The Learner

My view of ID changed as I considered the importance of the learner. While working at a daycare, I was always told that the children were the focus of everything we do. Also, as a school bus driver, we are told that we don't drive children to school, we provide a safe environment for children as we transport them to school. Even in my training thus far as a seminary teacher, we are told about the importance of the learner. However, like many things in life, discovering the importance of the learner comes over time.

What I've learned recently is this: in ID, the learner needs to be first and foremost in your mind during every step. While Analysis includes the learner, this doesn't fulfill your responsibility to them. Even in the objective, the learner needs to be considered in order to be effective (i.e. the characteristics of the learner will determine the the difficulty of the instruction). For example, while a 10th grade chemistry teacher covers the periodic table over the course of a month and students will simply know the names of the periods. In the same time, a college professor may skip the names, but teach the attributes of each period, number of valence electrons, reactivity, and electronegativity. While curriculum may determine such things, that curriculum was determined with the learner in mind.

In the end, an incorrect understanding of your learners can make your entire instruction completely worthless. So a designer will constantly be asking how effective, efficient, and appealing the design is to the learner.

ADDIE

ADDIE describes what I next thought of Instructional Design. ADDIE stands for Analyze, Design, Development, Implementation, Evaluation. With this in mind, I pretty much viewed Instructional Design as step-by-step process that leads to a final product. I also thought that, with the exception of Evaluation, I had to go from one step to another, and couldn't go on to the next step until I had completed the current one.

As mentioned before, I did see Evaluation as one area that I could use during each step of the process. For example, in the analysis phase, you could evaluate your work by having someone else look it your analyses and see if you could have missed something. However, after implementation I know that a major evaluation needs to take place to really decide of your instruction was effective, efficient, and appealing. After this, but to a smaller extent, throughout the project, you can make improvements to your instruction.

In closing, I should note that this was my view of ADDIE, not necessarily what the ADDIE system is.

Intro

This is my blog for my Instructional Design (ID) class. Mostly this blog will serve as a history of what I learn in this class about ID, and how I define it in my mind.

Before I ever started taking this course, I spoke with the director of the ID program and he introduced me to the program. At the time I thought ID was simply deciding what to teach and how to teach it. I guess I thought design meant simply picking and choosing what materials to use, and not actually building instruction from scratch. So that was how I defined it heading into this class.