Doing instructional design work for speed is an occasional reality for IDs at the university. Speed becomes a critical issue whenever there are deadline-sensitive projects. In these situations, there are deadlines from grant funders, compliance trainings, legal requirements, course-launch deadlines, commercial deadlines, and any number of other reasons.

The Cases for Speed-work

Speed is seldom the first requirement, but in some cases, it can be. Sometimes, speed is the over-riding factor. Sometimes when a crucial staff member has moved on, or a project has hit a road bump that the current team is unable to solve, then instructional designers are brought on to troubleshoot and to carry a project forward. Subject matter experts who do not have a sense of method for the instructional design work may also bring an ID on to create some workflows and generic work documents.

Speed-work is also required for other peripheral work, such as publications that are on deadline, compliance-based trainings, presentations for conferences, last-minute curricular updates, and others. Commercial off-campus work may also be done on a speed basis because these organization are more used to fast development. They’re not working on semester schedules. They have cost-benefits calculations going on constantly.

Even normal development schedules may evolve to ones that require speed-work. These are projects that rely on a number of subject matter experts to develop, and some pieces come in late or under-par.

Aspects of Speed-work

Some keys to speed-work are to have some amount of breathing room in a work day to accommodate surprises. It also helps to have instructional design workflow processes and designs down pat, so these may be applied without too much difficulty. It helps to know the authoring tools well to get them to output the contents needed. This involves fairly constant work because the interfaces and tool capabilities are constantly changing.

Speed-work also means paring down the learning to the core necessary elements. This means that the training is no-frills. A sense of workflow and a digital box of tools that may be used to develop these learning materials are also needed. It also helps to have working relationships around campus to execute on work in a distributed (albeit localized to the campus) way…

In Corporations

It’s so much more common to hear of speed-work in corporations that use instructional design. There, they have a captive learning audience that must receive particular legal and compliance trainings on a regular basis as a feature of a legal and compliant workplace. These are basic concepts and practices that have to be conveyed, and the learning doesn’t really have to be too customized…just understandable, clear, and accessible.

Most work offers sufficient lead-up time to completion. And there’s plenty of support for the varying speeds necessary for different types of development. Still, there have been exhilarating occasions for fast work, and when there’s a need to deliver, it really helps to deliver.