The Discourse of Collaboration in Instructional Design

Abstract

We examined collaboration via the discourse of Instructional Designers (IDs) actively engaged in co-design. Discourse is language-in-use within a specific community as opposed to abstract notions of how words might fall together by more general rules of grammar and semantics. An analysis of discourse in a community of practice is a direct observation of the meaning-making process employed by members of that community. We collected and analyzed five audio recordings from Collaborative Project Meetings (CPM) among teams of IDs and clients to determine the types of design expertise that comprised the discourse of collaboration. Several findings from this study shed light on how instructional design benefits from collaborative strategies such as co-design. The content analysis revealed that the most prominent type of design discourse used by IDs was problem-solving, followed closely by discourse surrounding tools, and user experience; however other dynamics, such as gender balance and the presence of multiple instructional designers correlated with differences in instructional solutions.