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 3
Developing Performance Objectives and Creating Learning Materials
Performance Objectives, sometimes called behavioral objectives, are the pivotal blocks of the instructional design process. Both these terms sound somewhat technical, but, when you distill them down, they are really only a description of what the learner is suppose to be able to do when they have completed the instruction.
A simple and broad example would be:
Given a tennis racket and after viewing a demonstration of how to serve a tennis ball, the learner will serve balls into the serving area three times out of four.
A performance objective can be broken down into three different sections -- activity, behavior, and condition or more simply put, the A, B, C method. In the example above, the “Given a tennis racket and after viewing a demonstration” is the activity, “the learner will serve the ball” is the behavior, and “into the serving area three out of four times” is the condition by which the skill has to be measured.
Your content should be broken down to develop the performance objectives. From the example above, we’re only looking at the serving portion of the game of tennis. Serving is still a broad portion of the game and something that would probably broken down into more specific components (e.g. gripping the racket, tossing the ball into the air to be served, etc.).
The area of creating your instructional materials can be broken down into two distinct areas; the instructional strategy and material development.
The instructional strategy is the procedure by which you will implement your instruction. It has five major components:
1: Preinstructional activities - motivating the learners and informing of what is to be covered
2: Information presentation - lecture, demonstration, videotape, etc.
3: Student Participation - practice and feedback
4: Testing - measuring their ability to meet the objectives
5: Follow-up - evaluating for success or remediation and enrichment
The materials development is when the rubber hits the road and decisions must be made about the delivery method. Should you use a lecture, a demonstration, guided practice, etc.? These should fit the learners and the topic to be taught. If the instruction is one-on-one, self-paced learning, maybe a CD-ROM would be appropriate. If you have to delivery to a geographically dispersed audience, then maybe a satellite videoconference might be best?
In some cases, “re-inventing the wheel” may not be necessary. Perhaps some materials have already been developed that can be used or adapted? In other situations, materials will have to be generated from scratch.
At the culmination and throughout the entire instructional design process, you should be evaluating the success of the process and adjust, modify, and change methods to ensure success.