Reflecting on Instructional Design

As part of a wrap-up assignment for my ED 601 course on Instructional Technology, I was asked to reflect on the following questions:

• How would you explain good instructional design to others?
• What is something that you learned that you didn’t know before?
• What is at least one thing you will change in your own design for future training sessions?
• Provide a brief overview of the training you developed for this course (what it is, who it was designed for, highlight components of good instructional design you chose to use, etc.) and provide a link to the site where you hosted all of your information (presentation, handout, etc.).

Good Instructional Design

Brown and Green (2024) describe good instructional design as a reflective process that considers more than the information being presented in a lesson; it also gives equal importance to the learners, the organization of the information, and the presentation of the information. Each of the teachers in my building has different strengths and weaknesses. I have to adjust each training session I offer to tap into those strengths and address those areas of weakness. I also have to organize the information in a way that facilitates processing the information in the allotted training time I have with them each week. Finally, I have to consider that some of the teachers I train are more visual learners while others want to follow written instructions.

Something I Did Not Know Before

Considering the limitations on how the brain can process information and how that ties into how information is presented to learners is something that I had not considered before this course. Specifically, I am thinking of Mayer’s Principles for Multimedia Instruction. One of the principles discusses not adding on-screen text to narrated animation because this requires two different processing channels in the brain (Digital Learning Institute, 2024). This extra effort to process both inputs at the same time can limit how the brain processes the information and connects it to existing schemata. This has become an important consideration as I have been tasked with creating more training materials for my teachers.

One Change

One thing I do not do enough is provide my teachers the opportunity to give me feedback specific to the goals and objectives of each training I do with them. I plan on incorporating more of this into my training this school year. Given that most of my trainings deal with technology, I can assess a teacher’s skill level based on whether they can use an app or piece of technology effectively. Brown and Green (2024) discuss three types of evaluation: learner, formative, and summative. I already incorporate the learner and formative assessments as part of the training I do. It is the summative piece that I would like to focus on more. This type of assessment could provide valuable information that I can relay back to the central office regarding district-mandated programs or technology initiatives and how they are being utilized in the classroom.

My Instructional Design Project

My instructional design focused on training my teachers on the basics of using Chromebooks and how to perform basic troubleshooting. As my district moves to a one-to-one technology environment this school year, all students will now be issued a school Chromebook. Each of the teachers in my are issued a laptop and a Chromebook. Most of the teachers are more comfortable with a laptop and very rarely, if ever, utilize their Chromebooks. Teachers will need to be more comfortable using Chromebooks and troubleshooting common issues to help students.

To fine-tune the training, I incorporated a formative, pre-assessment component to take a temperature check on what each teacher is comfortable doing on the Chromebook. This information will be considered before the training is implemented with my teachers. Understanding the learner’s abilities is a crucial component of instructional design; it informs where I will start with my training and which topics I can simply review and which I need to spend a little more time on during the training.

I also considered how the information will be presented in the training. I incorporated both text and video instructions. In order to minimize the amount of information displayed on a single page, I included links to the videos I created that illustrated the skills outlined in the text on the screen. Teachers have a choice if they want to access and view the videos walking them through the skills. They decide how they want to interact with the information. Initially, I was going to include a GIF of each skill on the same slide as the instructions. I reconsidered this because I felt like it would be too overwhelming. While I still wanted to use the GIF, I ultimately decided it would be better to scrap the GIFs and instead make MP4s of each skill. This way, the learner can pause the video rather than having to wait for the GIF to repeat to see a step again.

Link to Instructional Design Project and Resources

Here is the Google Drive file housing all of the components of the training session I plan to implement with my teachers this September.

References

Brown, A. H., & Green, T. D. (2024). Essentials of instructional design: Connecting fundamental principles with process and practice (5th ed.). Routledge. 

Digital Learning Institute. (2024). Mayer’s 12 principles of multimedia learning. Retrieved July 22, 2024, from https://www.digitallearninginstitute.com/blog/mayers-principles-multimedia-learning