Every freshly made course or lesson is unique. It carries the fingerprint of its designer’s design decision-making. The last convolutions in the print come from decisions made as you test-and-revise (activity 4.3) a thought-up, worked-out design. The test is made…
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In the beginning, every designer makes a lot of mistakes. You never stop making them, in fact but they grow less in number as your experiences grows. Most are made in working out the design – in giving the abstract…
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Learners can like being told what to do. ‘Think aloud’, Draw a diagram’, ‘Talk to yourself about….. ‘Label this picture’, ‘Explain this to….. ‘Match the items in List A with those in list B’, ‘Conjure up a mental picture of….’Explain…
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Learners like to know where they are going. They need some navigational aid (verbal or visual) at the very start of the course or lesson which maps out, or hints at, the response route they are going to take. In…
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‘Nice’, ‘good’, ‘beautiful’, ‘exciting’, but remaining for ever gathering dust in its worked-out form on the designer’s shelf: this is sometimes the fate of a good design.
An S-R event in which the primary goal is `to instruct’ has a sharp, business-like sound to it. It has to deliver some pre-defined knowledge or skill. In contrast, an S-B, event which is an ‘encounter’ gives the learner plenty…
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How many times as a teacher or designer have you heard the complaint that the separate parts of a course ‘don’t seem to belong to each other’? You have probably had to respond to the complaint of non-integration in a…
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‘Tek frak’, ‘tooterm’, ‘non crit art’, ‘non crit info’, ‘transition’, ‘wow!’ and ‘speed up’ were some of the editing codes used in editing self-study texts in Basic Systems Inc, New York, in the ’60s.
This refers to any breakdown in the relationship between components in referent 2 (the nth generation of the specified needs).
If I were a millionaire, I would give away T-shirts with a special emblem; designers of instruction (myself included) would get four each. The emblem reminds us of a fundamental truth about ourselves and about our students. This truth has…
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