Best Practices of Developing Instructional Design Material as a Contractor

This paper presents a qualitative narrative inquiry into how contract instructional systems designers develop instructional design material, in terms of best and common practices within the framework of the Attention Relevance Confidence Satisfaction (ARCS) model developed by John Keller in 1987. Contractor instructional system designers (CISD), companies outsourcing for a CISD, and novices entering the instructional design development field may find the results of this study useful in understanding the commonalities of effective instructional design material development from a technical and focused perspective. Anonymous participants in the study consisted of 17 members of a members-only instructional design group on a LinkedIn page. The questions for the participants were formed after a thorough review of existing literature, formation of a field study group, and development of an online questionnaire. The answers on the questionnaire were codified by automated and manual processes, which resulted in three themes that developed from the analysis: (1) how requirements are gathered, (2) standardization of instructional design model use, and (3) the usage of interactive tools use in the development of instructional design material.