Why do we need instructional design?

When I think of instructional design, I visualize a house being built. According to Duggan (2005), before you start building your house, you first decide if you really need a house and if so, what kind of house. During the analysis phase we must also decide if training is actually needed and if so, what kind of training and what will the audience learn. Once we have decided that training is necessary, we create our blueprint or design our draft plan detailing learning objectives and solutions. The development stage can be viewed as building the house. When you start to develope your plan, materials are created to help the leaner benefit more from the lesson or training. Next, we have the implementation stage of instructional design. When comparing this stage to building a house, Duggan (2005) made the correlation between moving into the new house and testing out doors and appliances and testing out your lesson or training by doing a test run on people and using the feedback to tweak things and make them better. The final stage is an evaluation. Just like you would evaluate your newly built house to ensure it functions properly, we must also reflect on the effectiveness of our training or lesson. This can be achieved with the use of surveys or feedback given at the conclusion of the training or lesson Duggan (2005).

Furthermore, I believe instructional design is needed because in education, there is not a one size fits all model to learning or delivering instruction. Each student is unique from their personalities to their style of dress and so are their needs for learning. Let's look at some advantages & disadvantages of instructional design. When I think about the advantages of instructional design, I visualize a flexible approach to delivering a product.  As Piskurich (2015) states, "The main advantage of instructional design is simple: it assists you in correctly doing what you need to do (p.9)." Other advantages of instructional design would include cost, learning, and time effectiveness. The disadvantage of instructional design is that it requires additional resources (Piskurich, 2015).

When I reflect back on an instruction that I have experienced, I am reminded of a training called Learning-Focused, and the trainer had the majority of the audience feeling like the picture below.



via GIPHY

Learning-Focused was a series of trainings designed to make teaching more effective. The session that sticks out the most to me was the training on vocabulary strategies. The trainer prepared a PowerPoint, handed out an outline of the PowerPoint, and read verbatim from the presentation. At the end of the session, we filled out a reflection of the training, which included how we would implement the new learning in our classrooms.

A great example of training that I attended would be the Google Summit. This is training that I would recommend to everyone. The presenters identified their targets, broke the sessions down into several sessions, ensured that the audience was engaged in meaningful learning, and they asked for feedback at the end of each session.

In conclusion, I believe it is safe to say that as long as there are trainings or lessons to be delivered, there will always be good and bad experiences. Until everyone catches up to the 21st century learning, we will continue to see the good and bad elements within most training that we encounter.

Resources

Duggan, C. M. (2005). Designing effective training. Journal of AHIMA, 76(6), 28-32. Retreived     from http://library.ahima.org/doc?oid=59954#.V4mYkqK1xzU 

Piskurich, G.M. (2015). Rapid instructional design. Learning ID fast and right. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.