At Any Rate

I’ve always been intrigued by how people can design instruction without understanding the target domain or subject matter. The conventional wisdom in most custom-content companies is to interview subject-matter experts (SME, mostly pronounced Smee, as in Captain Hook’s sidekick) to “acquire content” and then subject that content to ID — a most torturous and meaning-bending process.

Instructional Designers certainly cannot be experts in all the subjects that they deal with, but that doesn’t take away the responsibility to take the time and effort to understand the instructional domain. Imagine an architect designing a hospital without getting a deep understanding of how hospitals work.

I was reminded of this style of instructional design in discussing a recent project on spoken English training for the BPO market. The designers obviously had no idea of how language learning works, and the result was a shoddy piece of work. Now that English is a big training opportunity, expect to see lots of wonderfully packaged but poor-performing programs.

Language learning is a little more complicated than most other domains because “[l]anguage is not a cultural artifact that we learn the way we learn to tell time or how the federal government works.” That’s from Steven Pinker’s wonderful book The Language Instinct.

At any rate, if you’re going to be designing a language learning program, make sure you spend some time up front getting to know the fundamental principles of language learning. And Pinker’s book might just be the right place to start.