Instructional Material Approach

Instructional materials are the content or information conveyed within a course. These include the
lectures, readings, textbooks, multimedia components, and other resources in a course. These
materials can be used in both face-to-face and online classrooms; however, some must be modified
or redesigned to be effective for the online environment. The best instructional materials are aligned
with all other elements in the course, including the learning objectives, assessments, and activities.

Why Is It Important?
Instructional materials provide the core information that students will experience, learn, and apply
during a course. They hold the power to either engage or demotivate students. This is especially true
for online courses, which rely on a thoughtful and complete collection of instructional materials that
students will access, explore, absorb, and reference as they proceed in a course.
Therefore, such materials must be carefully planned, selected, organized, refined, and used in a
course for the maximum effect. The planning and selection of instructional materials should take into
consideration both the breadth and depth of content so that student learning is optimized.

How to Put Into Practice?

Consider these questions as you select instructional materials for your course:
 Is the scope and coverage appropriate?
 What will learners read/explore?
 What will learners view/hear?
 What could learners experience/create?
 Will you find or create this material?
 Do materials and media support and align with the stated learning objectives?
 Is there sufficient interactivity and engagement?

Instructors and/or instructional designers should cast a wide net and aim for a variety of materials to
include in their course. At the same time, they should be deliberate with these choices so that the
course has the appropriate combination of instructional materials. Below are just a few categories of
instructional content to include in an online course.

6 Steps for Better Instructional Design

Staying on top of rapidly changing business and technical environments is a challenge. To accomplish this,
education or training in some form is necessary in every field, very often and usually on very short notice. Creating
instructional materials under these circumstances can be a daunting task, to say the least, but it is possible to do so by
applying some basic instructional design principles.

1. Begin At The End

Begin by pinpointing, as precisely as possible, what it is that the learner will know and be able to do when the
instruction is completed. This is often the hardest part in the instructional design cycle, but is the foundation upon
which the rest of the process is dependent. Avoid ‘soft goals’ that are imprecise and include vague verbs such as
‘will understand’. Classify your instructional objectives according to the three learning domains – cognitive,
affective and psychomotor and try to create goals for demonstrable skills and behaviors.

2. Know Your Audience

This principle is just as important in instructional design as it is in public speaking. Especially in a distributed
learning situation, you may not have as much information about your learners as you would like, but you should be
able to ascertain some essential facts such as approximate literacy levels, prior knowledge of the instructional
content, level of comfort with the instructional technology and degrees of motivation.

3. Develop a Game Plan

Develop instructional strategies based on your analysis of both the learners and the course content. This can be a
fairly lengthy step in the process because it is so open-ended and diverse. Very different strategies would be used to
teach a psychomotor skill such as golf, for instance, as opposed to the affective behaviors that might be required to
train customer service representatives.
4. Find or Create the Instructional Materials
The strategies you identified in the previous step will guide the process of finding or creating your instructional
materials. You may find that course content already exists that would work with just a little tweaking. Or you may
need to start from scratch. Sometimes it is necessary to reinvent the wheel if the existing wheel does not do what is
needed.

At this point you should revisit your learner analysis and consider what types of materials would be most effective.
Computer-based lessons that would work in an office setting might be less useful on a noisy factory floor. Above all
else, do not construct a barrier to learning by choosing the wrong format. Do not expect low-literacy populations to
plod through pages of written material.

5. Evaluate Your Learners

Assessing learning in the artificial environment of an instructional space can be tricky. Unless the instruction covers
procedural knowledge only, you may not be able to create a highly accurate assessment tool. Unless the group is
small or the budget unlimited, demonstrations of learned skills are probably not feasible. Written tests can be made
more accurate by including several types of assessment instruments: multiple choice, short answer, matching,
ordering and problem solving. These types of questions can be answered to elicit and evaluate how much has been
learned.

6. Evaluate Your Instruction

Once the instructional material has been used the first time, look at it as objectively as possible. What worked, and
what did not? Ask about all aspects of the instruction – the mode of delivery and the setting of the instruction as well
as the content. Ask your learners for feedback and keep the questions as open-ended as possible. Feedback forms
that rely on ‘yes’ and ‘no’ responses are worth very little. Following up on performance after the instruction will
produce valuable information, but takes time. Surveys that measure the learner’s perception of the value of the
instruction can be given at set periods after the instruction. Learning is an ongoing process and sometimes the value
of the instruction is not immediately apparent.

For any problem that man has ever encountered, at least part of the solution involves education or training in some
form. Fortunately there are tremendous resources available for this important task. Instructing is a privilege and a
responsibility, and critical to the continued survival of the human race. H.G. Wells (1866 – 1946) put it very well
indeed when he said “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe”.
Designing Instructional Materials

A summary from Rothwell and Kazanas (1999), Ch. 12 / for your directed study

Given that you know what the training gaps are, what tasks need to be trained, what the work and learner
characteristics are, you have a clear idea of the training content and sequence, and you have clearly written training
objectives, you have chosen an instructional strategy. Now all you need is to select or create the instructional materials.

