gonna learn, but I would have never known that, and it would have also been absolutely silly of me to say like, "oh, only the person who wants to podcast can have the podcast." The rest of the entire class can't have that, and it's like, no. Even if you think, and this is a complete myth, but even if you think you're like a visual learner - whatever - everyone says that all the time. 

Heidi Kirby 55:30
Yeah. 

Dr. Luke Hobson 55:31
Well, the thing is, you're not, but it's fine. This is another podcast episode, but the thing is that (laughs), yes, you can still have this downloadable toolkit, you can still see everything, but you just told me that you are also great at listening. You listen for auditory different types of signals, so then of course, have this podcast that goes along with it. It's gonna boost your knowledge when it comes to everything else the podcast is talking about once you go back into the course. And that's the whole point of everything for the framework. So UDL in the Cloud - I'll plug that book, all day and night. It's the one that you should get if you really are serious about taking your ID game to the next level.

Heidi Kirby  56:10  
Great, well thank you very much for joining me here on the BLOC. I'm super excited, and I am really looking forward to see how much this blog blows up and I'm sure I'll probably see people on LinkedIn sharing it soon.

Dr. Luke Hobson  56:25
It's it's still trending. So, it's very possible. Thanks for having me. Always fun to nerd out. And if you ever want me back on, more than happy to come back.

Heidi Kirby  56:36
Oh, for sure. 

Heidi Kirby 56:37
Thanks again for joining me on the BLOC. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with friends and  review us on your favorite podcast. I hope you'll tune in again soon.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai