Professional Development Of Instruction Designers In China

Instructional designer, an emerging profession which is behind-the-scenes and not known to all. In the era of knowledge economy, the idea of lifelong learning is prevailing, the citizens’demand for high quality courses is growing. If we compare a course to a movie, an instructional designer is the director of this movie, who presents the course content to each learner through elaborate content arrangement and scene design. From the view of corporation, instructional designer, as one of the core members of curriculum development, will influence the curriculum quality and learning effects. In China, there is a job growth in instructional design, while scholars lack of attention and systematic research on instructional designers. For that reason, this paper will choose instructional designers in Chinese consulting companies, training companies and e-learning companies as the research object, analyze the influence factors of instructional designers’professional development, and come up with a local framework for their professional development.The research takes the semi-structured interview, including face to face interview, online chat, video chat and open-ended questionnaire. Twelve instructional designers are interviewed while nine of them are presented in this study based on the screening criteria. With the help of QSR.NVivo.v8.0, the research follows the coding method of grounded theory in the phase of data analysis.The research not only finds out four situation factors, which are individual, Part B company, Part A company and vocation, but also interprets the composition of factors, the relations and deep interactions between them. Then the paper put forward a professional development framework for Chinese instructional designers, inspired by a toolkit for schools and districts by North Central Regional Educational Laboratory.