Instructional design is a rather popular subject in the MOOC literature. Logically, because the quality of a MOOC-course is much more critical that face to face education. A teacher has all kind of possibilities to adapt his of her teaching to the teaching and learning situation in the student group. But even in F2F- education the importance of the quality of the learning environment is growing. A higher quality of the learning environment increase the possibility the improve study success. Quality of education is defined as education which is effective, efficient, well liked and valued. This means teachers have to design and develop a learning environment in their courses of high quality.
But what can we say about instructional design and development. First at all, excellent teachers are able to design learning environment of high quality. Secondly, formulation of learning objectives, systematically selection of the learning and testing methods is no guarantee for high quality. Models form Mager, …, … are maybe logically correct. But if you follow the proposed steps of phases a course can be not valued and ineffective. The missing part can be found in the concept of design. Design is a systematics way of working, but is combined with explicit focus on creativity, using your imagination and intuition. As Tony Earl has approached instructional design: it is a art and a craft. in the design theory studied by the students of technical universities the design process is explicitly focussed on the art and the craft. And very interesting a crucial aspect is added: the systematic use the results of research in designing a product or service.
Researchers like Van den Akker, …, … has applied the design theory for approaching instruction design: courses and curricula. From their work you can learn that you can formulate design rules with help you to make a good designed learning environment. There is no guarantee for success. Research can indicate the importance of certain rules. It can prove that in a certain context the learning situation is excellent. But is not possible to make a forecast how you should design a new course for another group of students. the power of research are the design rules. When designing and developing a course they select and apply design principles using their imagination, experiences etc. Using the same design principles very different courses can be designed and still all can be of high quality. The word select is very interesting because teachers have to decide which design rules will be followed. If you want to introduce project education or MOOC-education the relevant design principles will be quite different. Of course the education the relevant design principles will be quite different. Of course there are some principles with are so general and so often proved to be correct. These should be a role and can often be operationalized in more specific design principles. An example is the list from …. (see ….) It is typical an example of a list of principles which is agreed on by most teachers. But how can you apply it in your teaching situation is not is not immediately clear.
If you evaluate existing courses the research results can help you too identify the weak spot of a course and explain why a certain course in not valued, not well liked, not effective or not efficient. With these results the researcher or evaluator can formulate suggestions what could be possible improvements. How these suggestions will be translated in a better course is a matter or redesign. There a no strict rules or algorithm how you should to restructure the course. Maybe this is the reason why so many teachers are not using the results of research. You have to understand the research result and translate it to your situation. Most of the time this is not easy
So, research is crucial but there is no one-to-one relationship between research and the learning environment.
Conclusions:
- My conclusion from the above is that if you want to improve the instructional design models you should find out what art and craft means and how you can insert the results of research in the design and development process. Tony Earl’s book is a very interesting example of an approach in which art and craft an a little bit or research are combined. An analysis of his approach will help to give more inside in art and craft.
- The approach of design research from van den Akker c.s. will also be analysed: what are their conclusions. Also the book of ….. have to be studied
- The design theory developed for example in TU Delft will give us a state of the art insight how the research people and designers from the technical universities solve design problems. The main line of the design theory will be described and applied in the field of instructional theory.
- There are different interesting models of instructional design: what are their main characteristics, what can you learn from them
- The results of the analyses 1 -4 are used to underpin and to further instructional design and development for courses and for curricula. The ambition is that for example the design questions of the MOOC-designers can be answered
Leave a Reply