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Objectives:
Align course objectives to open education materials.
Introduction
Instructional design (ID) is an entire profession, and often it can seem like the responsibility of online educators, but every person who teaches is responsible for ID, because we must all think about how students will best connect to and integrate the topics we are teaching. Instructional design is the process that instructors use to organize content, activities, and interactions so that they will best meet the students needs as learners. It is particularly important to apply some principles of ID in building courses using open education, because there isn’t a textbook providing a background structure that leads the students through the process. This section won’t cover everything about instructional design, but it will set up a process for practicing ID principles with open education to create successful courses.
For more information about Instructional Design, you might want to visit any of the following professional development materials:
CUNY Academic Commons: There are a lot of tools available at CUNY’s faculty development site, including some helpful definitions of basic terms in instructional design.
Instructional Use of Learning Objects: This is an edited collection of essays on using learning objects effectively in teaching.
Intro to Instructional Design: This is a full course on ID from the OCW project at Utah State University. It’s very straight-forward, contains videos as well as templates, and it is a solid demonstration of how strong design supports individuals.
The ADDIE Method
Most instructional designers use a collection of interdisciplinary models to define their practice as designers. Many people start with the ideas described in the ADDIE Method. The following excerpt is from Billy Meinke’s Blog:
If you can understand what each step of the ADDIE process describes, many more concepts and theories of instruction will fall into place. And in its most general form, ADDIE can be applied to just about any “making” or creative process. Keep in mind that many IDs choose to use a more flexible ADDIE model (Dick and Carey comes to mind), allowing for iteration at the various steps as opposed to requiring a full-cycle with each improvement to whatever it is you’re making. Here it goes. ADDIE basics.
ADDIE
(Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, Evaluate)
1. Analyze
As with most things, you must first figure out what it is you’re setting out to do. This step usually involves a needs analysis, an examination of the need that you’re aiming to meet through instruction. What resources are available to you (time, financial constraints, human resources, etc)? What is the current situation and where does it need to be taken? In the case of designing instruction, skills (or a lack of them) is the focus. The main point of the Analyze step is to discover the current situation and identify the desired goal.
2. Design
This step involved breaking down (or “chunking”) the g