An architecture professor once told me, “Architects live and die by scale.” If I were to devise a congruent profession-specific idiom for instructional design, it would be “Instructional designers live and die by alignment.” Alignment of a learning project’s goals, objectives, and outcomes to the organization’s strategic plan is essential in creating effective training programs. All learner assessments and program evaluations should also be in alignment with these factors.
Alignment in Action
IMAGE: For a project to teach freshman students about the role of contracts in architecture, I created a table that outlined the alignment between the larger goals, class learning objectives, and expected outcomes. I first asked the client what they generally wanted their students to take away from the course, and these larger, more general concepts became the goals. I then used backwards design and asked the client what they wanted their students to do with this knowledge in the real world, and these answers became the expected outcomes. From these outcomes, I then created learning objectives and aligned them with both the goals and expected outcomes. As all objectives should be measurable, I created the learning activities specifically to both teach and measure these objectives.
