If you look up jobs in the field of learning design you will probably find several different job titles.
The most common two are Instructional Designers and Learning Experience Designers.
So what is the difference between Instructional Design (ID) and Learning Experience Design (LXD)?
Is there a difference between these disciplines at all?
Let’s start by acknowledging that these terms and the expectations an employer might have of someone with either of these job titles is not universally agreed upon. Also, there is going to be significant overlap in most cases on the skillset required. For example, both will generally need to be able to do similar core training and communications activities like perform needs analysis, write objectives, make outlines, write content, evaluate programs, and make presentations to some degree.
To situate these terms and understand their relevance, we need to discuss the origins and language of Instructional Design.
Instructional Design
Instructional Design emerged out of the application of behavioural psychology and educational research to the demand for large scale military training in the early 1900s to 1940s. The work of behaviourists laid the foundation for ID with external stimulus-response training and observable behaviour.
This early work was built upon by others to develop highly systematic approaches to behavioural training by the 1950s. Through the 50s to 70s as our understanding of psychology advanced, ID went through a cognitivist revolution, exploring how individuals’ thought processes and information processing can also influence behaviour and memory, perception, and cognitive load gained appreciation for their role in behaviour. Key point here is that the “instructor” and “instruction” is really emphasized up to this point.
By the 80s and 90s more human-centred design theories started to gain popularity, ushering in the constructivist era of ID. Constructivism asserts that learning is a process where the meaning of things is actively constructed by learners through their experiences and interactions with the world, rather than passively received from an instructor or text.
This means that effective learning experiences should provide opportunities for learners to engage in hands-on exploration, experimentation, social interaction, and overcoming meaningful challenges to build their own understanding by connecting new information with their past experiences.
In my opinion, this is where things really started to split and the language used became significant. Constructivism, Cognitivism, and Behaviourism came to represent more than just ways of understanding the learning process, they became distinct schools of thought about how training, teaching, and learning should take place. Notably, the ideologies behind Workplace Training and Education started to diverge widely depending on industry and type of program, emphasizing performance and compliance vs meaning-making and discovery.
Throughout the 2000s the digitization of training and education combined with the advancement of research on learning and human behaviour has led to the use of the term Learning Experience Design.
Learning Experience Design
At Hot Neon, we choose to use the term Learning Experience Design rather than Instructional Design because to us, it better captures how we believe we should think about learning at this point in time: through a broad constructivist lens that chooses the most effective approach to learning for your context.
The words “Learning Experience” better describe the breadth of design methods, systems, and materials that you need to consider. Learning is change, and Experience is the total sensory, cognitive and affective processes and environment that lead to making meaningful sense of information. It also centers the learner better: A learning experience sounds like something you do or a process you go through, whereas instruction sounds like something done to you.
Terminology like “training” better aligns with behaviourist approaches, and “instruction” with cognitivist methods. Maybe it’s also my millennial disdain for how I was taught in public school to be a cog in the machine, but to me it feels yucky to approach adult learning with such reductive words. We seem to “train” dogs and “instruct” children, these words can have strong negative connotations for people.
To us, Learning Experience Design also seems to provide a more clear nod to the technologically changing and multidisciplinary industries we are a part of, where there is an ongoing convergence between educational technology, behavioural science, and user experience research and design.
Now What?
It’s time for the language to evolve with what we are actually doing and maybe more importantly, how we think about it and why we’re doing it. Most Instructional Designers are regularly expected to do much more than design instructional systems and materials. Many who work in workplace learning opt to be called a Performance Consultant to better describe the consultative and strategic nature of what they do to improve organizational performance.
Whatever you choose to call what you do, the problem with words and labels is that they are always limiting, they put a boundary around what we do and how we organize it in our minds. LXD suffers from the same issues and perhaps we will change our stance in the future as the role continues to change.
For now, we choose to use LXD because it better describes what we do and more importantly, how we think about what we do. Some people are truly instructional designers, and the title reflects what they do precisely. Some people have a strong identity or other reasons to vigorously defend the language used.
The point is, that’s okay. Difference is okay. Change is okay. We believe that as designers of human change we must always be adapting to the needs of the people we serve and if that means changing the words we use or reinventing ourselves to do that better, that’s okay.
