Instructional Design and Continuing Legal Education

Recently, I've been spending a lot of time studying distance learning options for helping attorneys learn about and develop their well-being as a path toward higher levels of professionalism and new roles for lawyers in society.  I ran across this:

Learners start as novices, needing formal structure, including foundational knowledge as well as motivation and skills. As they become practitioners, they take responsibility for their motivation and are looking more toward being kept updated. They may need performance support, but can learn from expert presentations without needing full instructional design; however, they likely will benefit from mentoring. Finally, they can become experts and assist practitioners while innovating new ways of doing things, alone or in conjunction with others. This process applies independently to each discrete area of competence. So while an individual may be an expert in, say, engineering, that same person may be a novice at management.

Clark Quinn, "Populating the Learnscape: E-Learning as Strategy"

Interesting, especially the suggestion that practitioners (attorneys) "can learn from expert presentations without needing full instructional design."  The overwhelming marjority of distance learning for attorneys is recorded expert presentations.  However, I'm not sure "expert presentations" inherently lack instructional design.  Many good CLE speakers use stories (scenarios), opportunities for peer-to-peer  or small group discussion, thought experiments, and other engagement activities in their presentation.  The good ones also think about where their listeners are and what they need to get from the presentation (learning objectives). 

So, maybe just recording and streaming a really good CLE speaker is enough "instructional design" for topics where attorneys are already practitioners or experts in Quinn's hierarchy.  However, in areas such as positive psychology, where attorneys are likely to be novices, a more thoughtful, intentional consideration of instructional design could be important.