ID2ID: A Cross-Institutional Peer Mentoring Program for Instructional Designers

From program participant to Advisory Committee member to co-author of the published model — service, scholarship, and network leadership inside a decade-old Community of Practice.

Context

ID2ID — Instructional Designer to Instructional Designer — is one of the longest-running cross-institutional structures in the field of instructional design. Built collaboratively by Penn State University’s Teaching and Learning with Technology and EDUCAUSE, the program has connected several hundred instructional designers across nearly a decade of cohorts.

For a field that, in many institutions, exists as one or two designers working without local peers, without clear promotion pathways, and without an obvious place to take questions that do not fit inside any single campus, ID2ID has functioned as essential professional infrastructure — not a perk.

Challenge

The challenge — for the program, for its Advisory Committee, and for participants who step into leadership inside it — has been to sustain a cross-institutional Community of Practice through almost a decade of change in the field.

The formalization of instructional design as a role. The pandemic-era acceleration of online learning. The rapid emergence of generative AI in design workflows. The constant turnover that comes with mid-career mobility.

Sustaining a national and international peer mentoring network at this scale, without becoming brittle or hollow, requires more than facilitation. It requires committed service from people willing to do governance work the field rarely sees and never compensates.

Approach

My engagement with ID2ID has moved through three integrated layers — participant, governance contributor, and scholar — each one shaped by what the previous layer taught me about what the program needed.

• Participant, multiple cohorts. Joined first as a participant and have since served as both mentor and mentee across cohorts. The direct experience of cross-institutional matching gave me language for things I had been navigating locally without a name, and relationships that have persisted well beyond the formal pairings.
• Advisory Committee service (2024 & 2025). Joined the advisory committee that stewards the program through its current three-tier structure: Engage (low-commitment community entry, discussion threads, grass-roots groups), Ignite (formal mentor/mentee and buddy pairings on a 16-week cycle, facilitated Interest Groups), and Accelerate (research-focused project cohorts producing presentations, publications, and programmatic improvements over 3–6 months).
• Co-authored scholarship. With Angela Dick (Penn State), Ed Beck (SUNY Oneonta), and Jennifer Englund (University of Minnesota), I co-authored “From Campus to Global: Building a Peer Mentorship Network Through the ID2ID Program” — forthcoming in a Routledge volume on mentoring instructional designers. The chapter documents the program’s evolution from a single-institution pilot through the Penn State–EDUCAUSE partnership to its current international form, with the Wenger-grounded Community of Practice framing that anchors the redesigned model.

Outcomes

ID2ID’s reach and the contributions I have made within it are documented across the following outcomes:

The most important outcome of sustained engagement, for me personally, has been the way the principles travel: the design decisions that hold a cross-institutional CoP together — autonomy at the matching stage, scaffolding at the project stage, post-program debrief as data — are the same decisions I now make inside the SoTL Collective and Pedagogical Wellness CoP at UNT Health.

The institutional and cross-institutional work are not separate. They are the same practice, applied at different scales.

My role

As an Advisory Committee member, I contribute to the governance and design conversations that shape ID2ID’s tier structure, participant matching, and dissemination.

As a co-author of the chapter, I share in writing the Wenger-grounded CoP framing and the historical case-study narrative of how the program scaled from a single-institution effort to an international network — with particular attention to the lessons from the 2019 pause-and-redesign that re-grounded the program in CoP theory before its 2021 relaunch.

The work is fundamentally collaborative: Angela anchors the Penn State institutional history, Ed contributes participant-experience perspective, Jennifer grounds the documentation work, and I bring communities of practice model and cross-cultural facilitation context.

What I learned, and what’s next

Two lessons travel back into my own institutional work.

First, peer mentoring scales when the program respects participant autonomy at the matching stage and provides scaffolding only at the project stage — the inverse of how most faculty development programs are designed.

Second, the most important thing an Advisory Committee can do is protect the program’s relational core when the operational pressure is to scale faster. The decision to pause the program in 2019 and rebuild it on a tiered CoP foundation is the move I point to most often when colleagues ask how to sustain a Community of Practice through change.

Next: continued Advisory Committee service through the chapter’s publication cycle; contribution to a forthcoming Accelerate-tier cohort on AI in instructional design practice; and translation of the tiered model into a transferable design pattern for institutions building or rebuilding their own internal peer mentoring infrastructure.

Selected artifacts

• Book chapter (in press): Dick, A., Beck, E., Yu, J., & Englund, J. (in press). From Campus to Global: Building a Peer Mentorship Network Through the ID2ID Program. In [Routledge volume on mentoring instructional designers].
• Service: Advisory Committee, EDUCAUSE / Penn State ID2ID Peer Mentoring Program — 2024 & 2025.
• Participation: Multi-cohort mentor and mentee, ID2ID Peer Mentoring Program.
• Public resources: EDUCAUSE Review pieces on ID2ID (2017, 2018) and the Penn State announcement of the relaunched tiered program — all linked from id2id.org.
• Related projects on this site: Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Collective · Pedagogical Wellness CoP · Project Management for IDs Collaborative