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The Nuts and Bolts of Instructional Design

In the FITS Department, there are a few things we assume pretty often. We are tasked with providing technology training and support services to faculty and with designing and assisting in the implementation of online courses. So the technology part of the Instructional Technology Consultant or Instructional Designer is often what’s emphasized the most. The majority of the work we do involves interacting with, mastering, and then teaching emergent technologies. However, even before the explosion of all this technology, people like us were doing the same job with more emphasis on the instructional part. We are here to support teaching and learning first. Doing so with technology comes second, but it’s easy to forget this when we are surrounded with faculty who want the next big thing right now. Think back a long ways to the days when reel-to-reel films became available relatively cheaply. Before long, someone decided that these films would be great to show to students in school, and then the initial challenge was presented: how to incorporate such a novel experience as watching a film in school as authentic learning experiences. Once the novelty wore off for students, the next challenge was to continue to use audiovisual materials to enhance instruction rather than just relying on them as instruction in and of themselves. Thus, instructional design begins to be an important idea, as a changing world prompts new ideas and new challenges in bringing those ideas to fruition.

We live in a technological world; by most accounts we are firmly entrenched in the digital age, and technology of all types is becoming virtually inescapable. We take for granted the ability to do things that were impossible only a few years or even a few months ago. I’m just old enough to remember the first wave of personal computers in schools and homes, and today you can buy a calculator that will do more than that TRS-80 or Apple II was ever capable of. Not only are we improving these near-ubiquitous technologies at a relentless pace, but the pace of these improvements is also increasing as development cycles are shortened. Today’s college students probably don’t remember not having the Internet or cell phones, but the tipping point where just about everyone had them still happened within their lifetimes!

I’ve got a technological job. I spend my days exploring technologies on the cutting edge and helping professors integrate them into classroom instruction. I am usually in front of at least one computer, more often two, all day long, and I am connected to the world through a work e-mail account, a personal e-mail account, and an instant-messaging client. I’ve got a telephone, but honestly it doesn’t get used much, as most people seem to prefer e-mail these days. I couldn’t escape all of this progress if I wanted to; in fact, it’s my job not to! Some days I feel like a technological fire fighter, because it’s my job to run into the fires that everyone else is running away from.

With all of these technological marvels swirling around us all the time, it’s easy to lose focus on the real nuts and bolts of the task: designing instruction. The task is about people, about talking to them and finding out what makes their course tick, and then translating that into improvements in pedagogy, streamlined access to resources, and smoother technology integration in the classroom for those elements that are technology dependent. Even though we’re some of the chief pushers of technology at DePaul, the ideal we are striving for is to get the technology out of the way so the teaching can continue, unburdened by “How do I…” or “I can’t….” Instructors should be asking questions that begin with “I’d like to” instead of “I need to,” and students shouldn’t be confused as to why something is used in their courses; a well-designed course makes all of the answers transparent and linear.

Yes, we love technology and try to find new ways to use it all the time, but not just because we can. Instructional design is about ideas, not stuff, and the end result should be a memorable learning experience for students no matter how it is reached. Instructors will still teach, and students will still learn, and we will still be standing in the middle of those two, working to make the jobs of both parties easier and more fulfilling and to keep them all looking forward.

Three Reasons Your New LMS Isn’t as Cool as You Had Hoped

D2L still supports CD-ROM files

This certainly isn’t a bad thing, but it’s also not that cool. While this may prove useful to some users—teachers who use CD-ROMs provided by textbook publishers—it shows that the D2L developers are clinging to antiquated features and tools, which might eventually lead to an overbloated, slow product. And that’s not a good direction to be headed in when the product is already suffering from serious slowdown in certain tools, like Manage Files.

D2L tells you when there’s an error, but not much else

I should clarify: sometimes it doesn’t even tell you there’s an error. But in the cases that it does notify you of an error, D2L does a poor job of describing or explaining the nature of the error.

