Front-End Instructional Design Practices for Training within Three Large Telecommunications Organizations

More and more, organizations are investing resources in the design of face-to-face and online courses and learning materials. There have also been more resources invested in repurposing face-to-face training materials for delivery online. Repeated calls in the training, distance learning, and instructional design literature appeal for additional research into industry training and into the use of new technologies in training. This is a multi-case study of the instructional designers and managers from three large organizations in the telecommunications industry. To understand how designers go about their instructional design work in three large organizations the Dick and Carey Model was used to compare the steps taken by instructional designers working for these telecommunications industry organizations. This research finds that these instructional designers create programs that are initiated and driven by business needs and not solely driven by learner performance goals. The steps taken by designers during the design of face-to-face and online training programs are found to be the same among the participants in this study, whereas front-end needs analysis and other processes are circumvented when these designers repurpose face-to-face training for online delivery. At a higher level of analysis, the Dick and Carey model was insufficient to describe the needs analysis and budgeting processes that are part of design projects within these organizations, so the author offers a revised model to better describe how these telecommunications industry instructional designers work.