The Instructional Designers' Field Guide

Bridging research and real-world practice to help instructional designers create meaningful learning experiences

Note: This Field Guide is in development as part of my graduate research at California State University, Monterey Bay, and I’ll be sharing updates along the way.

What This Phase Looks Like

The Instructional Designers’ Field Guide has officially entered a new phase – active outreach and data collection. This means I am now connecting with instructional designers, and organizations across LinkedIn, academic networks and beyond to gather diverse perspectives for the books research foundation.

Balancing Research and Writing

While the survey is open and responses are coming in, I’m also still deep in the literature review – refining, expanding, and validating each section of the Field Guide to ensure it’s anchored in both academic rigor and lived professional experience. The goal is to make sure every insight, strategy, and “best practice” in the guide reflects the real-world work of instructional designers, not just theory.

This stage is a mix of research, outreach, and synthesis:

• Reaching out to professionals and businesses to invite participation.
• Reviewing and early survey data to ensure survey functionality and required maintenance.
• Cross-referencing themes against the existing body of research.
• Updating the Field Guide draft based on what’s emerging and updating the thesis based on my findings and progress.

It’s messy, exciting, and deeply collaborative – exactly how good instructional design should be.

How You Can Get Involved

If you are interested in taking the survey, please reach to SarRose@csumb.edu. You may even be one of the individuals I’ve reached out to. If so – thank you for taking the time to learn more about the project and explore the survey’s progress. Participation is entirely voluntary, and responses are collected anonymously to ensure confidentiality. Your contribution helps ensure the Field Guide represents the many voices shaping the field of Instructional Design today.

What’s Next

If you haven’t already, you can learn more about the project, view the consent and recruitment details, or reach out to take the survey – all at www.IDFieldGuide.com – the official project site. I will be sharing progress updates every few months as the survey continues and the first draft of The Field Guide takes shape, expected release 2026.

Welcome to The Instructional Designers’ Field Guide. This is just the beginning.

Sara Rose

✍️ This project is part of my Master’s capstone research at CSUMB. The website and articles are intended to share progress and resources, they are not part of research data collection. post was drafted by me with the support of ChatGPT (OpenAI), which I used to refine grammar and polish readability. All ideas and perspectives are my own.