When I was younger and completing my NVQ in Children's Playwork, one of my mentors was a softly spoken woman in her sixties. Every day she arrived with a Winnie the Pooh pencil case. It was exactly the sort of stationery you'd expect a gentle grandmother to own, and, if I'm honest, I quietly built a picture of who she was.

 

Then she mentioned that she was a black belt martial arts instructor. Suddenly the picture I'd created no longer fitted. The Winnie the Pooh pencil case hadn't been misleading. My assumptions had. Someone looking for an easy target would probably have reached exactly the same conclusion as I had. They would have been very mistaken. I've often thought about that since.

 

As a single mother, I spent years becoming adaptable because I didn't really have another choice. Along the way I collected experiences that don't obviously belong together. I've worked in microbiology and environmental consultancy laboratories. I hold a forklift truck licence. I have qualifications in psychology. I can also pull a good pint. On paper they look unrelated, yet each has shaped the way I think, solve problems and approach new situations. People are rarely the sum of our first impressions.

 

The more people I meet, the more convinced I become that we all carry unexpected experiences, strengths and ways of thinking that aren't immediately visible. We just don't wear them on the outside. I think instructional design can sometimes make the same mistake that people do when it comes to assumptions.

 

We design courses assuming learners will all read information in the same order, interpret instructions in the same way, arrive with the same confidence, or need the same amount of support. We build a pathway that makes perfect sense to us and hope it makes perfect sense to everyone else; but learners, like people, are wonderfully unpredictable.

 

Some will want to explore before they commit. Others need reassurance before they move on. Some will spot patterns immediately, while others need time to reflect. Some thrive on challenge; others need confidence to build gradually before they are ready for it. None of those approaches is wrong, they're simply different.

 

Good instructional design isn't about predicting every possible learner. That's an impossible target. It's about designing with enough flexibility that different learners can still find a route through the experience.

 

That might mean giving learners choices, offering multiple ways to engage with content, providing opportunities to pause and reflect, or simply accepting that not everyone will experience the same course in exactly the same way. Just as I learnt not to judge a mentor by a Winnie the Pooh pencil case, I've learnt not to assume too much about the people sitting on the other side of a screen.

 

People are always more interesting than our assumptions. Perhaps our learning should be too.