Books to read in ID

The role of the Instructional Designer

In chapter 13 of "Designing effective instruction", the role of designers in ID is explained by Morrison, Ross & Kemp (2004) . It clarified some of my concerns and helped me clear some of my confusion on the role of an instructional designer that I could be playing in CSULA eLPS. This chapter further explained how to work with subject matter experts (SME), how to effectively determine the time frame, nature of delivery and resources available during an ID process. With this established, the instructional designer could roughly assess his role in the entire process. It further elaborated on how it would vary in business environment, higher education and developing training for a third party. It also explained how to approach certain situations while working with different support personnel like graphic artists, media production specialists, scriptwriters and so on. I would recommend this chapter to my EDIT 580 group.

Morrison, GR, Ross, SM, & Kemp, JE (2004). Designing effective instruction (4th ed.). New York: John Wiley and Sons

Principles of Instructional Design by Robert Gagné, L.J. Briggs and W.W. Wager. 4th ed.

From this book, I have some understanding of Gagné's work in Instructional design.

As an instructional psychologist, Gagne's work has contributed greatly the field of instructional technology especially regarding the design of instruction. According to Gagné, the following steps should be clearly thought out when designing instruction. In his writings, he mentioned that there are five categories of learning. Such categories can be formed because each leads to a different class of human performance and each requires a different set of instructional conditions for effective learning (Gagné,1974).

The categories are:

1. Intellectual skills. These skills are the capabilities that make the human individual competent. They enable him to respond to conceptualizations of his environment.
2. Cognitive strategies. These skills are the ones that govern the individual capability to learn, think and remember.
3. Verbal information. Stored in our memory to recall when needed, such as names of months, days of week, letters, numeral.
4. Motor skills. The capability to learn: to ride a bike, drive a car, write, draw a straight line.
5. Attitudes. All of us possess attitudes of many sorts towards different things, persons and situations. These attitudes may affect our position toward those things.
These categories of learned capabilities are distinctive categories that also require different arrangements of conditions in order for the learning of each to occur.

Within these various types of learning there must be nine general instructional events:

1. Gaining attention. To ensure reception of coming instruction we give the learner a stimulus.
2. Tell the learners the learning objective. Tell the learner what they will be able to do because of the instruction.
3. Stimulating recall of prior learning. Ask for recall of existing relevant knowledge.
4. Presenting the stimulus. Display the content.
5. Providing learning guidance.
6. Eliciting performance. Ask the learner to respond, demonstrating learning
7. Providing feedback. Give informative feedback on the learner's performance.
8. Assessing performance. Require more learner performance, and give feedback, to reinforce learning.
9. Enhancing retention and transfer to other contexts. Provide varied practice to generalize the capability

In his book, he also identifies to look for specific results in learning:

1. Identify the types of learning outcomes
2. Each outcome may have prerequisite knowledge or skills that must be identified.
3. Identify the internal conditions or processes the learner must have to achieve the outcomes.
4. Identify the external conditions or instruction needed to achieve the outcomes.
5. Specify the learning context.
6. Record the characteristics of the learners.
7. Select the media for instruction.
8. Plan to motive the learners.
9. The instruction is tested with learners in the form of formative evaluation.
10. After the instruction has been used, summative evaluation is used the judge the effectiveness of the instruction.

This book helped me in understanding instructional technology and design from Gagné perspective and research.

Still reading:

Here are some of the books that are important for Instructional Design and Technology and I am reading them now. I will be reviewing some parts of the Instructional design with these books and in the near future, I will be posting commentaries on the ID process in regards to my current EDIT 580 internship:

-Instructional Design Theories and Models: An Overview of Their Current Status by Charles M. Reigeluth (Editor)
-The Systematic Design of Instruction by W. Dick and L. Carey 6th ed.