I have found in the workplace that there can be debate about what constitutes training, documentation, learning and development, and instructional design, as well as their related best practices. Businesses and teams tend to have their own preferences for what works best for them, so I lean toward a practical approach to first learn about those preferences and then offer support as may be best appropriate.

Some environments are fast moving, particularly in the technical and financial professions, which have developed their own undocumented shortcuts, innovations, trade secrets, or practical workarounds, to use blogs, file sharing systems, instant messaging logs, searchable knowledge bases, or a collection of other systems and practices that step far outside of formal instructional design theory, but which nevertheless serve to effectively and economically augment workplace learning and collaboration.

When it comes to learning, the Internet has changed almost everything. Who has not used YouTube, or known someone who has used it, to find a video that someone else has made to fix something around the house in an emergency, or to save some time or money? It’s the same for Google, to search for answers to everyday questions. Instruction has become more self-directed, or steered by computer algorithms to filter what people consider or learn.

That said, there is still a place for instructional design theory to harness these systems and methods, and offer structure to learning programs, including assessments, certifications, and quality assurance.

While the instructional design field grows to include social media, mobile learning, blended learning, open educational resources, virtual reality, and gamification, it can still draw from the Behavioral Objectives Movement, including Benjamin Bloom with his Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, and Robert Mager, with his efforts to promote measurable, performance base learning objectives with their matching assessments, to help assure learner engagement, as well as relevant, fair, and accurate testing.

Other names include Miller (task analysis; information processing theory - chunking), Gagné (Conditions of Learning: five major categories of learning: verbal information, intellectual skills, cognitive strategies, motor skills, and attitudes, and nine events of instruction), Dick and Carey (systems approach to instructional design), and Kirkpatrick (four levels of evaluation of training effectiveness: reaction, learning, behavior, and results).

With the development of AI, personalized learning, and other systems, this arena is evolving, and we all learn what works best to meet needs.