Curses are like chickens; they always come home to roost. And, some take it to the level of insanity. and The above two I have ran into, and it has been disastrous so far. The disaster is because the new governors have little to no knowledge of the student base, while the designers have little to no knowledge of the material.
I agree that it doesn't always work out that way, but ideally instructional designers are paired up with subject matter experts. Interestingly, I was recently at CITE, Pearson's e-learning conference, and there were a few group presentations where one or two college faculty members and an instructional designer from Pearson reported on their collaboration. (Of course, it being a Pearson-sponsored conference all the sessions were about how wonderful it was, but just because they were presumably cherry picked doesn't mean they weren't relaying their actual experiences.)
It did start out that way. Not so much any more. It seems, at least what I saw, instructional design team is in full charge.
