Suggested Readings

You may want to read Chapter 1, Introduction to Instructional Design, from Dick and Carey's book, The Systematic Design of Instruction.

Introduction

There are three main stages in creating a multimedia product:

  1. Planning

  2. Development

  3. Evaluation

Planning involves using instructional design strategies to determine your instructional goal and objectives, analyze your learners, and develop strategies for implementing your instruction. The planning stage generally refers to everything that is done leading up to the actual creation of the instructional materials. Once you start creating materials you are in the "development" stage.

Development is where you actually create your instructional materials. The information generated during the planning stage should guide the development process.

Evaluation involves testing out your instructional materials and developing a plan for revising them.

The first part of this course involves the Planning stage. When working on an instructional multimedia project, the planning process is similar to the planning process involved in any instructional design project; you still need to produce detailed design documents to guide the development process. The instructional designer creates functional specifications for the product. These documents specify how the end product should function, and how the users should interact with the product. The specifications include all the factors that are relevant to what is being designed. These design documents then become the basis for the development stage. In many cases, the instructional designer is not even involved in the actual creation of the end product; he or she hands the design documents over to a team of creative folks who then develop the instruction according to the designer's specifications. What this means is that the design documents need to be very detailed and comprehensive. Because of this we will present a review of the instructional design process you may have been exposed to in an earlier course. The difference is that this time you will be applying the process in the creation of a multimedia project. In addition, you will have to actually develop the program and test it out.

When you are finished with the Planning stage of the course, you will have a design document that contains all of the information necessary to develop an effective multimedia project. Your design document will contain the following information:

  1. Description of your instructional need
  2. Goal statement
  3. Instructional Analysis flowchart
  4. Description of the learners.
  5. Description of the learning and performance contexts
  6. A list of instructional objectives
  7. A list of assessment items
  8. An instructional strategy
  9. Storyboards for your multimedia program

Because this will not be your first exposure to the instructional design process, the process should not be as involved. You won't be learning about instructional design at the same time you are trying to learn multimedia, but instead will be applying the skills you learned in ID in a multimedia setting. In addition, in the Instructional Design course we had you document all of your steps as you progressed through the design process so that we could monitor your progress. In this course we are more interested in the results as opposed to the process, so the final document will be much shorter.

Subsequent lessons will provide you with the information needed to create each part of your design document. First, however, let's start with a brief overview of the instructional design process.

Instructional Design Models

Instructional design models are designed to provide a framework for you to follow when going through the process of designing and developing instruction. There are many different models out there, each of which takes a slightly different approach to the design of instruction. More importantly, each of them incorporates certain theories and principles that have been culled from the research that has been done in our field over the years. The basic instructional design model has come to be known as the ADDIE model. This stands for:

  1. Analysis
  2. Design
  3. Development
  4. Implementation
  5. Evaluation

Dick and Carey (1986) refined this basic model and came up with what is currently one of the most well-known models of instructional design. Their model is represented by the following graphic:

Within the stages of Planning, Development, and Evaluation, the first six boxes would comprise the Planning stage. These are:

  1. Assess Needs to identify Goals
  2. Conduct Instructional Analysis
  3. Analyze Learners and Contexts
  4. Write Performance Objectives
  5. Develop Assessment Instruments
  6. Develop Instructional Strategy

The Dick and Carey model, and others like it, are often referred to as systematic models. They view the instructional process as a system in which all the components are crucial. And in this system the desired goal can best be achieved when all of the components are taken into account during the design process. Each individual component's unique contribution must be taken into account. Consequently, the Dick and Carey model was developed to address each of the components of the learning system: instructors, learners, materials, and the remainder of the environment. The Dick and Carey model is also systematic in that all of the steps in the process are interrelated. Each step receives some input from preceding steps and provides some output for the succeeding steps. The components must work together to achieve the desired goal of producing effective instruction. If one element of this system is changed then the entire system changes.

We'll now take a look at each of the required components of your multimedia design document, beginning with the Needs Assessment and Goal Statement.