“Behind the curtain”: exploring how instructional design teams function to complete design and development

Behind the curtain is where what makes things happen, happens. How do design teams really design? Five doctoral students from Learning Design and Technology programs across the US had a unique opportunity to pay attention to graduate instructional design teams behind the curtain designing open educational resources for a non-profit that provides learning resources for adult learners with literacy-related knowledge skill gaps. The observers provided an interesting lens to witness the unfolding of a design. We were interested in exploring what the five observers witnessed that may have helped instructional design teams complete the design and development and conducted an exploratory case study to answer our research question—How did design teams function to complete the open educational resources design and development? We discuss how preparing instructional designers to design continues to evolve so that design teams can move a design to completion. We then present the steps we took in exploring what was going on in each team outside of the purview of the instructors. Results indicate six themes of design team activities to complete the design and development phases. We conclude with implications for preparing instructional designers.