Education for a Digital World Advice, Guidelines and Effective Practice from Around Globe, 2008a

10 – General Principles of Instructional Design
Learning outcomes
After completing this chapter, you should be able to:
• Describe each step of the instructional design process.
• Assess needs.
• Analyze goals.
• Identify subordinate skills.
• Conduct a learner analysis.
• Write complete learning outcomes at the highest
appropriate level.
• Create courseware using the instructional design
process.
Introduction
Instructional design is a systematic, repetitive process
of activities aimed at creating a solution for an instructional
problem.
In this chapter we describe the instructional design
process, and provide details and practical guidelines for
completing the process. You will also learn how to conduct
a needs assessment and a learner analysis. This chapter
also introduces a revised Bloom’s taxonomy (Anderson
& Krathwohl, 2001).
The steps in the instructional design process are
shown in Figure 10.1. These steps, which are similar to
other models, are adapted from Dick and Carey’s (1990)
model. Note that this chapter only covers the steps
through to “Write learning outcomes”. The subsequent
steps, shown in Figure 10.1, are covered in other chapters
of this book.
One danger in the instructional design process is that
it can go on forever. Each step is a checkpoint, and must
be signed off with the general knowledge that the results
are acceptable enough to continue in the project. However,
subsequent evaluation feedback may indicate a
need to make changes in previously signed-off steps.
These changes are sometimes the result of not putting
the necessary time and resources into each step the first
time.
This model represents an ideal situation. However,
cost and time constraints will sometimes force you to
make modifications. How safe such modifications as
omitting or minimizing steps are will depend on the
actual problem being solved, the information that is
available, and your intuition or experience.
Figure 10.1 Steps in the instructional design process
For some courses, the systematic instructional design
process can take hundreds of hours of development
time. Factors such as the course’s complexity, the course
management system used, the availability of resources
such as instructor notes, the team members’ experience,
team dynamics, and whether suitable design specifications
exist, can all affect how much time is required.
Identify the instructional
goal(s)
Instructional goals are general learning outcomes that
break down into specific measurable skills, for instance,
learning to speak conversational French. Before identifying
the instructional goal, you must first define the
actual problem. You can gather the information for defining
the problem and identifying the instructional goal
through a needs assessment.
A needs assessment is a method for determining the
actual problem, rather than the symptoms of a problem.
For example, an individual may refuse to use the computer
system because the “program doesn’t work”. In
this case, the symptom (refusing to use the computer)
132 Education for a Digital World