Academic librarians seek to connect and collaborate with faculty in order to integrate their skills into the teaching and learning process. Learning more about our instructional design colleagues, and establishing relationships with them, might help.
Though it is seldom at the core of their work, academic librarians who have instruction responsibilities often engage in instructional design to some degree. Whether it’s performing analysis to identify student learning gaps or developing an instruction activity, librarian-educators benefit from the adoption of instructional design skills. Because the work of academic librarians, including those whose primary focus is something other than instruction, often involves some aspect of design or design thinking, I’ve advocated that LIS programs should integrate more design education into the curriculum. Rather than wait for that to happen, there is an action academic librarians can take to get more engaged with instructional design. Get connected with the instructional designers who work at our institutions. How much do we know about them, and what efforts have we made to build relationships?
Call for Integration
While academic librarians’ work involves various types of design, only within the last decade has there been a more formal recognition of the value of having instructional design capacity within the academic library. One way in which this is evidenced is by the gradual increase in either formal instructional design positions within academic libraries or blended positions that combine librarian and instructional design skill sets. The Blended Librarian concept was an early attempt at acknowledging the value of integrating instructional design into the existing librarian skill set. It has influenced some change and position development within the academic library, but the merging of the two would likely have happened anyway in time. Where that set of recommendations fell short is in bringing about a closer working relationship between librarians and instructional designers in higher education. You might think, given some of our professional similarities and efforts to support faculty success with their students, that we’d be naturally engaging in more collaboration. We need to invest more time in really understanding and reaching out to each other. A new report may help academic librarians to learn more about instructional designers in academia, and give us a push in the right direction.
Work of Instructional Designers
Instructional Design in Higher Education is a report on the “role, workflow and experience of instructional designers.” It comes from Intention Futures, a strategy and design organization, with support from the Gates Foundation. The report is an effort to learn more about the work and professional experience of instructional designers: Who are they, what do they do, and where do they fit into higher education as they help to bridge the gap between faculty instruction and student learning? The report finds the work of instructional designers falls into four categories:
Design instructional materials and courses, particularly for digital delivery
Manage the efforts of faculty, administration, IT, other instructional designers, and others to achieve better student learning
Train faculty to leverage technology and implement pedagogy effectively
Support faculty when they run into technical or instructional challenges
Academic librarians should find it of interest that instructional designers also report that too often faculty are unaware of what instructional designers can do for them. We are not alone in wanting faculty to take greater advantage of what we offer. That’s just one way in which academic librarians and instructional designers face similar challenges in academia. The report identifies quite a few—and some differences too.
Alike in Some Ways, Not Others
There are quite a few similarities between instructional designers and academic librarians: It is primarily a female profession (67%), about a third have doctoral degrees, the majority (64%) are above age 40, and designers come to the profession from a multitude of backgrounds. Where the two differ significantly is the basic nature of the work and relationship with faculty. Unlike reference librarians who generally handle questions of a specific nature that are less time intensive, excepting the occasional more complex consultation, instructional designers are more project focused. They are more likely to work with faculty over a longer period, helping with course design and doing pedagogical training or program assessment. Whereas instructional designers focus primarily on instruction-related activity, given the complex nature of libraries, academic librarians fulfill a wide range of functions, from e-resource management to metadata services to digital scholarship support. Instructional designers report working with faculty multiple times a day. Academic librarians might interact with faculty multiple times a month. Instructional designers collaborate with faculty. Academic librarians help educate their students. Both professions work with lots of technology tools, though as you might expect, instructional designers work more intensively with learning management systems and educational technologies.
Make the Connection
If the librarians at your institution already connect with the instructional designers, job well done. For all the others still thinking about it—or who have yet to give it any thought at all—this is an opportunity. The report makes a great conversation starter because librarians can reach out to instructional designers to recommend getting together to discuss the report and identify where interests and objectives overlap. My own experience is that instructional designers know less about library resources and the work of academic librarians than we would expect. Once they do know, that works in our favor. How so? Instructional designers, as indicated in the report, engage in more direct contact with faculty than librarians. That’s a natural outcome of their role in helping faculty design courses and, where feasible, more effectively apply technology to improve student learning. That positions instructional designers and technologists to be strong allies in pointing faculty to library resources and librarian expertise in building courses, structuring assignments, and improving student research. This is a two-way street. Librarians can work collaboratively with instructional designers to strengthen learning, whether it’s leading the design of a research tutorial that enables a faculty member to flip a class or designing an annotated bibliography assignment that points students to the appropriate resources. The opportunities are there. What we need is better communication. Instructional designers may think that their librarian colleagues have little interest in their work or the possibilities for engagement. Now’s the time to demonstrate we have a great deal to offer each other.