Introduction
Researchers and practitioners have spent the past 50 years attempting to define and create models of design with the intent to improve instruction. As part of a joint, inter-university project, Barson (1967) defined instructional development as the systematic process for improving instruction. Perhaps most interesting about this project and subsequent report is the caution that many different conditions influence learning, including the use of media, and that generalizing any sort of model would potentially be hazardous at best and disastrous at worst. Shortly thereafter, however, Twelker, Urbach, and Buck (1972) noted that a systematic approach to developing instruction was an increasingly popular idea, but cautioned that instructional design (ID) methods varied from simple to complex. These historical observations predicted the reality that every instructional design project is unique every time with no two projects ever progressing through the process identically. These differences, sometimes subtle while at other times significant, have given way to literally dozens of different models used with varying popularity in a wide variety of learning contexts.
Mushrooms
Models
Because there are so many different ID models, how to choose which one to use? A total of 34 different instructional design models (see Table 1 for a summary) have been covered by Survey of Instructional Design Models text since its first edition in 1981, and this list does not include every model. Still, this list of models is useful in providing a concise guide to some of the more common approaches to instructional design.
| Table 1
Instructional Design Models included in editions of the Survey text |
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| Model Name | 1st Ed 1981 | 2nd Ed 1991 | 3rd Ed 1997 | 4th Ed 2002 | 5th Ed 2015 |
| Banathy (1968) | x | ||||
| DeCecco (1968) | x | ||||
| Blake & Mouton (1971) | x | ||||
| Briggs (1970) | x | ||||
| Baker & Schutz (1971) | x | ||||
| Gerlach & Ely (1971) | x | x | x | x | x |
| Instructional Development Institute (Twelker et al., 1972) | x | x | x | ||
| Learning Systems Design (Davis, Alexander, & Yelon, 1974) | x | ||||
| IPISD (Branson, Rayner, Cox, Furman, & King, 1975) | x | x | x | x | x |
| Blondin (1977) | x | ||||
| Morrison, Ross, Kemp, & Kalman (Kemp, 1977) | x | x | x | x | x |
| Dick, Carey, & Carey (Dick & Carey, 1978) | x | x | x | x | |
| Gilbert (1978) Front End Analysis | x | ||||
| Courseware Development Process (Control Data Corporation, 1979) | x | ||||
| ASSURE (Heinich, Molenda, & Russell, 1982) | x | x | x | x | |
| Diamond (1989) | x | x | x | x | |
| Dick & Reiser (1989) | x | x | |||
| Van Patten (1989) | x | x | |||
| Bergman & Moore (1990) | x | x | x | x | |
| Leshin, Pollock, & Reigeluth, (1992) | x | x | |||
| IPDM (Gentry, 1993) | x | x | x | ||
| Smith & Ragan (1993) | x | x | x | ||
| de Hoog, de Jong, & de Vries (1994) | x | x | |||
| Bates (1995) | x | x | |||
| PIE (Newby et al., 1996) | x | x | |||
| 4C/ID (van Mer