Members share quick and easy tips and hints to help you!

Do you have a short tip or quick reference guide that you use when designing instruction or when teaching? In this column, you can share with your fellow Instructional Design & Learning SIG Members what works for you!

If you have a tip or hint you'd like to share, please send it to the Newsletter Editor at: Williams.210@nd.edu

The Complete Development Cycle

>> by Jack Butler <<

A Simple Aid for Instructional Designers

I wrote the following documents (see links below) to help keep the sequence of instructional design steps in front of me while I work through a project. This is not a complete design strategy — it is a simple job aid for instructional designers who just need a reminder that there is a path to follow. Just hang it in your closet and haul it out when you want to remind yourself how the bones all go together.

Instructional Design Model: Basic Outline (.doc, 31 KB)

Instructional Design Model: Detailed (.doc, 37 KB)

Develop the Assessment First and Your Teaching/Instructional Design Will Be Better

One of the features of this path that many teachers have not yet discovered is that the assessment development should precede the development of instructional material. (Alas, my students suffered from my lack of this realization for many years.) Many academic teachers and instructional designers leave the writing of assessment to the end. That is a mistake. Think back to some of the classes you have taken in your life and you will most likely remember the frustration of trying to guess what it was the instructor really wanted you to master. Those teachers’ tests were difficult and not very good at assessing what you knew of the stated curriculum. Student-centered teachers/instructional designers want to see students succeed, so they write the assessment tasks first. That helps the teacher/designer to better know what content to write and how to write it.

So if you need something brief and skeletal rather than a set of books to help you remember the essentials, then this may just help.

Jack Butler (right) is an instructional designer at IBM. His writing and Instructional Systems Design (ISD) experience includes telecommunications, networking, Internet security, asset management, software development, e-commerce, as well as mechanical technologies. He has an MS in Technical Communication. Additional studies and experience: multimedia, information design, and usability. Former German teacher. Twin sons, Casey and Mackenzie, 15. You can contact him at butlerja@bellsouth.net

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