Sunday, January 21, 2018

Instructional Designers in the 21st Century



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Instructional designers have been working on designing contents for some years to now although the profession is not defined that much popular in different areas of the world.
There may be a popular perception that Instructional designers work with online learning alone either teaching online or designing contents for online learning. In real situation, people should be aware that Instructional designers deal with instruction. They design the learning content for universal audience i.e. both face to face classrooms and online ones. They work according to the learning theories and cognitive principles to ensure that the learning goal is reached as planned. From that Introduction, I believe that people will be somehow aware of instructional design and instructional designers on how important is the profession.
In the 21st century, Instructional designers have been running with technology to ensure that the content is designed in proper manner in terms of learning styles, learning theories and cognitive load. For example, in my early learning history, I just learned because I was supposed to learn and for concepts that looked to be difficult to get captured, I used to repeat and repeat in writing until it gets into my head. I did not have any idea related to information processing theory and how brain works in retaining new information. It is the task of instructional designers now to deal with the problem like what I experienced personally. As early years termed important for learning but children often make cognitive gains in very complex environments but such cognitive gains have a habit of diminishing over time.
The Instructional designers need to understand how the brain works in order to design the content that hits the objectives for the target audience. As Every designer aims at delivering the content that will enforce the information to the learners in a long-term memory, they may be advised to use underlined meanings, image visuals, animations etc. Through the researches made, Instructional designers will be better at connecting the materials with the information processing theory.

References
Ormrod, J., Schunk, D., & Gredler, M. (2009). Learning theories and instruction (Laureate custom edition). New York, NY: Pearson.

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