The above error occurs in the Manage Files area when you are trying to access a directory whose name exceeds the fifty-five-character limit. But instead it gives you some vague description about content path settings. And I’ve left out the best (read: worst) part: you can’t rename the directory from the Mange Files tool. So you’re stuck with a directory that breaks the entire copy-component procedure. The only solution from within D2L is to have the admin go through the database and rename the file manually.

D2L still uses pull-down menus for reordering content

While D2L does give us the option of going to the Course Builder tool where we can drag and drop to reorganize content, it’s just out of the way if you do most of your content building in the Manage Content area.

By the time I’ve gone to the Course Builder tool and reordered the content there, I’ve probably lost track of what I was doing in the first place. And if I use the pull-down menus to reorder in Manage Content, I have a hard time making a mental map of the reordered list once I start switching things around.

My wish list

  • Stop supporting legacy features that aren’t likely to be used. Deprecate features like CD-ROM support and remove them in future upgrades.
  • Provide more feedback and explanations on error dialogues (and in the error log).
  • Make the Course Builder drag-and-drop functionality available in the Manage Content area—even if I have to click “Reorder” first to access it.

Course Development: Is On the Fly Always Bad?

In the world of instructional design, it is a given that a set lead time is necessary for online-course development. With faculty availability, course load, and designer workload in mind, the instructional designer wants to plan up front to make as much time and room for the development process as possible. To nail down course objectives, learning activities that meet those objectives, media assets, and any of the other myriad pieces of course content, an instructional designer generally favors the cushion of perhaps two terms ahead of when the course is to be taught to coordinate with the instructor and the other members of the design team.

On the other hand, “on the fly” course development—that is, building a course as it is being taught, week by week—is a common, if little desired, practice. Instructors have many priorities, including academic travel, which too often trump their commitment to developing new courses. Resourceful instructional designers make a course happen, even when bumping against (and past) deadlines. Designing on the fly can seem like the least-desired way to develop an online course offering, but is it always?

Software development, a field not too far flung from online training and teaching, has recently begun to realize a sea change in the dominant process philosophy: from traditional, upfront “waterfall” process to iterative, adaptive, “agile” methods. Waterfall is a process where the activities flow down an orderly succession of steps, such as:

  1. Concept
  2. Requirements
  3. Architectural design
  4. Detailed design
  5. Coding and development
  6. Testing and implementation

This linear series of steps is in contrast to the “agile” concept of development, where projects are built in iterations, with regular retrospection into the needs of the customer and how the evolving project should adapt to meet them.

iterative design
Image courtesy Kumido Adaptive Strategies

At its core, agile believes that it is impossible to know everything required to build software up front, that the customer can only gain that knowledge from the process itself.1 And so it often is with course development! Until a course is actually taught to students, it can be impossible to determine whether it will meet their learning needs as it is designed. That tool for the synchronous session never worked as it was promised and will need to be abandoned for a better option, or you realized during the quarter that those five-point discussions need to be turned into written assignments.

This isn’t to say that the structure of a course should be changed midstream. The syllabus given to students at the beginning of the offering term is essentially a learning contract and sets an expectation for the learning experience to come. But what if the process of developing the course allowed for a more iterative model? What would a more agile approach to instructional design look like? How could we design learning modules that are highly adaptable and easily changed? Can we embrace the idea that learning materials and programs are not designed, then built, and only then evaluated—let alone that they are produced with the expectation of updates and new versions to be produced? How do we adapt the course-development process to allow for much, much more feedback from the learners and educational stakeholders?

As e-learning becomes online learning and online learning becomes a major component of the educational model, our development techniques and philosophies must also evolve. All development up front is an ideal, but perhaps it is an ideal of the past.

1 Extracted from: Lean-Agile Software Development: Achieving Enterprise Agility by Alan Shalloway, Guy Beaver, James R. Trott – NetObjectives Lean-Agile Series.

