Designing the Instruction

After you have a complete understanding of what you want to teach, by following a good analysis process, you are ready to design the instruction. This is different from actually writing the materials. Before you can do that you need to have a plan for how it is all going to work together. Deciding on your instructional strategies is a big part of that plan.

Instructional strategies are the techniques, methods, sequences, media, and other means that we have of teaching things to students. In this step in the ISD process, we take some time to design the instruction before we develop it. That is, we specify how we will teach before we actually write the teaching materials to do so. Think of it as being similar to an architect who draws blueprints for a building before a contractor actually does the work.

We won't draw a literal blueprint, of course, but we will specify the media of instruction, the sequence of the instruction, and the strategies and tactics used in teaching each part of it. In this course we use a couple of systems for helping us thing about these issues.