Instructional design is the necessary evil when it comes to working with other educators. In my role as singular classroom teacher, I am able to wing it, work off the cuff. The classroom is very fluid and it works as long as I have a general idea of where I want to end up. The day can start with a topic and the students guide their learning from there. This approach has been highly successful for a few years and I prefer it to sitting down, writing out lesson plans, creating specific activities, and standard assessments. However, now that my instructor role has evolved into working with other educators, teachers that are less comfortable giving up control, I am finding that they are more successful with detailed instructional deigns.
The instructional design project has helped demonstrate the need for the initial step of brainstorming ideas and figuring out the best way to pass the content on to the students. The development phase of the project has helped define the “how” and was an important part of showing the client exactly what ways the content would be transferred to the learners.
For an educator that prefers to let the student choose their next adventure, instructional design doesn’t come easy. The ADDIE model has been extremely helpful in creating a step-by-step guide to the project. Even though the client is a content specialist, the ADDIE model is necessary in giving an outline for each step of creating the blended learning unit.
Combining the knowledge of the instructor (content specialist) with the process of the instructional designer allows the project to have the highest chance of success. The content specialist has been able to demonstrate the information needed to be transferred while the instructional designer has been able to take the content and turn it into a working lesson plan. The teacher has plenty of years of experience in creating her own lessons; however, the project is a much larger task, requiring outside resources, online tutorials, detailed scheduling, and unique assessments. The combination of this many working parts can be overwhelming for an instructor, normally solely concerned with imparting the knowledge of adding or subtracting fractions.
What do I think of instructional design so far? It takes a lot of work and pre-planning; however, it is a necessary step to have a successful project. Without it, the client may have dealt with a lot of trial and error throughout their lesson.
SReed LTEC5210 