Instructional Design: The Journey of Education Needs a Roadmap

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Duration: 6:16

Transcript:

Imagine for a moment that you’re driving your car down an open road. It’s a beautiful day, and you’re heading to the beach for week of fun in the sun. You’re a half hour into your trip when it strikes you that you forgot your map on the kitchen table. Your mood is so bright, though, you figure things will just work out. “How hard can it be to find this place?” you think to yourself. Unfortunately, your attitude darkens as you notice the sky turning an ominous gray. Within moments, you begin to hear the pitter patter of raindrops on your roof. You strain to see the road through your waterfall of a windshield. You flick on the wipers expecting to get the typical squeak-plunk-squeak-plunk, but instead your wipers let out a guttural moan and refuse to leap into action.

“Man, I forgot to get those fixed.” You slow down and lean closer to the windshield.

There’s just enough visibility for you to notice a “Welcome to Georgia” sign. You realize you’ve gone too far and missed the exit to pick up your good friend, Sam. The rain must have prevented you from seeing where you were going. But before you can even attempt to do a U-turn, you notice your gaslight beaming at you.

“Ahh man, I wonder how long that’s been on.” The car satisfies your curiosity by dying in the middle of the road. And as you veer onto the shoulder, you wonder if you’ll ever get to the beach.

This story is a metaphor for teaching. If education is a journey, then instructional design is the roadmapping that goes into making the trip as good as possible. In the expedition of educating, it’s important to know where we’re going. It’s essential for us to connect with our students, so they can come along for the ride. And, it’s paramount that we maintain the various components of an effective “transportation system” that will get us and our students to the destination. Overall, we educators need to be thoughtful and systematic in our approach to creating learning experiences. Otherwise, courses turn into the equivalent of the poorly planned excursion I just illustrated.

When considering instructional design, it’s important to recognize that any well-designed educational experience is systematic in nature. A system is a grouping of units that forms a whole and operates in unison. A car, for instance, is a system because it has various parts that work together to make it function properly. With this in mind, it’s important for the vehicle’s owner to maintain the car’s various parts to keep the automobile in good working order. Similarly, as educators, we have to consider the various components that go into good teaching to allow our systems to run smoothly and effectively for the purpose of maximizing learning.

To produce meaningful and positive course experiences for students, we should work to remain faithful to all of the following steps.

1. Know your audience. It’s important to analyze your learners to uncover their strengths, their shortcomings, their learning styles, etc.

2. Establish reachable goals. These are the broad mission statements of your course. In a general manner, they answer the question, “What do I want my students to be able to do as a result of taking my course?".

3. Specify observable learning objectives. Objectives are like goals but they are much more specific. They outline the specific behaviors that you want students to demonstrate as a result of your instruction. Think of objectives as being like specific targets that you want your students to hit.

4. Design effective teaching and assessment strategies. How can I get my students to achieve what I’ve outlined in my objectives? And, more importantly, how can I measure their success?

5. Gather and/or produce quality resources. These are the assets that will support learning in your course. These can be textbooks, articles, presentations, videos, web-based resources, etc.

6. Implement course materials via effective communication and management.

7. Review student performance and course feedback to evaluate the strengths and shortcomings of your course.

As a systematic approach for creating successful instruction, these steps allow us to connect with learners’ needs, establish a clear roadmap for learning, engage learners in meaningful activities, assess learners’ skills appropriately, maximize learning and productivity, and reflect on our own effectiveness in facilitating learning.

This podcasting series will be dedicated to the exploration of resources and strategies related to this type of systematic approach to teaching and learning. If you’re listening to this podcast now, you’ve already embarked on a journey. My hope is that you’ll continue to take this trip with me and that we will all improve our practice as a result of this process.