The Everydayness of Instructional Design and the Pursuit of Quality in Online Courses

Abstract

This article reports research into the everydayness of instructional design (meaning designers’ daily routines, run-of-the-mill interactions with colleagues, and other, prosaic forms of social contact), and how everydayness relates to their pursuit of quality in online course design. These issues were investigated through an ethnographic case study, centered on a team of instructional designers at a university in the United States, and using the dimensions of everydayness articulated by Troubé (2021) as an interpretive framework. Designers were observed spending significant amounts of time engaged in repetitive practices of course refinement, meaning mundane, workaday tasks like revising, updating, fine-tuning, or fixing the courses to which they were assigned. Refining practices were interrelated with, but also experienced as distinct from, the specialized processes of instructional design or innovation that the designers also applied, largely because of their adjustable nature and the background of neutrality they provided (or the way they faded out of designers’ explicit awareness and attention). Refinement also contributed towards the normative structures of meaning designers shared around their work (both positive and negative). Refining played a meaningful role in designers’ pursuit of course quality, both to help them achieve quality, as well as to understand what the ideal of quality meant in specific instances. The article concludes by exploring what implications these findings have for the study and practice of pursuing quality in the context of online course development.