A review of what instructional designers do: Questions answered and questions not asked (original) (raw)
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A Review of What Instructional Designers Do: Questions Answered and Questions Not Asked1
The purpose of this literature review was to determine what evidence there is that instructional designers apply ID Models, as well as to establish what other activities and processes they might use in their professional activities. Only ten articles were located that directly pertained to this topic: seven reporting on empirical research and three case descriptions recounting development experiences. All ten papers pertained to process-based ID models. Results showed that, while instructional designers apparently do make use of process-based ID models, they do not spend the majority of their time working with them nor do they follow them in a rigid fashion. They also engage in a wide variety of other tasks that are not reflected in ID models.
1 A Review of What Instructional Designers Do: Questions Answered and Questions Not Asked1
2015
The purpose of this literature review was to determine what evidence there is that instructional designers apply ID Models, as well as to establish what other activities and processes they might use in their professional activities. Only ten articles were located that directly pertained to this topic: seven reporting on empirical research and three case descriptions recounting development experiences. All ten papers pertained to process-based ID models. Results showed that, while instructional designers apparently do make use of process-based ID models, they do not spend the majority of their time working with them nor do they follow them in a rigid fashion. They also engage in a wide variety of other tasks that
Judgment and Instructional Design: How ID Practitioners Work In Practice
Performance Improvement Quarterly, 2015
practice on its own terms. While this was a promising start, a general lack of core understanding in the fi eld as a whole about how design is actually done has resulted in a number of attempts by researchers (Sugar, 2014) to explain the complexity of practice with limited success. Review of Literature Views of Design in the Field One approach has been to study practice based on how it conforms to existing ID theories or models. In Wedman and Tessmer (1993), 11 pre-identified ID activities were presented to instructional designers, who responded with how often these were used, whether or not they were used in their prescribed order, and whether or not they were all completed to the same degree. Noting that rarely do designers use most of these activities, and not always in order, Wedman and Tessmer proposed the layers of necessity model, later revisited by Winer and Vásquez-Abad (1995), which encouraged designers to input their needs into a base model for each unique situation. When ID practitioners began to move from a cognitive to a more constructivist approach, Kirschner, Carr, van Merriënboer, and Sloep (2002) began describing how ID models were becoming more of an inspiration for designers, and less a prescribed set of rules. The focus on how designers prioritize activities introduced by these authors, and the sense of temporal awareness that came with these ideas, also led to the Cox and Osguthorpe (2003) study of how ID practitioners use their time. The focus of this study was moving away from what instructional designers do and toward how they incorporate other aspects of designing, such as time management and task prioritization. Following these studies, Visscher-Voerman and Gustafson (2004) and Christensen and Osguthorpe (2004) turned back to the question of how designers interact with prescribed models, theories, and methods they had been taught. Both studies came to the conclusion that homogenous design methods were not widely practiced by instructional designers, but that a more adaptable, diverse, and heterogeneous approach is typically followed. Several of these efforts have led to the development of new models for designing, presumably reflecting better in their conception what designers actually do, but ultimately prescribing what they should do in an effort to ensure that following the model will produce optimal practice-an approach antithetical to broader views of design (Boling & Gray, 2015; Lawson & Dorst, 2009; Stolterman, 2008).. .. a general lack of core understanding in the fi eld as a whole about how design is actually done has resulted in a number of attempts by researchers to explain the complexity of practice with limited success.
Relating ID Models to Practice
There have been many instructional design models over the last century. Some have been effective, others not so much. One thing is clear: there was a flurry of development in the field of instructional design during World War II. The need to get massive amounts of troops trained and ready for the battlefront was instrumental in providing research into learning that aided theorists such as Piaget, Gagné, and Bruner. As a result, the field of instructional design has benefitted greatly from the discoveries that were made. The following study examines the instructional design models in place during the last half of the twentieth-century and compares them to the author's workplace.
