With increasing exposure to global mores, Indian schools are trying to make coursework interesting for students. And the people who are helping to provide that spark by redesigning syllabi are instructional designers. Take the Bangalore-based Alifia Zaveri, who uses her creative skills to make science lessons come alive for children. “Instructional design is the process by which boring lessons are jazzed up and made interactive and application-based,” says Zaveri, a content creator at an instructional design firm.

When students realise that science principles are not just a collection of dry words but the reason for some very interesting phenomena in real life, they will eagerly look forward to their lessons. It is the dream of every instructional designer, and the correct measure of their success, to design a course like that.

Zaveri uses a variety of tools, whether it is telling a story through pictures and cartoons or other multimedia applications, to make science concepts easy to understand and keep a child engaged all through the lesson. The instructions have to be such that the child understands the language and can easily relate to situations, she says.

Instructional design (ID) is, however, not limited to improving the school syllabus. “ID today is a practice that’s in demand wherever a teaching-learning transaction or knowledge transference happens. This includes classrooms in schools, colleges as well as the training rooms of corporate organisations,” says Chennai-based Chitra Ravi, founder and CEO of EZ Vidya Pvt. Ltd, a firm that also designs training courses for companies.

According to experts, ID comprises five phases — analysis, design, development, implementation and evaluation — ADDIE, in short. Instructional designers first analyse the content, design the coursework and develop the methods and tools that will help disseminate the information.

Designer touch

They then check how these tools and methods can be implemented and, finally, figure out how students are going to be evaluated.

The process might sound very technical but ID is actually about telling a story in an engaging way so that the message gets through. “We have great storytellers in India — right from our grandmoms to those who wrote the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. ID is in our genes and the time has now come to package it to the world,” says Ravi.

“An ID professional can find employment in teaching and training institutions, both public and private, though the private sector offers more scope. This includes IT companies, knowledge-based companies and business process outsourcing companies that train and retrain their staff,” says Mamata Rao, faculty member at the National Institute of Design, Bangalore.

Educational institutions interested in creating a virtual learning environment need instructional designers, as do audio-visual production firms that provide the software.

“The focus on measurable learning is increasing in India. The corporate sector — insurance, retail, manufacturing, pharma and health care, aviation, hospitality, customer service and sales — needs training. And effective training to my mind is impossible without ID,” says Punam Medh, founder of iDesign Skills, a consulting company in ID.

To become an instructional designer, you need a good grounding in English, a creative bent of mind and basic computer skills. “The prerequisites for an aspiring instructional designer include a flair for teaching, the ability to empathise with learners, mastery over English, the ability to visualise, proficiency in MS Word and PowerPoint, an ability to work in a team and awareness of ID theories and practices,” says Aliasger Shaiwalla, delivery unit head, Aptech Learning Services.

The money isn’t bad either. “An ID aspirant can expect a starting salary of Rs 15,000 a month. With hard work, a positive attitude and a bit of luck, the sky is the limit,” says Shaiwalla. “It is a financially, emotionally and intellectually satisfying career,” says Medh.

The only dark lining is that very few institutes in India offer courses in ID. Mumbai’s SNDT Women’s University conducts a two-year postgraduate programme for women while Pune University recently launched a course. Symbiosis Institute, Pune, offers a six-month certificate course in ID through correspondence. The course fee is Rs 7,000. There are some short-term online courses too like the one offered by the Hyderabad-based Tenable Learning Solutions Pvt. Ltd. There’s even an online university (www.Asi anVU.com) that offers a course.

But not everybody thinks that a formal degree is necessary. “Simply put, an effective ID course will not churn out a bad instructional designer but a good one need not have necessarily undergone training,” says Rao.

So if you were always interested in teaching but didn’t know how to handle a class full of brats, ID could be just the answer.