1. INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN ESSENTIALS – WEEK 1 LECTURE
Welcome! We are so excited to have you in the Instructional Design Essentials ALA ecourse,
this should (hopefully) be an engaging and fast-paced month. Move at your own pace, whatever
that may be. As long as you complete all the work by the final date of the course, your
instructors are happy to be flexible to accommodate varying schedules. This course was
designed to help you develop an instruction session, course, module, learning object (you name
it) as you go, so taking this ecourse should help boost your productivity instead of being a
roadblock. Let’s get started!
So if you signed up for this course, you have at least some idea of what instructional
design (ID) is, or that it’s beneficial to library instruction. Essentially, instructional design aligns
learning outcomes, assessment, and content/sequencing to provide a more seamless and
effective learning experience for your students. Likewise, with all of these factors linked, you are
better poised for assessing learning and evaluating your own teaching. Instructional design
often includes other areas of research that benefit teaching, such as learning sciences and
educational psychology, as well as appropriate use of technology.
We will be using the principle of “backwards design” (BD) in this course to focus your
practice. BD literally means what it implies, that you design your instruction backwards, starting
with goals and outcomes, then assessments, and then content and sequencing. When teachers
start designing lessons based on “engaging” activities or content-driven activities, the ability to
focus and ensure students are learning with an end goal and transferable skills in mind can get
lost. For example, let’s say Jessa the instruction librarian is about to teach freshmen about
doing library research. She’s trapped in a seemingly neverending one-shot model and needs to
come up with something quickly for her session next week. Although the first approach might be
to work with faculty to develop programmatic instruction (a topic beyond the scope of this
ecourse), Jessa just needs to put something together at this point for this purpose. She’s very
comfortable with having students do a scavenger hunt around the library and thinks it’s
engaging and fun because they are moving around, and then after that activity, she
demonstrates a number of databases and sends them on their way, class assignment attached
or not. But if Jessa relies so heavily on *her* strengths and what makes *her* feel comfortable,
is that really being learner-centered? And just because the students are being “active” and
“engaged,” does that necessarily mean they’ve learned anything? On top of that, with this type
of design (driven by content/activities), what is the ultimate goal? What is the WHY? By starting
design with goals, students see more transparency and have a better understanding of what
and how to accomplish what they are supposed to learn. There is a bigger purpose attached
that can help improve motivation and learning.
Speaking of being learner-centered, most ID models start off with completing some form
of needs assessment. To be able to design instruction best suited for your learners, you need
to understand where they’re coming from, their needs, and their background. Likewise,
understanding environmental factors and the overall picture behind the instruction will color your
PAGOWSKY
&
DEFRAIN
–
INSTRUCTIONAL
DESIGN
ESSENTIALS
1

2. design as well. You’ll be reading Fink’s Self-Directed Guide to get started thinking about this.
Fink’s model is great because he guides you through the ID process in a holistic way, while
considering affective outcomes and needs of your learners. If you’re not familiar with affective
learning outcomes, it’s basically feelings. This can tie in directly to something like library
anxiety or confidence levels in other subject areas. Affective outcomes can also tie into critical
pedagogy.
Because this is a short course, we have made the critical pedagogy components
optional. It’s hard to start thinking about this approach to instruction and learning if you don’t first
have the foundation for ID. For those of you not-so-new to ID, we present the critical pedagogy
components as scaffolding so you can engage in more challenging thinking about instruction,
but we invite all to participate if you are interested and find you have enough time to complete
these readings and activities. We will have a variety of activities including writing blog posts,
engaging in Twitter chats, and reflection prompts. To introduce critical pedagogy before you
start reading more in depth about it, a brief definition is:
The significance related to library instruction is in realizing that we are not neutral participants in
education, so how we teach either reinforces existing power structures or can bring our learners
into Freire's notion of “critical consciousness.” You can and should form your own opinion and
definitions of critical pedagogy for library instruction as you engage in the readings and
activities.
We then set you forth to begin this week’s work and look forward to engaging with you in
discussions and feedback.
2
PAGOWSKY
&
DEFRAIN
–
INSTRUCTIONAL
DESIGN
ESSENTIALS