Instructional Design Services

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Customize Instructional Design Solutions for Your Employees

Here at ThinkingKap, we’re all about awesome training courses that educate, inspire and motivate your learners! That’s why we pack our courses with top-notch, research-backed strategies that that help bring to life real world scenarios.

Want to know the secret to crafting the perfect training course? It’s all about understanding the “why,” and that’s where our instructional design services come in. We use a unique problem-centered approach, blending psychology and cognitive science research, to create concepts that really stick in your mind. So you don’t just learn – you remember!

When we’re creating designs, we focus on how our brains soak up information and work from there. All our design techniques align with the brain’s unique way of learning, not against it. This makes learning a whole lot more exciting for everyone involved in the course! Whether online, mobile, instructor led, or some Blended Learning combination, it takes a well thought-out design for training to be effective.

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Benefits of Custom Corporate Instructional Design Services

A good course design will leave your participant happy. A great instructional design for your course will leave participants feeling assured, motivated, and prepared for each and every situation, improving your team’s productivity and overall mood.

Because a team that understands the material, delivers better results.

However, because of the complexity of adult learning, common methodologies used in course design are often too complex or ill adapted to fit most people’s learning styles. Instructional design helps to eliminate this risk, with thorough learning objective identification and an expertly formulated design strategy that caters to the learner and their needs.

Improved Team Motivation
Reduced Financial Risk
Better User Experience
Higher Engagement Rates
Streamlines Project Management

What are Instructional Design Services?

Instructional design services are a range of services aimed to help individuals, organizations, or institutions develop effective and engaging instructional materials and experiences in professional and/or corporate settings. Instructional design involves the systematic process of designing, developing, and delivering learning content and experiences to facilitate effective learning outcomes.

Our Approach

ThinkingKap starts every instructional design project envisioning what success looks like by ensuring we have clear learning objectives. These define what someone should be able to do after completing the course, and they form the foundation for the course design. Objectives get at the “what” AND the “why” behind your course.

Learning objectives remain our compass as we navigate this process. By understanding where we’re going, we can see more clearly what is essential, and what isn’t. Come on, admit it, you think ALL your information is important. And maybe it is, but not necessarily to a new learner.

That’s the next design step, to sift through your information to find out, given the audience you’re designing for, what’s important, what isn’t, what’s important but can wait, and what’s the best sequence to present the information to make learning efficient. The goal is to avoid overloading students or “info dumping” at all costs!

The essence of teaching is to support the bridge between what learners know already and what they need to learn. Our design strategies help connect the dots between the knowledge they need and when they need it, in a manner that’s adapted for their context. Too often, designers get in their own way by throwing too much at learners and obstructing the message. We’ll help you design a clear and efficient path to their success.

The benefits of good training are clear. You get better work out of your team, and you face less financial risk from the mistakes that happen when people lack training.

The source of good training is just as clear: Learners get the most out of a course when it’s well designed. A careless design, on the other hand, will cause them to tune out and retain little.

Service in Action

One of our clients wanted help with a project that involved rolling out a family of new building automation products that control critical environments. The challenge was that they had one classroom laboratory already set up with the legacy controllers, and needed to utilize the same laboratory for the new controllers. So, we had two laboratories that needed to share the same physical space and critical environment equipment. We had an existing course to use as a baseline, but no one at the client yet knew exactly how the new controllers would impact the existing instructor material, since product development was in flux. In addition, the client wanted to reduce the length of the course from 4 days to 3 days.

ThinkingKap’s instructional designers became immersed in content analysis of both old and new material to see where there might be overlap and where processes and procedures would vary depending upon which controller – old or new – was installed. This involved comparing product content, workflow processes and procedures, and laboratory layouts. The result was a design strategy that included:

Pulling some of the content out of the old ILT course and turning it into eLearning.
Reusing critical environment overview content.
Creating a lab tour to reinforce and support various types of lab equipment.
Creating a case study around the classroom laboratory.
Museum placards to identify all laboratory equipment, controllers, and sensors.
Recommendations for creating wiring toggles between old and new products.
Logistics for equipment needed to support hands-on practice activities.
Course map with activities and hands-on lab exercises identified.
Gap analysis for identified content, processes, and procedures.

In this case, you can see the instructional designer can end up wearing many different hats. That’s because the designer is concerned about more than just the learning objectives. The designer also has to be concerned about the context and environment in which the training occurs; removing barriers that might get in the way of learning; and doing everything possible to ensure training runs smoothly.

We are Experts in Instructional Design Solutions

At ThinkingKap, we’re focused on changing how corporations view and deliver their training programs. Since 2011, our expert team has worked with a variety of industries to create effective, customized training services that prioritize learning and content absorption. We believe that successful learning should be interesting, fun, and engaging. That’s why a primary objective is to develop a diverse range of programs tailored to each client’s unique needs. We strive to integrate the latest solutions and technologies to fit seamlessly into your corporate environment.

Our Process

Start Your Next Project with Us Today

Ready to create effective and engaging learning material? Partner with the experts at ThinkingKap today and we’ll help get the process started for you, delivering you the customized instructional design solution you’ve been looking for.

HOW IT WORKS

We start every design project by identifying the clear objectives in order to better understand what your team needs to be successful.

We then shift to our review and analysis step, which gives us access to your info, so we can understand the audience you’re designing for.

After that, our team will implement our various design strategies and adapt your learning material to fit the required context.

Finally, we’ll deliver the exact, customized design you’ve been looking for, based on your unique requirements and target audience needs.

FAQs

Frequently Asked Questions

A new hire needs to learn a lot to work with us. Can you build me a course that teaches them everything they need to know?

Yes. But, trust us, you don’t want to teach “everything they need to know” in a single course. Instead, you might want to first design an on-boarding curriculum architecture that prioritizes what the new hire needs to know first. Well-designed training addresses what learners need to know, when they need to know it, and nothing more.

The training needs of a new hire, on her first day, are totally different from someone who’s been with you a few months. If you teach company policy about bonuses and benefits on day one, nobody is going to remember that information months later when they actually need it.

How can we design training that guarantees knowledge retention and job transfer?

One of the biggest keys to retention is engagement, and one of the most important criteria to keep someone engaged is relevancy. Throwing in factoids that someone “might encounter at some point” or “will be important down the line” is just noise right now. People want to know what they need to know NOW. Good instructional design focused on performance-based learning minimizes distractions and gives you the most out of each session.

We don’t think of ourselves as SMEs, and we have very little content documented. Can you still help me design and build a course?

Of course! (Pun fully intended.) All good design has to start somewhere, so researching existing materials or interviewing SMEs is where we start. We’re experienced with research, and we know what to look for. If all your knowledge is in your head, we can surgically extract the knowledge (but an interview to get it out would be significantly less painful). And if your scope is somehow different or broader than what you have in-house, we can go out into the world and collect what’s needed to build something. Just tell us what success looks like – what are the objectives – and we’ll get you there.

We already have a course, but it might be in need of a re-design, can you help with that?

Absolutely. Our instructional design methodology can be used to build a course from scratch or to improve existing training. We can work backwards to find your learning objectives in the material and re-define them if they don’t align with the true needs of your learners. We can look at your existing course to ensure congruency between the learnings objectives and content, and offer recommendations on how to bring the content into alignment with the objectives through various design strategies. Whether it’s a new course or a re-design, you’ll come away with something that’s measurable, specific, and customized to your needs and resources.

We also offer Course Conversion to adapt instructor led training to eLearning or convert eLearning to mobile-friendly training.