What are the Results of Following an Instructional Design Process?
What are the Results of Good ID
While informal learning is all the rage and provides a number of benefits like speed and peer-to-peer interaction and exchanges of information, good, sound instructional systems design is still necessary. A systematic approach provides good sound instruction and promotes learning and knowledge acquisition. As designers of instruction via mobile, virtual worlds or social networking, we cannot ignore good instructional design. Many benefits can be obtain by following an instructional design model.
Designing good instruction does not happen by accident, it takes following a systematic process but the results of that process can be far more effective and productive than using a trial and error approach or “see what sticks” approach.
Some of the benefits of following a systematic process include:
- Instructional quality is higher than trail and error approaches because the selection of content, use of specific instructional strategies, and engagement of the learner are approached systematically.
- Motivation of the learner is higher because the instruction is designed to be appealing, motivating and targeted toward the learners needs.
- Learner success increases with instruction that is systematically designed to teach and achieve clearly stated goals and outcomes.
- Learner assessments are tightly integrated with the objectives of the instruction.
- Higher quality instruction results from following a clearly defined process.
- Research-based principles guide the selection of media and instructional strategies and approaches.
- Consistency of delivery of instruction. Following a specific process for the development of all learning modules provides consistency between various courses developed by various instructors/designers. The general look and process of content exploration is standardized.
- Courses are developed from the learner’s perspective and not from the viewpoint of the instructor’s knowledge or opinions on a topic.
- Increased retention and recall among learners because of the rigorous process used to design the instruction.
Of course there are more benefits, what did I miss can you add any other?
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Janet,
Thanks for the comment! I think elements of the ID process (especially design) can and should be used with the social web to make it better for learning. As designers, we can provide guidelines to make the informal contributions more effective for a contributor’s co-workers.
We've both waded through a lot of social networking comments and not gotten any learning that we needed because of many of the issues you identify. Since time is money in a corporate setting–an instructional designer is needed to help streamline the learning that can take place in informal social networks.
As designers, we need to provide templates for meaningful contributions of one peer to another, perhaps a sample blog entry to use as a model, or a method of standardizing contributions, a list of key words so the folksonomy is limited, something that ties strategies to contributions to encourage learning and retention of the content contributed. These elements add structure to the contributions but still allow creativity.
Sometimes informal learning is overrated. It can take lots of time to find the right information and sometimes, it becomes noise and not learning. So designers are challenged with structuring the noise (like Google did to the web.)
As I have written before…"While learning can and does happen in non-designed situations, it may not be as efficient as it could be, it may not be deliberate and retention may not occur." You can see my posting Kapp Notes: Yes, We Should Keep ADDIE, HPT and ISD Models that explains why models for designing learning are important to keep even with today's social learning.
You have done a good job in identifying elements in microlearning that make learning in a social web problematic…no structure…not stored centrally, not standardized…those can all be addressed with some ID process elements.
Specifically design. ie. teach concepts with examples and non-examples, use mnemonics for facts. So while social learning can be powerful, I think it needs elements of design to truly reach its full potential.
As always, the answer is a combination, not an absolute…instructional design and social web make for the best learning not exclusively one or the other. If we designers help contributors create instructionally sound informal microlearning then we are valuable as designers of an instructional system and not just designers of instructional content.
Just some thoughts.