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.