So you want to design a product for teaching English. Where do you begin? Read on to find ten top tips for the novice ELT instructional designer.

1. Identify your audience. Who are the learners? Is the product for a particular age group? Is it for an audience from a specific cultural background or country? Define your audience as clearly as possible before you start.
2. Clarify the mode of instruction. Is the product self-access or is there a teacher involved? Is it a blended course or does it use only one mode of instruction?Is it face-to-face or is it distance learning? In short, determine how the product is to be used.
3. Decide on the course components. Does your product include a course book? What accompanies the course book? Is there a workbook, a teacher’s guide or an accompanying CD or website? Is your product technology-based? What technological components will be part of the product?
4. Think about the delivery platform/s. Are you developing a print product or an online course? Are there multiple delivery platforms? If so, what are they? Establish how the content is to be divided across platforms.
5. Determine the length of the course. How many hours of learning do you want your course to cover? Does it follow a school year or a school semester? Is is a consumer product? If you are developing a print-based course, how many pages do you want your book to have? This will help you to decide upon the quantity of material you will need.
6. Choose the level of the course. Are the targeted learners beginners, intermediate learners or advanced learners? Does your course follow a prescribed curriculum? Will you need your course to correlate to a public standard such as TESOL’s ESL Standards for Pre-K-12 Students or the Common European Framework of Reference?
7. Clarify the pedagogical approach you want to use. Do you intend to follow a specific approach to language learning? Will you incorporate principles from different approaches? Will your product be primarily inductive or deductive in nature? Answering these questions will assist you in developing the pedagogical rationale for your product.
8. Plan well before developing. Whatever the mode of instruction and whatever the delivery platform, the more you invest in the planning phase of your course, the better the development phase will go.
9. Materials development is a team effort. Remember that you will be working with others and that each of you brings different basic assumptions with you into your teamwork. If your product is for a commercial publisher or client, there are many factors to be taken into account. While the pedagogy should inform all other aspects of the project, it is not the only aspect. There are marketing and budgetary considerations, and there are graphic, engineering and production constraints.
10. Be analytically creative. Sounds like a contradiction in terms? Not really. The content of your materials has to be both attractive to learners and meet their learning needs. So while you have to be creative, you also have to make sure that your materials have really covered your instructional objectives.

Overwhelmed? Don’t be. The world of innovative instructional design is an exciting ride. Jump on!