Operationalizing Creativity: Desired Characteristics for Instructional Designers

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to explore the ways that creativity manifests itself in the field of higher education instructional design and to identify specific core competencies that could be considered desirable in this context. The study utilized the Delphi methodology in which an expert panel of 28 higher education instructional design managers and leaders, established through a selective snowball sampling process, provided both Likert scale and open – ended responses to a series of survey instruments to indicate their level of agreement with topic statements suggested by the literature as being related to creativity in the higher education instructional design context. Through this three-round process, the panel transformed these literature based constructs into their context of practice and reached consensus on 35 of 41 discrete concepts relating creativity to instructional design in higher education. In parallel with the Delphi process, panelists were asked to provide examples of specific instructional design tasks or duties that embodied traits associated with the topic statements, and subsequently respond to the resulting 27 creativity-related competencies in terms of the desirability that their instructional designers possess the indicated competency as well as the perceived level of correlation between the competency and creative potential in general. This portion of the research effort resulted in the creation of 11 desirable, practical, context-specific instructional design competencies that are tied directly to the broad-based creativity literature.