Three Questions to Get Started on Instructional Design
By Philip Silva
Photo by Indira Tjokorda on Unsplash
Dialogue Education offers instructional designers three remarkably simple—yet completely essential—questions for getting started with crafting a new learning experience from scratch.
These questions are already familiar to folks who practice “design thinking” or “human-centered design.” They are questions that nudge us into thinking expansively, creatively, and holistically about the problems we’re trying to solve and the people we’re trying to serve as instructional designers.
First, who is this program for? Who are the students that will participate in the course? What are they aspiring to achieve from learning? What are the struggles and challenges they aim to overcome through learning? What knowledge do they already possess and what wisdom do they already practice?
Second, why is this new program needed? When we look at reality right now, what are the things that are broken or dysfunctional or misplaced or even just frustrating? Why are we driven to invest our limited time, energy, and money in the effort to design a new program? What needs to change? (A longtime Seinfeld fan, I call this step “The Airing of Grievances”).
Third is a future-oriented question that Dialogue Education practitioners often phrase as “… so that…?” We’re designing this new program so that…? Imagine traveling into the future and stepping out of your time machine to see what has become of the world as a result of the changes put in motion by the students who completed your course. What do you see? What do you hear, smell, taste, feel? If the second question above asks us to name everything that’s wrong right now, this third question invites us to imagine a brighter future.
Our answers to these three questions create the necessary constraints within which we:
Select the time, place, and technology for a course,
Identify and prioritize the skills, concepts, and perspectives that become the focus of a course;
Decide on specific objectives for what students will do with the content by the end of a course; and
Craft the moment-by-moment experiences that lead to hands-on learning in a course.
As we know from other design practices, constraints are essential for dealing with the infinite choices implicit in each of the design steps bulleted above. They rescue us from decision fatigue and they help prevent us from overstuffing our courses with too much content in those moments when we give up on making any decisions at all. Constraints also hold us accountable to students, their needs and aspirations, and their desire to create change in the world through learning. They guide us to design courses that are responsive to a world beyond our own personal prejudices, assumptions, and priorities.
Note the special connection between the second question (“why?) and the third question (“so that…?”)—the creative tension between the current reality that we describe in our response to “why” and the aspirational vision we describe in our response to “so that…?”. Naming a clear, precise, and aspirational vision for the future makes it difficult to ignore that another world is possible. It drives us to take action as instructional designers and invest ourselves in doing right by the students who will engage with the experiences we create. Everything that comes next in the design process is essentially focused on moving students (and the worlds they inhabit) from the current reality to that vision for the future.
Instructional designers will always grapple with the temptation to skip these three foundational questions and dive right into the later steps of crafting a course. The world moves quickly, clients demand results immediately, and we can fool ourselves into believing it’s enough to have tacit answers to these three foundational questions in the back of our minds as we plow forward. Don’t give in to temptation. Even a few minutes spent drafting responses to these questions on the back of a napkin will go a long way toward improving the quality of your design. Investing even more time in researching and reflecting on answers will only add richness, depth, rigor and precision to your work.
© 2025 Philip Silva