In this study, we address the relative lack of rigorous research on instructional design (ID) practice via an exploratory study in which pairs of researchers observed design judgments made by eight practicing instructional designers in two consulting environments as they went about their normal work activities. In our analysis, we sought to characterize their practice on its own terms, rather than through superimposition of existing ID models or frameworks. A nonprescriptive, philosophical framework of design judgment by Nelson and Stolterman (2012) was operationalized and used to frame two phases of analysis: identifying and coding design judgments and creating holistic summaries of the observed practice. We found that design judgments occur quite frequently throughout design, often in clustered or layered ways, rather than in “pure” forms. These judgments appeared to be shaped by factors unique to the firm, the role or position of the designer, and project, client, or other external factors.
Instructional Design and Models: ASSURE and Kemp
Journal of Education and Research
Instructional Design (ID) is a procedure for developing an educational or training programme, curricula, or courses sequentially and authentically (Branch & Merrill, 2011). This procedure enables instructors to create instructions, which involves the “systematic planning of instruction” (Smith & Ragan, 2005, p. 8), ranging from instructional analysis to evaluation (Mager, 1984). Thus, ID can be referred to as a “systematic and reflective process of translating principles of learning and instruction into plans for instructional materials, activities, information resources, and evaluation” (Smith & Ragan, 2005, p. 4). As such, taken as a framework, ID provides the process to create instructions based on the necessity of a teaching and learning environment. Thus, ID can be defined as a process to develop directions and specifications using learning and instructional theory to ensure the quality of instruction.
2015
Coming from a background in the visual arts (MFA, Printmaking, 1983), I was puzzled when I began to work in instructional design and technology by the apparent centrality of design process models to the overall enterprise. While every field incorporating design uses and teaches processes for design, most do not seem to view the design process itself as a central object of focus in teaching and learning design. The focus of teaching in these fields is centered on developing habits of mind within those who will be designers, using design activities as the primary focus and design models as one possible support for those activities. In discussions with colleagues in the IDT Futures group we have speculated on why this may be so – we want to be seen a scientific ally-oriented field instead of craft- or arts-oriented one; we have traditionally embraced systems and communication theory, which tend to place process models front and center; our models started out as conceptual frameworks an...
An Investigation of Development Toward Instructional Design Expertise
Performance Improvement Quarterly, 2008
F or decades now, researchers have been investigating the nature of process and product in the practice of instructional design (ID). There are various useful descriptions of good ID and prescriptions for how ID should proceed. Both researchers and practitioners have generated rubrics and heuristics designed to assess ID deliverables as well as the design process. Graduate programs in institutions of higher education designed to cultivate the design skills of students typically include courses in ID with students creating a series of deliverables while under expert supervision. What is not well understood is the set of cognitive and affective processes that unfolds over time as students develop as instructional designers. These meaning making processes that unfold in situ are important to investigate so that we can better understand which practices most effectively speak to the development of expertise in the field of ID.
The Practice of Instructional Design: The Process and Its Application.
There is nowadays a lot of interest in the field of Instructional Design. The focus is still on theories and methodology of Instructional System Design (ISD), which are the fundamentals of the field and are absolutely important for its application. However, most professionals are involved in the daily practice of instructional design (ID). The practice of instructional design has a slightly different approach, which tend not to follow strictly the linearity of many ID Models that have been created over the past thirty years. Success in applying the ID methodology lies on a systemic validation and revision of all phases performed along the process of developing instruction. Another element to be considered in the practice of ID, aiming effectiveness and high quality results, is the synergy of all components and the team, which will be acquired by fully knowledge of the process by all.
Instructional design (ID) models have been developed to promote understandings of ID reality and guide ID performance. As the number and diversity of ID practices grows, implicit doubts regarding the reliability, validity, and usefulness of ID models suggest the need for methodological guidance that would help to generate ID models that are relevant and appropriate to the ever-changing design challenges in our world. Because the construction of an ID model involves an intricate externalization of unique sets of design experiences as well as a logical synthesis of relevant research, the purpose of this study was to formulate a methodological framework for ID model development. Through the analysis of 20 selected studies, four critical dimensions and ten synthesized procedures for constructing ID models were formulated. The resulting framework is intended to provide a useful theoretical and practical contribution to the field of ID.