In eLearning, an Instructional Designer, or an ID, is the person who gathers the necessary information for the course, understands that information, and develops content that is educational, well structured, engaging, and meets the learner’s objectives. An Instructional Designer needs to be a good writer, understand the learner’s abilities and limitations, be good at developing learning plans, working with Subject Matter Experts, or SMEs (pronounced as”Smee”), and be flat out awesome at understanding what makes content educational to meet the needs of  both the learner and the course provider.

As you can see, an Instructional Designer wears a lot of hats and bridges of lot of gaps. A team of developers, often work from an Instructional Designer’s storyboards to produce the final module or interactive learning tool. A storyboard is a document that details out each chapter of information, what the audio needs to say, what text and images need to show up on screen, and what knowledge checks and interactive components can best benefit the user. An Instructional Designer will work with a Creative Director to define a look and feel and brainstorm all the ways to make the course content engaging.