Institutions with programs in instructional design have a ready resource of graduate students that often can be effectively tapped. For larger curricula and full degree programs, a professional full-time instructional designer might appear costly on the surface, but the investment will yield great gains in areas of content effectiveness, efficiency of content development, and student learning. Part of the job of an instructional designer is to match the goals and objectives of what students are to learn with the characteristics of the students and the constraints of the delivery environment. For example a very important design decision focuses around the choice of media. In the case of courses on the Web or any distance learning degree, every media decision has a resulting ripple effect, as every medium needs to be supported.
Every medium requires an infrastructure.
Most colleges, if they are serious about distance learning programs on the Web will find room in their budgets for Web masters. Some colleges have given up faculty slots, at least temporarily, to secure the expertise of a Web master. A Web master's skills can reap great benefits in long-term planning for structural efficiencies in a curriculum offering. Every discipline, and particularly a tightly structured degree program, can benefit from a curricula-level planning that identifies a core set of resources and a core set of processes that may be common across the degree program. The content researcher assists the faculty member by searching out and identifying content resources available in digital form.