Instructional design gets spiced up

May 16, 2008

Over the past few months I have been helping develop a Flex based instructional design application for Instructional Spice. For those of you who don't know (I didn't), instructional design is a huge market for flash development, but most of the work relies on custom development of training and learning modules by flash developers, who just happen to be in very short supply. Instructional Spice does for instructional design what Sprout and Wix do for creating flash content, it allows regular joes to build flash based instructional design modules and content in a simple to use GUI, with no development experience required.

The most amazing aspect of working on this project was that the lead developer had no prior Flex experience, he came from a .Net background but he had the interest and passion to learn Flex and build something great. I think he succeeded and based on feedback from beta and initial users, others agree.

For me the most rewarding part of the project was the reason I was brought in to help. It wasn't to help architect out the application or to lead the development, which is normally the case, it was to primarily mentor the lead developer, help him learn Flex and AS3 and provide some insight and guidance into building a Flex application. This was something I had never formally done before and had certainly never been contracted for. I'm sure having worked on various projects there have been times when I have informally "taught" junior developers, but never really mentored.

We setup a plan where Dale (the lead developer) and I would meet once a day to go over any issues or problems he ran into. We kept the meetings short and focused and were generally able to resolve most issues in a single meeting. One great thing about this arrangement was that it forced Dale to try and solve issues on his own first before coming for assistance. Too many junior developers just cry wolf when they run into a problem, they go running for help, looking for someone to fix the problem, instead of hunkering down and finding the solution on their own. Another benefit of this was that only the really critical or difficult issues filtered to me, which forced me to look at new problems and challenges and also try to recall how I had solved tricky AS3 issues in the past. It was also an opportunity for Dale to show me things he had learned, some of which were completely new to me. Overall mentoring was a win-win, for the mentor and student. I will definitely be blogging more about mentoring.

I am looking forward to seeing where Instructional Spice goes, it certainly changes the instructional design playing field. I am also looking forward to additional mentoring opportunities. In the past I had never thought that teaching/mentoring could be so rewarding for the mentor and I never thought I had the aptitude to do it successfully ..... who knew.