Week 7: Part 2 Activity 2 - My Take-Aways on Designing Instruction

When I started this course, I felt knowledgeable in designing instruction. As part of my job as an instructional technologist, I design and create training guides, professional development sessions, and tutorials on a daily basis. My hope for entering this course was to grow in this area and not only find new ways of delivering instruction, but to also find ways to enhance instruction. Now that I have completed the course, I realize that there are so many different facets of designing good instructional sets.

First, a quick look at some of the major points that I learned over the past seven weeks. I learned that without teacher direction, written instructions can be interpreted in many different ways, leading to frustration on the student’s part. Instructions seem to be much better when a connection is made between the student and instructor with the use of audio and/or video. Students are driven to learn when they know that their instructor has put forth the extra effort to provide the tools needed for the students to learn. To create these multimedia instructions, there are some simple steps that make the process much smoother. When creating video instructions, it is important to make a script prior to recording so that your thoughts are planned out in advance and you do not skip over crucial pieces of information. Then as you create the mashup, it is easier to edit when short video clips are used and then spliced together. As you put together multimedia instructions, special attention must be paid to the fact that there is a fine line between adding elements that enhance the instructions and elements that cause distractions.  Although the creation of good multimedia instruction takes more time up front, it gives the instructor more time to facilitate learning and also provides the student with the ability to go back over the instructions when needed.

As I designed the projects for this course, I realized that there were some differences in creating multimedia instructions as opposed to single media instructions. First, I found that it takes much more time to create instruction when media such as audio and video are included. These types of media have to be recorded, edited, and then published or embedded in a way that the student can access the information. Although there is more time involved, I feel that using these types of media enhances instruction because it allows the instructor to add phrasing and tone which in turn adds a personal touch to the instruction. Finally, using audio and/or video in the design of the instruction allows on demand access of the instruction from any mobile or smart device.

Although there are some differences, there are also similarities between designing multimedia instructions and other forms of instruction. With any type of instruction, the designer must initially set clear goals for the instruction. These goals give purpose to the instruction set. Then, no matter how the instruction is delivered, the designer must also include some form of assessment to measure mastery of these goals. And just like any other type of instruction, multimedia does not replace the teacher. The teacher is still needed to guide students and be a source to direct student’s to finding answers to their own questions.