Chapter 10: Developing instructional materials

“In a typical classroom setting, the instructor plans and performs functional activities that we describe as being components of an instructional strategy. The instructor is often the motivator, the content presenter, the leader of practice activities, and the evaluator. The instructor makes decisions that affect the whole group as well as individual students. Instructors are usually required to use strategies whereby they must move the whole class forward through a sequence of instruction, or retain the whole class at a particular point in the instruction until they believe that sufficient skill and knowledge have developed within a majority of the group.” (p. 251)

“We recommend that you produce self-instructional materials in your first attempt at instructional design—that is, the materials should permit the student to learn the new information and skills without any intervention from an instructor or fellow students.” (p. 252)

“learning components such as motivation, content, practice, and feedback should be built into the instructional materials” (p. 252)

“If you begin your development with the instructor included in the instructional process, it is very easy to use the instructor as a crutch to deliver the instruction. In your first effort as a designer, we recommend that you see how much can be done without having an instructor actively involved in the instructional process. Not only does this test your design skills and give you added insight into the learning components of an instructional strategy, but it also gives you a defined and replicable product to take into the formative evaluation process” (p. 252)

“The analysis and design work serve its purpose by ensuring an instructional product that is responsive to the needs that gave rise to the original goal.” (p. 252)

“In many instructional settings, the person who designs the instruction also develops materials and teaches students. For example, a human resources generalist in a small company may design, develop, and deliver all new-employee orientation, benefits training, and “soft skills” training; teachers and professors do their own lesson plans and syllabi , materials, and instruction; professionals in all fields routinely design, develop, and present their own workshops and in-service training.” (p. 252)

“By providing a learner guide for available materials, instructors may be able to increase the independence of the materials and free themselves to provide additional guidance and consultation for students who need it.” (p. 253)

“In professional and technical training, the designer often develops a formal instructor’s guide that provides detailed lesson plan–like guidance for lectures, discussions, and participant activities, whereas in educational settings, daily lesson plans or the course syllabus serve this purpose.” (p. 253)

“The intended delivery mode for instruction is a very important consideration in the development of materials based on the planned instructional strategy.” (p. 253)

“If instructors plan to deliver all the instruction with such materials as lecture notes, a multimedia projector, and a whiteboard, then it may be necessary to develop little besides lecture outlines, electronic presentations, practice worksheets or active learning exercises, and formal tests.” (p. 253)

“Another commonly practiced arrangement assigns responsibility for design with the instructor, but not sole responsibility for materials production. Unusual in public schools, it occurs more often in higher education, business, government, and military settings, where there is often technical assistance available for production of complex media such as video, web-based, and multimedia. The designer usually works collaboratively with an in-house media production specialist rather than turning over specifications.” (p. 254)

“Another reason for introducing the idea of an ID team is to point out a common problem in the instructional design process that stems from the relationship, or lack thereof, between the designer and the learners: When the designer is also the instructor of a given set of learners, the designer–instructor has a good understanding of the interests and motivations of the learners, of their preferences and expectations, and their general and specific knowledge of the content area. It is often the case, however, in team ID settings that the designer is not the instructor, is unfamiliar with the learners for whom the instruction is intended, and may have little or no direct contact with them. In such cases, the designer can depend on careful learner and context analyses, but in lieu of good information, he or she may depend on personal stereotypes of what the learners are like. Such assumptions may result in more problems than if the designer had no knowledge of the learners at all.” (p. 255)

“Media formats and delivery systems that look expensive are expensive. Cutting production corners to save money usually does not affect student learning, but it does affect attention and perceptions of relevance and authority.” (p. 256)

“Practitioners of the e-classroom and e-lecture–hall models worked out innovative strategies for maintaining high levels of interaction in their courses without burdening their instructional personnel by shifting their instructor–student communication to student–student communication. This works well for peer-moderated practice and feedback, and for small-group discussion focused on implementation and transfer to the performance context. It also works well when e-space is set up for small-group project and problem-solving interaction.” (p. 258)

“Some training managers and performance consultants speculate that problems in online learning have arisen when content from instructor-led training was converted for web delivery without in-depth consideration of the learning components for which the instructor had been responsible in the face-to-face learning environment.” (p. 258)

I would argue that what is missing here is also a redesign based upon the change in delivery medium. What makes sense in the classroom may not make sense online.

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Foundations of Instructional Design by Rebecca J. Hogue is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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