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Helping Digital Immigrants Feel at Home

If you’re an instructional designer or an educator with an interest in technology, you’ve probably heard someone use the term “digital native” to refer to young students who are innately tech savvy because they’ve been using the internet and digital technologies for as long as they can remember. You’ve probably also heard someone refer to today’s instructors—particularly older educators—as digital immigrants because they lack the same level of “fluency” in the technology skills, language, and culture that digital natives possess.

When Marc Prensky wrote “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” in 2001, he presented several spot-on observations about how some older instructors are unwilling or unable to embrace digital technology and culture in the same way that some immigrants never embrace the language and customs of a new country. While a few of his observations are lighthearted, he insists that the consequences of this trend are quite serious. To drive this point home, he claims that game-based learning can be used in all subject areas and implies that educators who reject this idea are dumb, lazy, and ineffective.

A frequent objection I hear from Digital Immigrant educators is “this approach is great for facts, but it wouldn’t work for my subject.” Nonsense. This is just rationalization and lack of imagination. In my talks I now include “thought experiments” where I invite professors and teachers to suggest a subject or topic, and I attempt—on the spot—to invent a game or other Digital Native method for learning it. Classical philosophy? Create a game in which the philosophers debate and the learners have to pick out what each would say. The Holocaust? Create a simulation where students role-play the meeting at Wannsee, or one where they can experience the true horror of the camps, as opposed to the films like Schindler’s List. It’s just dumb (and lazy) of educators—not to mention ineffective—to presume that (despite their traditions) the Digital Immigrant way is the only way to teach and that the Digital Natives’ “language” is not as capable as their own of encompassing any and every idea.

In his 2006 article “Listen to the Natives,” Prensky continues to emphasize that instructors must change their ways and place higher emphasis on engagement, stating, “As educators, we must take our cues from our students’ 21st-century innovations and behaviors, abandoning, in many cases, our own predigital instincts and comfort zones. Teachers must practice putting engagement before content when teaching.”

As someone who spent much of his childhood (and now a decent chunk of adulthood) playing video games, I love the idea of instructors integrating more games, simulations, and challenge-based learning activities into their courses. And there is mounting evidence that computer games can provide students with critical skills they need to succeed in the 21st-century job market.  A 2006 Wired article, “You Play World of Warcraft? You’re Hired!” describes how management at Yahoo! considered a candidate’s achievements as a leader in the multiplayer game World of Warcraft to be an asset that set him apart from other applicants for a position as senior director of engineering operations.

Unfortunately, what educational-game-loving scholars fail to acknowledge is that even when we can prove that students have learned something more effectively and efficiently through game-based learning, we have to consider the return on investment. And by investment, I don’t mean the amount of time students have to spend playing the game in order to master a particular number of concepts or commit a certain number of facts to memory (although this should be evaluated as well). I’m referring to the amount of time and money it takes instructors, instructional designers, graphic artists, and programmers to develop educational games—or any multimedia learning resources for that matter.

Any game designer will tell you that even a high-budget, state-of-the-art video game will look dated within a few years of its release. Even the games featured on Prensky’s own company website, games2train, are showing their age. This isn’t necessarily an indicator that Prensky and his team are poor game designers. It just confirms that games often take a great deal of time and money to build and have a relatively short window of usefulness before they need to be updated or completely redesigned.

I think Prensky would argue that at the very least, instructors could do more to engage digital natives with low-tech games and simulations that increase learner engagement. His suggestions for games to teach philosophy or the Holocaust don’t necessarily require much more than a good set of role-playing instructions or a collection of powerful images from concentration camps and a provocative discussion prompt.

If the message was simply, “Let’s rethink the design of our assessments and learning activities so they’re more interactive and engaging,” I’d be all for it. However, what I often hear (and what I hear from the faculty I train) is that instructors feel pressured to make their course material as riveting and addictive as the bestselling video game du jour.  That’s a lot to live up to, especially for a faculty member who, until recently, was feeling quite proud of herself for finally learning how to resize and crop a photo in PowerPoint.

