A couple weeks ago a good friend from high school asked me about my job.  My standard answer with most people is, "I'm an instructional designer; I create training programs".  I add the last bit because people hear 'designer' and they thing Graphic Design, which is fine because I happen to do a good deal of that with my particular work, but it's not generally what an Instructional Designer does.

Part of my first class at Boise State entailed answering the question, "what is Instructional and Performance Technology?"  It's really difficult to explain, at least when you compare it to "I'm a lawyer" or "I'm a doctor".  Even though those fields are just as wide and varied as Instructional Design (ID) and Human Performance Technology (HPT), the entry point of "I'm an Instructional Designer" is pretty tough to comprehend.  So, what I'm going to do is start sharing examples of Instructional Design.  Unfortunately, most of these will either be video, web sites, or documents; but I'll talk about different presentation models as they come available.  Once I can give some examples, I'll see if I can put together some posts explaining the 'backend' of ID.

So, to start off, here is an example of one of my training presentations.  This one is a basic tutorial for TechSmith's SnagIt.  SnagIt is the product I work on the most.  Currently I've been localizing the original material and getting it ready to release in other markets (we just released German). Here's one of the videos from the English release: