Instructional Design

Smith & Ragan (1999). Instructional Design. New York: Wiley. [ Chapters 1, 2 ]

Instructional design: systematic and reflective process of translating principles of learning an instruction into plans for instructional materials, activities, information resources and evaluation.

Instruction: intentional arrangement of experiences, leading to learners acquiring particular capabilities.

Education: all experiences which people learn

            Unplanned, incidental, informal

Training: those instructional experiences that are focused upon individuals acquiring very specific skills they can apply immediately.

Teaching: facilitated by human being, by a live teacher.

Constructivism:

An educational philosophy within a larger category of philosophy called rationalism. Resource is the primary source of knowledge and that reality is constructed rather than discovered.

Piaget, “knowledge is not transmitted it is constructed”

Individual constructivist:

Knowledge is constructed from experience

Learning results from personal interpretation of knowledge

Learning is an active process

Social constructivist:

Learning is collaborative with meaning negotiated from multiple perspectives

Contextualism:

Learning should occur (situated) in realistic settings

Testing should be integrated in the task not a separate activity

Empricism: objectivism, knowledge is acquired through experience.

Pragmatism: knowledge is acquired through experience but this is interpreted by a reason.

Learning Theories

Behaviorism: focuses on observable behavior

Behaviorists look at learning as acquisition of new behavior based on environmental conditions. Behavioral theory has stimulus-response relationship with environment.

Cognitive Learning Theories:

Learning is active, cognitive process

High level processes present in learning

Cumulative nature and prior knowledge’s role

Concern for the way knowledge is represented and organized in the memory

Analyzing learning tasks performance