The Seven Steps to Designing Instructional Materials

1. Prepare a working outline (a syllabus)

It is based on the instructional strategy

It is based on measurable, sequenced performance objectives

It should be based on the instructional events .. here’s “cheat sheet” for the standard instructional event culminating
from your clever instructional strategy, using the Old Ways of Gagne & Briggs (pre constructivist design philosophy):

1. Gain the learner’s attention

2. Inform the learner of the performance objective
3. Stimulate recall of prerequisite learning
4. Present stimulus material (is this behaviorist enough for y’all ;-)
5. Provide learning guidance (in any modality) so learners begin target achievements.
6. Elicit desired performance
7. Provide positive feedback to the learners so they know how well they are obtaining the performance objectives
8. Assess learner achievement (and revisit the instructional design)
9. Enhance retention and transfer so that learners will remember what they learned. (Gagne, Briggs & Wager,
1992).

2. Conduct Research
Identify the materials that are inside the organization and outside it.

Identify if you need funding to develop the materials. Sometimes you need to sub contract graphics, video, or
educational materials productions. This is particularly the case in distributed learning / training environments.

Identify knowledgeable people as to what they are familiar with as learning materials – and see if they are open to
innovations if you require them (example: role play at a remote site via interactive television instead of role play in a
classroom).

Consider that companies believe today that they can cut their training travel costs by 70% if they use distributed training
systems and learning content management systems.

Ask the knowledgeable people 3 questions:

 1. Have you ever seen any procedure manuals, checklists, descriptive booklets or training manuals on this subject?
2. Whom do you know in the organization who is especially knowledgeable about this subject?
3. What department might have needed, in the past, to do special training on the subject?

3. Examining Existing Instructional Materials

Check out your CBT notes to evaluate computer based training materials and designs (yes you will need to evaluate
them to see if they could fit your instructional strategy… not every training program is built from the ground up, you can
use existing materials or “chunks” if they fit your strategy – this saves the client a lot of investment (potentially).
Materials that depend on delivery technologies of the day, remember, are very expensive because the technologies get
outdated quickly.

Expect to make minor revisions

4. Arranging or Modifying Existing Materials

1. Secure copyright
2. Arrange materials for exactly this new training setting

5. Preparing Tailor-Made Instructional Materials

Traditional Components of an ID package

1. Learner guide sheets or directions

2. Instructional materials (books, software)
3. Tests (pretests, post tests, progress tests, on the job performance tests)
4. Instructor directions or guide sheets

Formatting ID Materials

Storyboarding helps you figure out a multimode program and sequence .. (all media and personnel are sketched out).

Formatting Modules, guide sheets or web page design is critical for proper independent learning / training materials.
Refer to your EDER 677, 673, 679 classes.

Student manuals (online is good, but remember students do not like to have to download them.. and reading online is
not some learners’ favorite mode).

Instructor Materials: need to be clear and efficient, always referencing design considerations (goals, sequence,
evaluation…. Pacing). Lessons are the best way to assure that the instruction can occur on design (but this takes a
special instructor to use them in a training session ).

Trainer Guides are very effective for group-oriented training. See page 251 for an excellent training guide outline.

Tests should be chosen as you chose the instructional strategy – to match the learning events and outcomes. Use
performance tests for performance or skill training evaluation, use other tests for cognitive knowledge acquisition
testing. Remember that formative tests and practice are essential to a good design – summative tests only give people
an exit grade, doing little to enhance their mastery.

5. Selecting or Preparing Learner Activities

2 types of activates exist: Individual or Group.

Almost any type of experience can be transformed into an individual learning activity, if:

1. outcomes are specified in advance

2. outcomes can be compared to pre-established performance objectives
3. the experience meets learner and instructor needs

To do this, decide how much instructor involvement is needed – and prepare scaffolding materials too.

A learning contract can work well for self-directed learners (Knowles, 1986). The key parts the contract specifies are:

1. the knowledge, skills, attitudes and values to be acquired

2. how these objectives are to be accomplished (your learning resources, strategies and modes are known to the
student)
3. the target date (s) for the learner accomplishment
4. specifically, what performance evidence will be offered to demonstrate that the objectives have been achieved?
5. tell the student how this evidence will be judged or evaluated

Group Activities

Panel discussions (experts) can be a great addition to performance-based training – (high) competencies and exemplars
“meet the learners”.

Case studies work well as simulations of real world problem solving, and cases can isolate specific learning constructs.