Instructional design is the process by which learning materials such as online courses, e-books, interactive videos, simulations, virtual reality training, etc., are designed, developed, and delivered to the learner. The entire process takes place systematically, helping the learner to gain and apply new learnings and, thereby achieve their learning goals. To know more about the eLearning technologies, visit our website: https://bit.ly/3feWuhB
2. How do you ensure that the designed course is effective?
How do you ensure that the course will meet the learning
goals?
How do you ensure that the course includes all the components
for a successful learning experience?
How do you ensure that the course is engaging enough to keep
the interest of the learners alive?
These and many such questions can be answered by including
instructional design in your eLearning development process.
Introduction
3. eLearning is a combination of technology and education or
training. Instructional design bridges the two, keeping learning
at the center while designing and developing an eLearning
course.
A very large number of people around the world are now taking
eLearning courses in both, formal and informal ways. This
further stresses the need for instructional design to make
eLearning more effective.
• Let us understand how instructional design helps to make a
good or more effective eLearning program.
What is eLearning?
4. How can Instructional
Design Help?
Helps in planning
• Instructional design ensures that the learning material is planned
systematically
Helps to understand learners
• All learners cannot be grouped with common backgrounds or needs.
Each learner has specific characteristics and prior knowledge. To
identify a common aspect that connects all of them a needs
assessment is conducted.
• A needs assessment is an integral part of the instructional design
process that is conducted before planning the course. It helps to
know what needs to be accomplished by the learners to reach the
goals. It guides the overall design process and approach of the
course.
5. Helps to improve learner engagement
• Course developers create learning designs that meet the
learners' needs. Relevant, engaging, and appealing learning
activities are developed accordingly to keep the learners
engaged.
Helps distinguish ‘need to know’ from ‘nice to know’
• An important step in the instructional design process is
identifying the need-to-know information and nice-to-know
information. The primary focus remains on task-based
information that helps to improve the learner’s
performance.
How can Instructional
Design Help?
6. Helps to evaluate learners
• Evaluation is necessary as it is the most reliable tool to know
whether the learning goals have been met or not. Self-
evaluation, formative evaluation, summative evaluation,
confirmative evaluation – all provide immediate feedback
and tell if the learners have attained the desired knowledge.
Helps boost learner retention
• Instructional design allows learners to not only acquire new knowledge
but also retain it by integrating various visual elements into the course.
Instructional design helps to align the content with the learner’s needs.
Chunking information, and including only the ‘need to know’ content
prevents cognitive overload.
Helps to choose goal-based learning methods
• In instructional design, the course is designed by focussing
on the outcome, that is, what the learner must
accomplish after taking the course. A logical structure is
built by identifying the concepts to be learned and the
sequence in which they must be presented.
How can Instructional
Design Help?
7. • Instruction design focuses on the learner’s experience.
• Instruction design maintains consistency between
several courses that may be developed by different
teams working on eLearning.
• Instruction design covers all the stages of good
development, thereby ensuring the quality of the
course is maintained throughout.
• Instruction design helps to speed up development
time, thus saving time.
• Instruction design can make the best use of available
learning technologies.
Other Benefits