Essentials of Instructional Design Ch 1 &2

Bill Osterholt

EDU 657

Dr. Jayme Linton

June 15, 2017

            Abbie Brown and Timothy Green, the authors of The Essentials of Instructional Design, define the intention of their thought as:

            According to Smith and Regan (2005), instructional design may be currently defined as “the systematic                               reflective process of translating principles of learning and instruction into plans for

                 instructional materials, activities, information resources, and evaluation” (p. 4).

And then the chapter evolves into the different models of instructional design. In practical application, quality instructional design covers how people think, learn, what tools are available, and the method for the work to be assessed. Ever progressing current literature provides constructive critique:

                Hokanson and Gibbons (2014) observe, “Design involves dealing with uncertainties, and designers must not only learn to deal with uncertainty but embrace and use uncertainty as a tool to propel optimal design solutions” (p. 11).

                The process involves three steps:

·         Analyze

·         Produce

·         Evaluate

            Kemp, Morrison, and Ross expand on these ideas and further define the processes to best enable your students to learn. Those include learning characteristics, subject content, objectives, sequence, and strategies toward mastery.

ADDIE – provides five actions to facilitate understanding of the five components of many models:

·         Analyze

·         Design

·         Develop

·         Implement

·         Evaluate                                                                                                                     

            I thought the authors’ comment, “no educational theory is universally accepted, and no one knows the ‘absolute truth’ about instruction and learning environments,” drives home the necessity of personal use of a structure like ADDIE to continue to analyze and evaluate the models on which one structures the class. ADDIE focuses on how the learner thinks, what he knows prior to the instructional event, what are the motivations to learn, how the teacher teaches, and what are the consequences of evaluation.

            In the most of the twentieth century, the learner was overlooked because the model was based on a system. The idea of rapid prototyping a model for education models addresses this point.

            Rapid prototyping is explained by comparing it to the development of a stage play. I thought this made the concept very clear. The idea is to arrive at a final product through the creation of a number of prototypes. In a stage play, this would take you through writing, rehearsal, performance, while modifications are continuously made for improvements.

            Understanding how people think helps to understand how they learn. Understanding how they learn will help instructional designers assist in developing effective designs.

            The behaviorist perspective, known as behaviorism, dominated psychology for the first half of the 20th century (Brandt & Perkins, 2000).

                According to behaviorists, mental processes are invisible and therefore cannot be studied scientifically.        What can be observed is outward behavior; therefore, rather than speculating on internal causes for why things take place, the focus should be placed on how organisms respond to different stimuli (Brandt & Perkins,          2000; Brunning, Schraw, & Norby, 2011; Ormrod, 2007; Woolfolk, 2004).

Behavior, or modified behavior, becomes a measure of success.

Psychologists began to move toward a different perspective of the mind and how people think. This perspective was distinguished as cognitivism.

            With this perspective, internal mental processes were considered important and capable of being identified and studied (Brandt & Perkins, 2000; Ormrod, 2011). From a cognitivist perspective, the human mind is considered to be highly complex. A metaphor typically used by cognitivists to describe the mind is a computer. Like a computer, the mind processes information through a series of different processes that work together as a complete system.

The authors condense the thought into “the human mind does not simply take in the world but makes it up in an active way."

Instructional designers tend to look at thinking from a pragmatic point of view, asking themselves, what do we need to know about thinking and the studies done on thinking that will help develop efficient and effective instructional interventions? The majority of instructional designers borrow from different perspectives.

If learning is defined as “being a relatively permanent change in either behavior or in mental representations or associations brought about by experience” (Ormrod, 2011), then instructional designers must have the ability to identify different types of learning in order to design efficient and effective instructional models.