Games have been a hot topic in education and industry since the early 2000s, with more organizations seeking to apply games as a way to motivate and engage clients, trainees, and professionals seeking new learning opportunities. But, even though the design process might seem all “fun and games” on the surface, it’s more nuanced than it looks.

Establishing yourself as an effective instructional designer or facilitator requires that you are knowledgeable, effective, and dynamic in the virtual and blended classroom. Unfortunately, while navigating new and emerging technologies, focusing on learning needs can sometimes fall to the wayside. Even understanding what participants need in order to successfully complete an online learning initiative can prove to be challenging. And, as we all know, if you can't engage your learners, your learning initiative will likely fail.

On June 22, 2015, Candice Kramer shared her insights into "Learning Across the Performance Spectrum," with the InSync BYTE series attendees. (Click here to view the full recording of the session.) During this session, Candice shared some key insights that deserve reiteration.

Virtual instructional designers will need to participate as learners in the environment and be trained on how to use the technology to its best instructional advantage.

If you would like your virtual classes to meet, or even exceed, the quality you expect from traditional deliveries, you need to strategically think about how to prepare your team to be successful in the virtual classroom. Prior experience as a designer, facilitator, or learner in a traditional classroom does not guarantee success when moving to a virtual environment. Everyone involved in the learning process needs to acquire the skills they need to master the additional competencies required for the virtual learning environment.

Virtual instructional designers manage the development of learning solutions for live, virtual classroom-based instruction.  Without the designer there would be no content to deliver.  They connect client needs to solutions through analysis and execution of an effective design process.  They make the material come alive by adding context to the content through teachable stories and engaging activities.

This post was originally written by Roger Courville on The Virtual Presenter blog. Many thanks for sharing.

Why and how every instructional designer should include “performance notes” for virtual classroom courses 

Think about how written music works. Looking at something on a piece of paper is a FAR cry from real music, right? So what do composers and arrangers do?

They include a myriad of annotations that give a musician looking at the sheet music direction on volume and tempo and repeats and mood and on and on.

And instructional designers should take note (pun fully intended).

To ensure success, end-to-end project management is critical.

Congratulations! You’ve created an instructional design plan that includes validated learning goals and objectives and an assessment plan, and maps the learning outcomes to the most appropriate delivery methodologies. The next step is to get this plan off of the virtual drawing board and into development.

Developing virtual and blended learning programs is not a “plug-and-play” scenario. Most organizations are relatively new to blended learning, and chances are no one individual has the expertise or time to develop or launch a blended curriculum. To ensure success, end-to-end project management is critical.

Spending a day or two planning on paper, away from authoring tools and virtual classroom environments, will go a long way toward making sure your development initiative is on track.

Designing for the face-to-face delivery is hard enough; how do you transfer those skills to the virtual and blended delivery environments? Virtual learning is live learning delivered via a virtual classroom such as WebEx Training Center or Adobe Connect. Participants and facilitators interact and collaborate through speaking, whiteboards, breakout rooms, and other engagement types. Blended learning is a program in which performance objectives are matched to the most appropriate delivery medium or technology, including virtual training, self-paced training, and traditional classroom instruction. Program design determines the delivery method, and not the other way around.

When creating a design plan for a live online learning session, the instructional designer must keep the needs of many different individuals in mind. They include the following key players:

• The Subject Matter Expert, who needs to be able to determine that the content is being communicated effectively.
• The media producer, who needs to understand the context of the media he or she is producing.
• The instructor, who needs to have a script and understand how the technology is being used in context with the content.
• The participants, who need materials that complement the training program, and resources to extend the learning beyond the individual session.
• If you're using a stage director to manage the live event, that person needs to know the big
  picture and have "stage directions" that are clear and concise.