I’m overjoyed when faculty come to me with grand visions for a multimedia game or simulation, but I know they often feel daunted when I tell them what they’ll need to contribute to the project. That’s why I typically brainstorm with them to find the most low-tech solution that meets their needs, then we build on that as time allows. I also like to look at their learning materials and ask a few questions to make sure we’re not putting the cart before the horse. Some of these questions include:

  • Are the course materials broken down into manageable segments?
  • Can students easily stop reading, listening, or watching and pick up where they left off later?
  • Is it clear to students why they should read or watch each resource?
  • Are resources prioritized? Is it clear which resources are the most important and which resources are optional?
  • Will students know what terms to watch for or what questions to ask themselves as they go through the material?
  • Are there ungraded knowledge checks to ensure students know if they’ve missed something?
  • Do some assessments require application of the concepts? Are students asked to think critically about what they’ve learned?
  • Do discussions encourage an exchange of diverse ideas and opinions? Or are students simply asked to regurgitate content from the resources and provide answers that will be repetitive and unoriginal?

This isn’t an exhaustive list, but I think it’s a good place to start. It might not generate the same buzz as turning a Holocaust lesson into a video game and accusing veteran professors of being lazy and behind the times, but at least we can rest assured that our priorities are in order and our courses are built on strong foundations. In addition, addressing fundamental course-design questions first and encouraging digital immigrants’ efforts does more than improve course quality. It provides digital immigrants with a starting point that feels welcoming and manageable—an Ellis Island of instructional design, if you will. It builds their confidence and encourages them to try new things. It replaces shame and guilt with pride and optimism.

We might not be able to completely transform an academic environment that can be hostile to digital immigrants, but we can strive to be better ambassadors of the digital culture we love. In the process, we can foster a melting pot of ideas and approaches to teaching that draws strength from diversity. And that’s the kind of immigration reform that benefits digital immigrants and digital natives alike.

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Teaching Online is Like Learning a Second Language

This is an analogy Dr. Carol Wren used to describe her feelings about online teaching—feelings that are shared by many participants of our DePaul Online Teaching Series (DOTS) program. “Teaching online,” as she says in the video below, “is sort of like learning a second language. You have to take what is unconscious and make it conscious. It is going from what you might call a cognitive understanding and making it metacognitive—that is, thinking about what you are doing.”

Carol’s analogy strikes me — a person who cuts across both fields as a trainer/promoter of online teaching and as a learner/instructor of a second language. Thinking about my own experience in learning (and then teaching), I believe a second language provides me with deeper understanding of how and why faculty would relate it to their feelings about teaching online. Without Carol’s permission, I am taking the liberty of adding a few validating factors to her comparison of the two dichotomies: teaching face-to-face versus teaching online and learning your first language versus learning a second language.

An Unconscious versus a Conscious Process of Learning

In learning to speak our native language, we observe, imitate, and interact. Most of these actions are taken without any awareness that we are learning. In this sense, learning to speak one’s first language is more of a natural and unconscious process, which is somewhat like how many of us get into the teaching practice in the classroom: we observed, for years and years, how it was done by our teachers, picked up the ideas, and carried them into our own classroom.

Learning to speak a second language, on the other hand, is a much more cognizant process that requires not only the intentional effort of memorizing and practicing but also a clear awareness of the learning effort itself. It takes some thinking to bring up a word and some more thinking to piece together a sentence—just like when we start to put a course online. It requires not only knowing what technical tools to use to carry the instruction but also how to conduct it. And often, what comes after the interpretation process is something that is completely “foreign:” a one-hour-long presentation is now four pieces of short videos followed by some online discussions; a term paper becomes a three-phase assignment that requires self-review, peer review, and instructor review; an in-class quiz is an online test with auto-feedback. The only difference is that instead of calling it “interpretation,” we call this process “instructional design.”

