What is Instructional Design?

Teachers and school systems share a common goal of assisting students in learning as much as possible. The use of instructional design can help you achieve that goal. In fact, whether students are in kindergarten, high school, college, or beyond, instructional design is relevant at all levels of learning. Instructional design, which was founded on the theories of various researchers, entails analyzing a learning setting, determining the learning needs of the students in that setting, and developing a system to deliver what is required using instructional strategies, instructional materials, learning theory, and instructional design models.

There are several instructional design models to choose from. The ADDIE model, on which several other models are based, is one of the most important. The acronym ADDIE stands for analyze, design, develop, implement, and evaluate, and it refers to five distinct phases in instructional design: analyze, design, develop, implement, and evaluate.

The analyze phase entails a review of the student’s characteristics as well as the tasks that must be learned. Design is a phase that entails establishing learning objectives and selecting an instructional method. The creation of instructional or training materials is referred to as the develop phase. The phase in which the teacher delivers or distributes the materials to be used for instruction is referred to as implementation. The evaluate phase is when you check to see if the learning materials were successful in meeting the objectives.

Theoretical foundations for instructional design were based on the theories of a number of researchers. Hermann Ebbinghaus and Ivan Pavlov, for example, studied forgetfulness and classical conditioning in the 1800s. B.F. Skinner pioneered radical behaviorism, which he then applied to learning. Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky studied the developmental stages of children and the cognitive processes involved in learning. Their work, along with that of David Ausebel, contributed to the development of cognitive learning theory, which is now an important part of instructional design.

Then, during World War II, Robert Gagne compiled training materials for the US military and later published “The Conditions of Learning” (1965), which became a seminal work in the field of instructional design. In addition, in 1962, Robert Mager published an important book called “Preparing Objectives for Programmed Instruction” to help teachers write clear learning objectives. In his famous “Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning,” Benjamin Bloom continued the work and described learning objectives in greater detail, emphasizing the importance of lessons that help students synthesize and evaluate information rather than simply recalling facts.

Walter Dick and Lou Carey, among others, developed instructional design models after that. Each model that came after it focused on a different aspect of instructional design. The advent of the computer age, as well as the development of distance learning, had an impact on instructional design.