Chapter 9 Developing Instructional Materials Summary

The hallmark of individualized instruction is that many of the instruction events typically carried out by the instructor with a group of students are now presented to the individual student through instructional materials. The authors recommend that you produce self-instructional materials in your first attempt at instructional design, that is, the materials should permit the student to learn the new information and skills without any intervention from an instructor or fellow students.

          Translating your analysis and design opens opportunities to be creative with the instruction. Simply translating your analysis and strategies into prose can yield rather dry and boring instruction. As a teacher and instructional designer, you need to consider ways to add interesting and motivating approaches to the instruction. For example, consider the various introductions to the units used in this course. We have used a variety of styles and approaches to make the units interesting and appealing to the students. Making good instruction is part science and part art, the trick is finding the right mix to challenge and engage your students. As we mentioned, developing new materials "from scratch" is not a matter to be taken lightly. It is time-consuming, may involve the efforts of an entire team, and must be undertaken carefully and systematically. That said, however, developing instructional materials may be highly satisfying to you and your team, and the resulting programs or products serve as tangible evidence of your own skills and knowledge.

There is something exhilarating about seeing users interact with your own multimedia instruction, or get feedback from learners in a course you developed. The type of material you determine needs to be created will often times be determined by how you want the learner to encode the skills or knowledge. Is it something they need to embed in long-term memory? If so, then you'll need to create instructional materials. But sometimes it's more convenient, or more important, to give the learners aids to use to complete specific actions. In this case, the information doesn't need to be encoded deeply in long-term memory, but can be accessed from an external object, processed in short-term memory, and acted upon.  All this gratification assumes you have developed a successful educational or instructional program or product. Seldom will instructional designer be responsible for media production, but knowing the processes helps when communicating with media production specialists.

Each type of product, whether multimedia, print, video, or online, have major production processes and a group of specialized production people who carry them out. Each of the different forms of media demand both careful review of the preproduction documents, and careful evaluation during the production phase. Many instructional projects will incorporate some combination of instructor-led, multimedia, print, video, and/or online components. Practice working on them while in graduate school will better prepare you for job opportunities beyond the university. Although the creation of instructional materials will be time intensive, it will eventually come to an end. But that's not when the work of an instructional designer ends. Next you'll need to determine how the product will be implemented, and eventually evaluated.