Implicit versus Explicit Rules and Objectives

While speaking a native language, one doesn’t have to think about grammar, sentence structure, and tenses. Your verbal expression follows the flow of your thinking, naturally and intuitively. Your thoughts are put forward in the form of words without any attentive effort.

When I asked my students why they would use “I have been to New York” instead of “I went to New York,” they said, “Well, ‘cause it sounds right.” But why does it sound right? Without knowing this “why,” we—the nonnative English speakers—wouldn’t know when to use which, and you—the native English speakers who are learning Chinese—wouldn’t know which Chinese word you should use.

Teachers and students both know the rules in the face-to-face class intuitively since they both grow up in this kind of environment, which is like knowing their first language, but all the “grammars” need to be clearly spelled out in the online world: what is expected, why it is expected, how to achieve the expectation, and when to achieve it.

For online students, you have to show them the ropes to avoid the drops.

The Cultural Connection

Language isn’t an independent entity. It represents the culture it stems from, and it is always attached to that culture. Isn’t it the same for online teaching? In order to teach online, you have to not only learn the skills to instruct through this medium but also prepare yourself to see the online world, which has developed (and is still developing) a culture of its own. Being open to that culture, talking to people coming from that culture (e.g. online students), and understanding the expectations of that culture become an important part of online teaching, just like when learning a foreign language. The sense of cultural sensitivity is essential to the online world where even font types can carry meanings that could impact the impressions of a viewer in front of the screen that is a thousand miles away.

The Surprising Benefit of Knowing Another

Students in my Chinese language class never thought that they would have to think more about English when they were studying Chinese. Likewise, it usually caught faculty by surprise when they realized that what they learned about online teaching was impacting the way they teach in the classroom.

Dr. Christine Reyna, a psychology professor, told us during a wrap-up interview with DOTS, “One thing that is really surprising to me about DOTS was how much it challenges me to think differently about my face-to-face class.”

After running eight editions of DOTS in the past three years, we are no longer surprised by comments like this. Examined closely, DOTS seems to be fulfilling the kind of profession education that Dr. Lee Shulman is calling for: to make the learners not only gain the skills but also the mentality and the moral of the profession they are studying for. When it comes to teaching online, what lies behind the technical skill is the pedagogical knowledge, and what goes beyond the knowledge is the virtue of being an online instructor.

So what is the virtue of an online instructor? I would say that an online instructor is the one who has the following attributes:

  • Well organized (since an online course needs to be well organized, and an organized site is a reflection of the organized mind of its instructor)
  • Advanced planning (since an online course is like an airplane that can’t be built while flying it; it takes a lot of planning prior to the launch)
  • Caring and thoughtful (since this is the moral base for any user-friendly interface)
  • Predictive (because all the foreseeable obstacles, either the logistical or the technical, need to be anticipated and addressed ahead of time)
  • Concise and focused (since this is the only way to catch student’s attention before they click away)
  • Efficient and responsive (as demanded by the pace and the turn-around time of online communication)

Now tell me, will any of these characteristics turn around to benefit teaching in the classroom?

Jing: Sharing Your Screen and Your Voice with Others (for Free)

Have you ever sat down to compose an email or make a phone call and realized that what you want to say would be better expressed by showing someone your computer screen while talking about it? Some processes, ideas, feedback, or explanations are difficult to convey with only visuals (text and static images) or only audio (a phone conversation).  In this situation, a screencast could be very useful. Screencasting software can capture the visual of what is on your computer screen—websites, mouse movements, Word documents—as well as the audio of your speech, creating a narrated video for your audience. This is actually the process that was used to create all of the helpful tutorials on the Teaching Commons Desire2Learn page.

I have found screencasting especially valuable when explaining assignments and clarifying expectations in an online course. It’s also useful for teaching my parents new tech skills when I can’t visit them in person. To discover additional ways that screencasting can make your life easier, read these screencasting success stories.

