Introduction to Instructional Design

Introduction: Instructional design is a scientific and systematic approach used to design material for learning in order to make an educational or training program more effective, systematic, and consistent.  They prepare materials such as textbooks, workbooks, guides, study material and question banks in order help the learners to learn in an effective manner.

History: The subject “Instructional Design” became more popular during World War II when the U.S. military was supposed to train large numbers of people to perform complex technical tasks.  To explain them about complex tasks in a simple manner, the trainers used to break the tasks into sub-tasks and used to treat each subtask as a separate learning goal.

The trainers got very good results with their approach of splitting a task into different subtasks and training the soldiers in each different task with the help of simple instructions.  After the war, the trainers started implementing the same strategy in business and industrial sectors.  They also implemented the strategy to an extent in the primary and secondary education.  Later, educationalists propounded several learning theories in order to make it easy for learners to learn in an easy and most effective manner.

Instructional Design Strategies

Types of Instructional Strategies

•        Macro Strategies

•        Micro Strategies (information presentation-level)

•        Assessment Strategies

Macro Strategies: These strategies deal with course level issues such as structure of course and syllabus.

Micro Strategies: These strategies deal with presentation level issues such as method, medium, and style of presentation.

Assessment Strategies: Assessment strategies deal with the assessment issues. Assessments are of various types such as assessment of prior knowledge, assessment of learnt knowledge, and assessment of performance.

Stasis Questions

Tagmemics

•         Writing lab: HEAV 226, Purdue University

•         On-line writing lab: http://owl.english.purdue.edu

•          Email: owl@owl.english.purdue.edu

Keep one idea to one paragraph

–        Begin transition into a new idea, belongs in a new paragraph.

Listings:  Chronological Simple to complex General to specification

• Region & Native language
• Familiarity with the language of instruction