Instructional Design

You may have devoted countless hours to content development and eLearning course design, but all will be for naught if your learners will not be able to commit what they've learned to long term memory. In this article, you will find everything you need to know about the forgetting curve in eLearning, so that your learners will always come away with the knowledge and skill sets they need to achieve their goals.

The Action Learning Model was first introduced by Professor Reginald Revans in 1980, who was a noted physicist and the first known Industrial Management Professor.

Nobody seems to know what I do for living, most have never heard of the term Instructional Design in their lives before. Why is that?

As the field of eLearning continues to grow, so does the demand for instructional designers. If you look at job listings for many corporations, the listing specifies that they are seeking a qualified applicant who has an advanced degree. Is it necessary for someone to have a graduate degree in order to design quality training courses? It's certainly a matter of perspective with more than one opinion.

Instructional design is certainly not an easy business. Having been in the learning, training and development industry for more than 27 years, I can assertively say so. Instructional designers shoulder the important responsibility of sugar-coating the critical learning content in such a manner that training becomes not just a mandatory activity, but something that employees love. Now how do you do that? How can you possibly turn something boring into something that employees love? The answer to that is what differentiates a good instructional design from a poor one.

The Elaboration Theory was introduced by Charles Reigeluth, an American educational theorist in 1979. The Elaboration Theory supports that the content organization should be presented in increasing order of difficulty.

Leo Vygotsky, a Russian psychologist, introduced the Sociocultural Learning Theory. His quote that “through others we become ourselves” could be the quintessence of the Sociocultural Learning Theory, which supports that learning is a social process.

The Generative Learning Theory was introduced in 1974 by Merlin C. Wittrock an American educational psychologist. The Generative Learning Theory is based on the idea that learners can actively integrate new ideas into their memory to enhance their educational experience. In essence, it involves linking new with old ideas, in order to gain a better understanding of the instructed concepts.

The Dual Coding Theory was introduced by the Emeritus Professor of Psychology Allan Paivio in 1971.

The Keller Plan, which is often referred to as “The Personalized System of Instruction”, was developed in the middle sixties by Fred Keller, J. Gilmour Sherman, and a number of other researchers and educational theorists, and relies upon the Individualized Instruction Model.

The Subsumption Learning Theory was developed in 1963 by the American psychologist David Ausubel. The theory focuses on how individuals acquire and learn large chunks of information through visual means or text materials.

Problem-based Learning (PBL) was introduced by Howard Burrows, an American physician and medical educator, in the late ’60s within the framework of the medical program at McMaster University in Canada.