Problem
In 2024, the Association for Talent Development found that 51% of the organizations they surveyed predicted that the demand for informal learning will increase over the next two years. Pilot research conducted in the spring of 2026 by the author indicated that 41% of instructional designers surveyed do not know how their audience engages with informal learning. These findings demonstrate a disconnect between where workplaces and organizations are heading for the learning and development of their employees, and the knowledge that instructional designers possess to be able to develop effective training and resources to meet that need.
York and Etmer (2011) found that the most commonly held heuristic across expert instructional designers with 10 or more years of experience in the field was, “Know your learners/target audience”. This finding is further supported by the work of Dick et al. (2008) who found that instructional designers need to be aware of and taken into consideration the characteristics of learners, the context in which the learning will take place, and how the skills gained through learning will be applied and used. Branch (2009) illustrates, “Students can’t improve their skills if they can’t fully participate in the instructional experience.” (p. 40) If informal instructional resources are not designed in such a way as to be accessible to learners within their flow of work, then employees may not fully engage with the content to help solve their problem or advance their skillset.
With the predicted growing demand of informal learning by organizations coupled with the demonstrated need of instructional designers to understand their audience and how learning takes place, it is imperative to bridge the gap between instructional designers and their learners. To provide learners with resources that are not only applicable to their situations, but accessible through how they typically interact with content, instructional designers need to know how learners find instructional resources, where they go to look for and access resources, and how effective those resources are in answering the problems that the learners are trying to solve. The Informal Learning Lab Dashboard seeks to be that bridge between learning and development and the audience that they serve.
Audience
Instructional designers working in the field are the largest population for the target audience of the Informal Learning Lab Dashboard. Tracey et al. (2014) describe instructional designers as, “the dynamic drivers of the design process who use their knowledge, experience, and intuition to navigate the design space and recursively refine both problem and solution until an innovative outcome is reached.” (p. 315) Instructional designers work to solve training related problems through their knowledge of the learners and adapted learning heuristics to accommodate the current context and constraints they encounter. Often this is accomplished through innovative solutions that can take several forms including, but not limited to, eLearnings, job aids, workshops, instructor led trainings, lunch and learns, podcasts, and videos.
As Tracey et al. (2014) indicate, the instructional designer’s knowledge is imperative to contend with the current design context and constraints to design, develop, and implement its solution. As referenced above, part of that knowledge is understanding the learner which goes beyond basic demographics such as age, job title, department, and years of experience. It means understanding their motivations, attitudes, and how they connect to and use instructional materials. This knowledge helps the instructional designer make design decisions around not only the forms that learning resources or training can take, but how and when it can be delivered for the most effectiveness.
Program or training leads are a secondary audience. They are responsible during the implementation phase of a training. They can act as in-person facilitators or as data trackers as well as being the individuals responsible to communicate with outside stakeholders about a training’s progress and effectiveness. Due to the competing factors on their time, program leads needs processes and workflows to be automated as well as the information to be housed in one place. They need to be able to distill the data in a visually appealing way to inform various stakeholders of what they need, when they need it.
Other audience considerations can include individuals on a director level or above who noticed a problem and brought it to the learning and development team. While these individuals may not use the dashboard directly, they will be presented with the information on a regular basis. This information not only will help to inform them of the success of certain informal trainings, but it can also result in them understanding the participants in their training programs more. This knowledge can help to bridge the gap between individual contributors and the upper levels of management.
Solution
The Informal Learning Lab Dashboard is a PowerBI dashboard that can be easily accessed by individuals given permission within an organization. It draws information from a customizable set of data sources which are based upon the organization’s needs. These data sources can include places such as learning management system records, SharePoint or other Intranet usage reports, IT or HR ticketing systems such as ServiceNOW or JIRA, direct messaging platform records such as Teams or Slack, or chatbot logs. Essentially, any data source that can provide an Excel report can be integrated into the PowerBI dashboard.
The Informal Learning Lab Dashboard itself will organize the data in a visually appealing and understandable way that is also customizable to the organization’s needs or branding requirements. These dashboards can be created to be automatically updated and sent out to relevant stakeholders as the need arises. This automation can save the time of the instructional designer as well as the program lead and the automated reports can help program leads more effectively communicate with their stakeholders. The automated information can help instructional designers make in-the-moment design decisions for learning resources that allows them to provide training in such a way that it consistently relevant and practically accessible to the employees that it is intended for.
Organizations can begin to cultivate a culture of learning and can solve problems faster through understanding how employees are solving problems and learning in real time. The Informal Learning Lab Dashboard will provide a window into how employees are learning in a way that it can be leveraged to develop more informal or semi-informal learning interventions, as well as inform the design of formal learning to provide the training that employees need in real time and in a format that appeals to their particular circumstance.
References
Association for Talent Development (ATD). (2024) Informal Learning: Measuring Success Outside the Classroom [White Paper].
Branch, R.M. (2009). Analyze. In: Instructional Design: The ADDIE Approach. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-09506-6_2
Dick, W., Carey, L., & Carey, J. O. 2008. The Systematic Design of Instruction (7th ed., Vol. 5). Boston: Allyn & Bacon
Tracey, M.W., Hutchinson, A. & Grzebyk, T.Q. Instructional designers as reflective practitioners: developing professional identity through reflection. Education Tech Research Dev 62, 315–334 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-014-9334-9
York, C.S., Ertmer, P.A. Towards an understanding of instructional design heuristics: an exploratory Delphi study. Education Tech Research Dev 59, 841–863 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-011-9209-2
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