Patterns in Instructional Design Responses

The Big Question

I’ve been reviewing the responses to February’s Learning Circuits Big Question: “Instructional Design: If, When, and How Much?” Because this has generated so many responses, there’s just a lot of content to absorb. To help me see the patterns, I created this tag cloud using TagCrowd. I excluded the words instructional, designer, design, learning, and e-learning, which were very common but I felt didn’t help me see the trends in the responses.

I’m still processing all this information myself, but I thought I’d share the tag cloud now. What stands out to you in the patterns? Are there any surprises?

LCBQ Tag Cloud

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5 thoughts on “Patterns in Instructional Design Responses

  1. Well, “learning” was the most common word, but I actually removed that from the results. I took out “instructional,” “designer,” and “design” too. But you’re right; content appeared quite often. That isn’t something I expected to see.

  2. I guess content is still king.

    Does this mean we’re still creating content-centric vs. learner-centric experiences no matter what our instructional design approach?

  3. When I was reading the posts and making my own notes, I recognized several people writing about analysis as one of the important roles of instructional designers. I expected that to be one of the themes that this tag cloud picked up. Like you, I thought “plan” would be more prominent too.

    I did include all the responses to Karl Kapp’s post about requiring instructional design degrees, so that may have skewed the results towards “degree” a bit.

    The fact that “however” made the top 50 intrigued me. I think many people did posts of “here’s the general point; however, there’s exceptions.”

  4. Hi Christy – very cool; I’m impressed by your innovative approach to analysing the data!

    Assuming that any discussion about ISD will include “learners”, “content” & “training” etc, the items that ‘jump off the page” for me are really the tags that aren’t there: words (and related discussion of course) like approach, methodology, collaboration, assessment, evaluation and so on (see how far “plan” is in the background). It’s also interesting that tags like SME, knowledge, tools are bubbling under the really large items. Did all of us contributors to the LCBQ miss the point of “If, How Much, and When” or has the debate moved on to some thing else?

    The LCBQ obvious tapped a wellspring of interest in the community. I’ll certainly be interested to see the outcomes of your pattern analysis.

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