Instructional Design
In this section of the ITS web site you will find an abbreviated primer on instructional design. Although, most models have more sophisticated procedures, for the sake of this web site, we will break the process down into three steps:
Step 1 - Needs Assessment And Assessing Learning Characteristics
Step 2 - Instructional Goals And Content Analysis
Step 3 - Developing Performance Objectives and Creating Learning Materials
Step 2
Instructional Goals And Content Analysis
For many educators, it seems to make sense to make an inventory of the subject matter you’re going to teach before doing anything else. And it is the place to start -- after you’ve performed your needs assessment and assessed your learner characteristics (refer to previous On Target Issue). Knowing your learners and their instructional needs is essential in selecting and molding your content.
The culmination of the needs assessment and learner assessment helps you arrive at the instructional goal. This instructional goal is the ultimate aim of the instruction. It can be broad and encompassing like learning how to play the flute, mastering basic algebra, performing brain surgery (yes, in this case, it is brain surgery), etc. You then move into more specific categorizing.
Reviewing and categorizing the information you’re going to cover in your educational effort is called a content analysis. It is the process of identifying the essential information that learners have to translate into knowledge, skills, and attitudes and making learning more easily managed by the learners.
The first step in the content analysis is to take the whole of the subject matter and then to break it down into manageable chunks of information. Ultimately, these chunks of information will be developed into some form of delivery (lecture, demonstration, videotape, etc.) and these will be used to develop the goals for the students to meet when they achieve the mission of the instruction.
An example of this process might be teaching someone to use a word processor. You might start off with an overview of word processing and then break the process into smaller chunks. These smaller, more manageable tasks, could be opening a new document, saving a document, underlining text, etc. This sort of approach not only makes it easier for the learner, but makes the content easier to organize.
In review, the instructional goal is the ultimate goal of the in educational effort. You want to always keep this in mind as you design your instruction, using it as a guidepost. Then perform a content analysis, taking the larger goal and breaking it down into more digestible chunks for the learner.