Teachology Spring 2014 Edition | Page 6

Spring 2014 Edition INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN By Jason Frank Instructional Designer What is Instructional Design? “In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design.” - Steve Jobs As teachers we often feel pulled in two directions. On the one hand, we feel the responsibility of covering a great deal of material in a fairly limited amount of time. On the other hand, we also feel the pressure to engage our students with exciting handson activities. It’s easy to forget that our job as teachers isn’t to cover material (that’s what the Internet’s for), nor is our job to turn our classrooms into engines of perpetual motion (we have Zumba for that). Our job is to foster learning. Deciding what tools to use and when to use them is at the heart of instructional design. Instead of starting with a text-book or a series of activities, a designer begins with the desired outcome (What needs to be learned?). Then a designer determines acceptable evidence or proof of learning (How do we know that what needs to be learned was actually learned?). Once we have answered these two questions we can begin the task of planning how learning will take place. We can draw on the tools we already have, or we may need to seek out new ways of doing things from our mentors or our peers. To be an effective instructional designer we need to have a clear sense of our goals for student learning and how we can help students achieve those goals with all the resources at our disposal and maybe a few that we don’t have yet.