Designing Instructional Design: Emerging Issues

Abstract

Instructional designers are expected to be familiar with the epistemological underpinnings of several theories and their consequences on the process of instruction. Constructivism is the dominant theory of the last decade and supports construction of knowledge by the individual. This paper discusses the basic principles, the major goal of any instructional model is to point up how to plan, develop, implement, evaluate, and organize full learning activities effectively so that it will ensure competent performance by students. underlying constructivism.  Application of these principles on the process - analysis, development, evaluation - of instructional design poses certain challenges concerning issues such as pre-specification of knowledge, authentic evaluation and learner control. Most of the problems are attributed to the fact that constructivism is a learning theory and not an instructional-design theory. Therefore, instructional designers must attempt to translate constructivism into instructional design through a more pragmatic approach that focuses on the principles of moderate - rather than extreme - constructivism and makes use of emergent technology tools.

Keywords : Instructional design, Constructivism,  Active learning, input, process, output,  feedback, learning