My experience with Instructional Design was a pleasant surprise. An ID class was included with the IT curriculum I had chosen.
I was fortunate to have an excellent instructor, who forced us to expand our thought processes to grasp the detailed concepts of designing instruction.
At the time, I had no prior higher learning experience, and my professional background is fairly blue collar…Landscape design, construction, and maintenance.

Our class split into various teams of roughly four people. My group was assigned with the task of designing an effective teaching tool, for people unfamiliar with basic functions corresponding to a PC keyboard. Our solution was to print a schematic of the keyboard with the pertinent information, on a mouse pad. My contribution was the use of simple color coding on the schematic, to facilitate with the learning process. Each step was given a color, which corresponded to a specific key.
I borrowed the practice from my habit of incorporating color codes, to help clients visualize two dimensional landscape plans.

Our instructor was impressed with our efforts, and I experienced a sense of satisfaction, that was quite unique.

I chose not to pursue an IT career, but I’ve never forgotten the positive experience with that Instructional Design course.