Designing Your Instruction

Written by:

Endang Asrini Arifiati (1507042025)

Do you, as a teacher, have a design for your instruction?

Instructional design has nothing to do with either the engineering terms such as building, construction or any fabric process or computer programming like graphic design though such skills of computer programming are very helpful in a course design. Instructional design involve the forming of educational content and the contents of educational forms. What instructional design has to do with is translating pedagogical research and practice into instructional curriculum specifically crafted to produce desired learning outcomes. In designing the instruction, the implementation of technology is not the main goal, but the good instruction is. The major goal of instructional design is to demonstrate planning, developing, evaluating, and managing the instructional process (Isman, 2011). 

Before going farther talking about what instructional designers have to do, it is better to find out the meaning of design. The word "design" is increasingly being used in various societal contexts, for example, career design, food design, and community-design. 

• Design can be defined as the process of composing a desired figure toward the future (Taura and Nagai, 2009: 3). 
• Gustafson in Isman (2011, 136) stated that instructional design is analyzing what is to be taught/ learned, determining how it is to be taught/ learned, conducting tryout and revision, and assessing whether learners do learn. 
• Instructional design is the process of taking information and framing it in a way that makes it interesting and easy for learners to understand (Lamotte, 2015: par. 2).
• Smith and Ragan in Freeman (1994) state that the term instructional design is the systematic process of translating principles of learning and instruction into plans for instructional materials and activities.

When looking at the above definition of instructional design, there are at least eight actions an instructional designer should do. 

Instructional designers perform not only designing training materials, teaching manuals and student guides but also developing full course materials and the curriculum. They have to consider four key elements in designing the instruction i.e. whom to teach, what to teach, how to teach and how to evaluate. They can employ multi-media formats ranging from simple pamphlets to online tutorials and complex interactive multi-media. The method of delivery can be in the form of face-to-face classroom instruction, internet-based distance education, and/or blended courses. Recently, the instructional designers pay attention more to the instruction from the learner perspective than from the content perspective which is considered as old-school approach. In the end, the ultimate goal of instructional designers is to create effective and efficient learning experiences for learners of all ages.

References:

• Chapman, S and Cantrell, P. What is an Instructional Designer? retrieved from the URL http://teaching.colostate.edu/tips/tip.cfm?tipid=70 on December 2nd, 2016
• Freeman, Robert. 1994. Instructional Design: Capturing the Classroom for Distance Learning. The Association of Christian Continuing Education Schools and Seminaries.
• Isman, Aytekin. 2011. Instructional Design in Education: New Model. TOJET: The Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology, vol. 10 Issue 1
• LaMotte, Allison. 2015. An Introduction to Instructional Design. An article of E-learning Heroes. Taken from the URL https://community.articulate.com/series/43/articles/an-introduction-to-instructional-design on December 2nd, 2016
• Taura, T. and Nagai, Y. 2009. ADefinition of Design and its Creative Features.  Proceeding of International Association of Societies of Design Research, Seoul, Korea