If you would like to spend hundreds of dollars purchasing screencasting software, you can. Or you can opt for a free, downloadable program called Jing. With Jing, your screencasts can be up to 5 minutes in length and can be uploaded and stored at Screencast.com. If you are using the Jing free version, you will receive two gigabytes of storage and two gigabytes of bandwidth per month. (As with most free software, there is also a pay version of Jing, which offers additional storage and features.)

The first time you run Jing, you will be prompted to provide an email address, create a display name, and choose a password. This creates your Screencast.com account, and you will use this login to access your files once they are uploaded to Screencast.com.

In the following video, I demonstrate how easy it is to create a screencast using Jing once you’ve downloaded the software to your computer.

If you want to share a video you’ve saved to your Screencast.com account, one option is to embed it in a Web page. In the Desire2Learn system, videos can be embedded anywhere you have a text editor box—for example, a News Item, a Discussion Topic description, or an HTML page. This video at the Teaching Commons site demonstrates the process for embedding a video in Desire2Learn. Screencast.com also provides a link to your video, and you can share this link with others.

Good luck future screencasters, and feel free to share your own success story with a reply to this post.

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The Year in FITS

At the close of the year, we often take time to reflect upon the best and worst of the year that has just passed. This has got me thinking about how far our department—Faculty Instructional Technology Services (FITS)—has come in a mere eight months. In fact, FITS didn’t even officially exist until July 1.

Looking back, I can hardly believe that most of the staff responsible for doing all the training for the Blackboard to D2L transition hadn’t even started nine months ago. Until the third week in May, none of the individuals who would eventually provide all the training had themselves been trained. In seven short months, the FITS Central Support group has done an amazing job writing documentation and developing online tutorials.

This group is also responsible for developing, revising, and delivering the D2L training sessions. Heroically they have, to date, trained more than 650 faculty and 80 support staff. This transition could not have been as smooth without this dedicated team of individuals who sometimes found themselves training with an unstable system or for less than enthusiastic audiences. Throughout it all, they have kept their humor and their desire to help. I am also heartened to see the faculty we have trained embrace the new technology. We know that change is often hard, and we appreciate the effort that so many of our faculty have made to be open minded and willing to make a change.

As I look forward to the new year (and a full implementation), I am thankful for my colleagues and their willingness to always go the extra mile—so a public thanks to Eric, Alex, Lori, Sarah, Kayte, Liz, Elizabeth, Megan, Josh, and Emily. Happy New Year!

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Power Users and Casual Users

One of the questions that has come up as we’ve been training instructors on using the new learning management system, Desire2Learn, goes something like this: Why are they making us learn a new, complicated system when Blackboard did everything I needed it to?

It seems like a reasonable question. I’m not going to tell certain instructors that they aren’t using enough instructional technology when they’re getting their students to learn without it. If they are just using the Learning Management System to post their syllabus and e-mail students, I’m not going to tell them they should change their teaching style just for the sake of using the advanced features of a new system. And part of me feels guilty for making them take the time to learn a new system when they aren’t going to use the exciting, new features that were the reason for the change.

But for logistical and financial reasons, DePaul can only have one active Learning Management System, and the powers that be had to choose the one that they thought would best meet the needs of all instructors—including those who are teaching purely online classes and who need a lot of control and flexibility from the Learning Management System.

But this tension between different kinds of users is not unique to DePaul. It is present in all kinds of software development. Upgrades and improved systems bring new features and better efficiency, but you have to invest in installing and using the new system. And the pace of development can move faster than the ability of casual users to adapt to it.

Think about what happened when we all switched to Microsoft Office 2007. There was a major overhaul to the user interface. While those of us who do document design on a daily basis may applaud how much easier it is to access text styles and keep them consistent now, it was a big adjustment, and in the short term we all lost productivity. If you were the kind of person who only opened Word a couple times a week, it may have taken a long time for the increased efficiency in the new layout and features to cancel out the lost productivity when you were first learning the program, if that ever happened at all!

For whatever reason, software markets seem to be driven by the power users, who demand more advanced features and faster update cycles.

