Instructional Designing (ID) – Simplified

Instructional Designing (ID) is an important part of E-learning. Although there are tens of hundreds of definitions of ID, they are so often, so heavy with e-learning jargons that a layperson never feels that he has understood the meaning of this term.

This blog post is an attempt to simplify the meaning of Instructional Designing to all and sundry.

Let us understand Instructional Designing by drawing parallels. One parallel that I can think of is a Lesson Plan.  

Take a scenario:

Assume you are an English teacher. You have to teach a group of Korean Students the usage of past tense.

Now, what do you do? You wouldn’t barge in and just start teaching without any preparation, would you? Surely not! You would certainly prepare for your lessons. Right?  So, how would you go about preparing for the lessons?

First of all, you would carefully draw a lesson plan. To draw a lesson plan, you would do the following things:

1. Fix the objectives of your lessons. For instance: Students should be capable of correctly using the past tense
2. Determine students’ comprehension level. For example: Beginners/ Intermediate/Upper -Intermediate level
3. Plan your lesson instructions according to the level determined. This would mean a whole lot of things, like:

• What theoretical explanation would you give and how much?
• What training material would you use to demonstrate the grammatical usage of the past tenses?
• What tasks-varying from guided practice to free tasks- would you assign your students?
• What evaluation process would you employ to test your students?

Second is the implementation of the lesson plan, i.e. you would teach students according to the lesson plan you have drawn.

Finally, you would evaluate your students to see if the learning objective is met. This is a lesson plan.

So far so good, right?

Now, let’s take the lesson plan a little higher. Imagine, you are a teacher, and you have been given a list of learning objectivse that you have to achieve. But, you have not been given any ready courseware, although you have some disorganized training materials that you can use according to your discretion, you have been asked to put together a training program that achieves the complex list of learning objectives, you have enough time, and are free to use any multi-media. Now, what do you do?

You start planning not for one single lesson. But, for an entire course. Here, what you actually do is Instructional Designing, i.e. you plan (i.e. design) the flow of lessons (i.e. instructions) in a particular order to achieve the list of complex learning objectives.

So Instructional Designing means:

• You understand the aptitude (physical and mental) of the audience/students of the course,
• Break the complex list of objectives into smaller goals, and design single lessons to achieve each goal at a time.
• Finally put together a whole set of lessons in a logical flow, and present it as a course in order to achieve a set of complex goals.
• Ensure that the entire course (flow of lessons) in put together in an interesting and appealing way.

 There a whole range of words like Instructional Systems Design (ISD), Instructional Systems Design & Development (ISDD), the Systems Approach to Training (SAT), that are used interchangeably, but mean the same as Instructional Designing.

Since, this was just a hypothetical instance, in reality there are professionals whose work is to put together courseware to achieve a variety of objectives, right from teaching companies’ staff the safety measures to be taken in an emergency, to performing a task at work successfully.

This is Instructional Designing simplified.

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