Instructional design is useless.

 Instructional design is useless.

There are two reasons why it’s useless:

1. the first is that it’s folklore: a good deal of instructional design (learning styles, Kolb, Bloom’s taxonomy) is basically just whimsy & ritual, with little or no evidential support.
2. the second is that it doesn’t relate to learning: Some instructional design does have good evidential support - cognitive load theory for example - but doesn’t relate to learning, instead to peculiar instructional challenges such as recall tests. In other words it relates to educational ritual and won’t help you make a difference in the real world of learning.

There are lots of people who are proud of their knowledge of instructional design, have qualifications in it, or have been practicing it for decades (I was one of those people) - so I am sorry about this.

Before you bark at me & tell me I don’t know what I am talking about, I taught learning theory, published study guides on this (and other things) and ran development teams where our goal was to apply it. I know more than most. It doesn’t work. Why do you think, YouTube, Google & TikTok are entirely bereft of instructional design? If they really helped people learn, don’t you think they would be popular?

Just stop. Move on. Start thinking about learning.

Image: Buzz Andersen