Rapid Instructional Design: Learning ID Fast and Right, 3rd Edition

Chapter 1

What Is This Instructional Design Stuff Anyway?

This chapter will help you to:

• Discover why you need instructional design
• Begin to see what instructional design is
• Consider the advantages and disadvantages of instructional design

............There is an old saying that if you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there. This is a fine philosophy if you are spending the summer between your junior and senior year “experiencing” Europe or if you have embarked on an Australian “walk-about,” but when you are developing training programs it leaves a lot to be desired.

One of the purposes of instructional design is to provide both an appropriate destination, and the right road to get you there, whenever you are responsible for creating a training program. Your destination is usually some form of learning that your trainees will accomplish, while the road is one of the many paths that instruction can follow to facilitate that learning.

Instructional design stripped to its basics is simply a process for helping you to create effective training in an efficient manner. It is a system, perhaps more accurately a number of systems, that help you ask the right questions, make the right decisions, and produce a product that is as useful and useable as your situation requires and allows.

Some people refer to instructional design as the “science” of instruction because it follows a set of theories and methods and is concerned with inputs and outputs. Other people see ...