The field of instructional design continues to evolve. This change is due, in part, to speed and storage increases occurring in computer technologies; an evolving infrastructure allowing for easier delivery of instruction through distance delivery; new epistemologies requiring a rethinking of the teaching and learning process; economic concerns demanding more effective and efficient performance; societal concerns mandating that materials reflect diverse cultures and peoples; and an increased understanding of a self-correcting systems operation.
Greater recognition and inclusion of diverse cultural perspectives: Instructional designers must become more aware and sensitized to an increasingly diverse and global clientele. Recognition and inclusion of diverse perspectives is justified for corporations not only with employees who travel to distant locations, but also to those with workers or clients at home in our multicultural society.
Development of rapid, adaptive, instructional design and evaluation systems: The importance of rapid prototyping, and the idea that instructional design will give way to more "on-the-fly" processes. These concerns may be originating from the idea that "time is money." Limited time and resources demand quick resolution with lean and simple approaches to a training requirement. How will designers react to this need for speed? Possibly by incorporating more fluid, nonlinear instructional design processes that rely on frequent evaluations and alterations rather than by following a rigid design process.
Growth of online, on-demand, access to information, performance support, and training: The ability to train workers at their work site, rather than sending them to a classroom, influences the bottom line by reducing the cost of the lost time spent in travel and adaptation to a new location or system, and by providing information and instruction when and where it is needed. Integration of training, support for learning, and electronic performance support will be integrated into a worker's ongoing daily activities. Computers will continue to move beyond CBT by providing access to data bases and expert opinions. These computer-based environments will help workers with minimal skills operate more like their highly skilled counterparts.
The emergence of content rich and methodologically robust distance training and information networks. There will be increased use of networks to provide easy access to training and information at a distance.Pushing the development of distance learning environments will be the continually expanding numbers of telecommuting employees. There will be greater use of distant shared synthetic environments, such as virtual realities and distributed simulations, which will be able to provide new learning opportunities.
Instructional materials customized to the user: Customized training solutions for individual users is a worthy goal, but today, cost usually prohibits this level of intervention. In the future, however, our experts believe that adaptive intelligent systems, coupled with the ability to store and access electronic resources and plug-in components, will make highly customized training a more distinct possibility. Increased customization would not only provide content relevant to the needs and experiences of the individual user, but could also allow materials to be more attuned to the motivational needs of the learner. As learners interact with the content, an intelligent adaptive training component could query the learner, then pass information through an appropriate plug-in to help situate the content in a context the user recognizes as relevant and motivating.
Increased personal responsibilities of instructional designers: Two additional highly rated items by our experts stressed the need for designers to upgrade their skills to both remain legal, and maintain their marketability. Knowledge of copyright law and intellectual property was identified as a top concern, possibly due to the increasingly murky area of access to the World Wide Web, transmittal of instructional materials via distance delivery, and the increasing ease of using digital means to cut-and-paste text, audio, and video material.
Streamlining the instructional design process via emerging technologies: In the quest to increase ROI, businesses often look for ways to streamline the way work is done. The content experts will be given more control of the instructional design process through increased access to automated instructional design systems, distributed data bases, and expert systems. Minkin (1995) describes the future uses of 'knowbots' which will allow the ability to search through “ever increasing networks of data bases for information desired for projects or for an individual task”. Together, these systems could potentially allow content experts to assume some of the traditional roles of instructional designers, thereby reducing the time to completion for instructional products and decreasing costs.
