Five Tips for choosing the topic of your research project

1. Choose what you know.

When you have familiarity with your topic, you can leverage that expertise to identify problems that can be corrected with instruction.

2. Identify an “instructional challenge” that you can fix.

If you identify a problem, you must verify that instruction is the right answer. For example, If call center operators are dropping customer calls at a high rate, we need to see if the problem is lack of training or if the problem might be equipment problems. Everything isn’t a training problem, and as instructional designers, we must be able to recognize that.

This principle also applies in education. Maybe students aren’t performing well on a certain test. Is the performance because they don’t understand, or are there other mitigating circumstances such as the testing environment or technology problems that are affecting grades. In those cases, creating new instruction might not be the answer.

3. Don’t try to save the whole world.

The biggest mistake that students make is that they try to solve too big of a problem. The list below highlights the refining process that you must go through to select a single pebble from among mountains of ideas.

4. Drilling down to find a manageable topic:

• Workplace health (too broad)
• Workplace safety (still too broad)
• Warehouse safety (still too broad)
• Non-mechanized equipment safety (still too broad).
• Ladder safety. (Yes!)

5. Slices are OK:

Maybe you have grand plans to create a multi-part training series for your employer. That scope would be too big for your MSIDT project. However, you can take just a slice of what you plan to do, and then develop that as your product. For example, you could create a pilot for the upcoming series of lessons or create a portion of a segment.