Instructional Design Theories and Models

I find these two week's reading materials well sequenced and progressive, helping me better figure out what to expect about and what responsibility I ought to take in the term of being an instructional designer via specific academic background and helpful design models.

Getting familiar with the major branches of learning theories, we could better understand our end users' necessities and how they may utilize instructional technologies. Then with instructional design theories and models, we would truly be prepared both theoretically and methodologically to carry out our job. Reigeluth (1999) at first illustrated what is and what is not instructional design theory. I noticed that such theory has these features: design oriented rather than description oriented; identifying methods of instruction and situations to be properly applied; consisting of more detailed component methods and being probabilistic rather than deterministic. The author explained the differences between design theories and descriptive theories, of which the instructional design theory and learning theory serve as good examples. Differentiated as “the natural theories” and “the theories of artificial”, descriptive theory attempt to provide a deeper understanding of effects that result from the phenomena, while it is design theory that offers direct guidance to practitioners. That said, the author did not intend to rank the theories, but pointing out that descriptive theories are of great use and its research methodology can be borrowed when applying design theories. Then it seems the destiny for us to be equipped with both theories to do better in our career.

 Reigeluth (1999) also mentioned the change of instructional paradigm and told the discomforting truth about how education was designed for sorting rather than teaching, resulting in the classification of people. Therefore, a new instructional paradigm with the focus on customizations is on demand. We can see advanced educational technologies have facilitated customization to a great extent, while clearly there's even more for us to realize.

Chapter 3-5 offer useful models for us to follow and further illustrate what makes a certain model feasible and reliable at present. 

References：Reigeluth 1999

[IDT] Chapters 3,4,5