When I taught high school English, saying my job title was an explanation in itself, mostly because anyone I was talking to had experienced high school English for themselves. The only difficulty was to convince them I was still an OK person even though I was a high school English teacher: “Don’t worry—I won’t be correcting your grammar or suggesting syntax improvements during our conversation!”

Now, when I say that I’m an “Instructional Designer,” the expression on most people’s faces is one of polite befuddlement—I may as well have said I’m a “Foley Artist” or “Happy Salad Model.”

That’s why I was surprised when Peggy Maki, the keynote speaker at the Teaching Commons Fall Forum, mentioned instructional designers. In her talk on the scholarship of teaching and learning, Dr. Maki was explaining the connections among program outcomes, course outcomes, assignments, and student learning, and she advocated for a clearer linearity across those elements. As an aside, she said (excuse my loose paraphrase), “And that’s why instructional design is so popular now.”

I was sitting right in front of Dr. Maki when she said this, and I think she saw my politely befuddled face. Popular? Instructional design? I think my friends and family have a vague understanding of what I do, and my parents are just thrilled that I’ve somehow parlayed my English degree into a career, but if they had to describe my day, they’d be at a loss.

Josh Lund explained his perspective on what it means to be an instructional designer a couple of years ago on this blog, and I agree with him—if you break down the term, we are certainly “instructional,” in that we focus on the pedagogical means available, and we’re “technological,” in that we focus on the technologies that best connect with those pedagogical means. A few years before that, Joann Golas wrote about the importance of instructional designers taking an integrative stance within their university cultures, and (surprise) I agree with her, too.

Those are the foundational pieces for what I think I do—coordinate with faculty and others at the university to integrate technology and learning. But, another recent conversation made me think about my job in a different way. Jeff Yan, the founder and CEO of Digication, was describing the design inspiration for the upgrades they’re making as an effort to blend the layout and design affordances of magazines within their platform. They want to fuse the value and beauty of the physical with the digital, and that’s how I’m defining Instructional Designer 2.0: the person who breaks down the barrier between “real,” in-class learning and the learning that happens in online contexts, which can seem disembodied.

We’ve been negotiating this boundary since we started to live, work, and think in digital contexts. Sherry Turkle wrote about it in 1995, after observing a crime in a Multi-User Dimension (MUD) and how the other participants of the MUD handled this virtual act of violence. Now, laws are changing to punish online bullying in a similar manner to in-person bullying.

But when it comes to learning, it sometimes still feels like there’s a chasm between what can happen in a physical classroom space and what can be accomplished online. My job is to help faculty conceptualize those two spaces differently. Learning happens differently in different contexts, and it’s not a given that one has more value than the other.

“Physical” and “digital” are intertwined—even though we know that the happenings on a screen are separate from our bodies, we still, through our fingers, voices and eyes, have corporeal connection. The iPad seemed like a revolutionary item because it changed the physical interaction with the digital space.

I don’t know that this new way of thinking about my job will help me explain it to anyone, but it makes me feel, as my fingers input my thoughts onto this screen, like I’m getting closer to grasping what’s truly revolutionary about the new ways we need to conceptualize learning.