And more casual users are often required to update their software just to stay compatible with everyone else, even if what they have serves all their needs. If you’re using an old version of Microsoft Office, you can’t open the new file formats from Office 2007 without a special plug-in. If you’re still using Internet Explorer 6, many of the Web pages you visit may not render properly—Google Docs, for example, no longer officially supports users on Internet Explorer 6. When casual users have to upgrade their technology just to interact with the rest of the world, it’s easy to see why modern luddites claim that the technology is controlling them rather than the other way around.

I’m not anti-technology of course—I wouldn’t be in this line of work if I was. I marvel at how much more I can do with a hand-held device today than you could do with the most advanced computers on the planet twenty years ago, and I’m always excited to try the next big thing in tech. But I think we need to keep thinking about the best way to reduce the friction on more casual users as we go chasing exciting new features.

Sick? No Excuse When You’re in the Cloud!

A respiratory virus had me by the throat—literally. It wasn’t pretty, and it wasn’t something to share with colleagues. I avoided campus for a full week… seven days with no face-to-face time!

I did get in some total downtime, but I still “met” with two faculty members, redesigned three modules for an upcoming online course, and participated in a staff meeting.

I’ll be honest—I’m of mixed mind when it comes to 24/7 accessibility. I don’t have a handheld device, and my cell phone doesn’t even get answered all the time! Yet there are some times when things just need to get done and I’m the one to do them. Even if sick.

So how?

  • Dropbox: http://dropbox.com – This free Web tool has saved me multiple times. Some days I am on multiple campuses, and sometimes I need to access a file from home. I was introduced to this tool while collaboratively writing content for the DePaul Teaching Commons—four writers in four completely different campus locations!
  • Google Docs: http://docs.google.com – An old standby that many faculty know how to use! So good for those subject-matter-expert/instructional-designer content-building activities.
  • Wimba – The synchronous tool integrated within our learning management system—also works as a wonderful “meeting space” when discussing online course content.
  • The Telephone – Do not throw out the old technologies! The landline still has better sound than 99 percent of cell phones, so if your ear is clogged, pick up the phone! And still the best way to hear/participate in a staff meeting.

Best, of course, is not to get sick at all.

But that technology has yet to be perfected.

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What is Instructional Design?

That is the question I’m asked every time I tell someone what I got my degree in or what I do for a living. What is instructional design? How do I explain this ever-changing field? I could give them the textbook definition—instructional design is the practice of arranging media and content to help learners and teachers transfer knowledge most effectively. But this definition is only the tip of the instructional-design iceberg.

What many people do not know is that instructional design has been around for decades. The field has its roots back in World War II, when the US military was faced with the challenge of training a large number of people to use complex machinery. The training model the military created worked so well that it was applied to the civilian work force. Businesses started creating their own training program to get their workers trained quickly and efficiently, including hiring interim polonais workers to meet immediate needs. Instructional design only advanced as the years passed. It might go by different names, but there is instructional design in every training manual or tutorial someone looks at.

In this rapidly evolving business landscape, the need for efficient accounting practices has never been more pronounced. With the integration of Bright’s comprehensive solution for streamlining accounting business workflows, many firms have witnessed significant improvements in their day-to-day operations. The software’s ability to handle complex financial data with ease and accuracy is a game changer. This has not only saved time but also reduced the margin of error in financial reporting.

Delving into employee training and development, the right data can be transformative. A dashboard that provides detailed insights into employee performance and learning patterns is invaluable. Such tools not only facilitate better training programs but also help in tracking progress. A notable example in this area is InetSoft.

Today, instructional design encompasses a lot more. Instructional design can be used to create 3D educational movies about the solar system or how to load a camera. It can be used to make fun but education games. It can be used to create flight simulators for the Air Force. It can be used to create a simple tutorial video on how to check and change your oil.

And at DePaul, we are using instructional design to help instructors create courses that are taught not in a classroom but through the computers, where students can learn at the pace that best suits their lifestyles.