Course Summary

The purpose of this course is to introduce you to basic learning and design theories that contribute to the development of more effective instruction. In the most basic terms, learning theories DESCRIBE how we learn and Instructional design theories PRESCRIBE instructional interventions that facilitate the learning process. As practitioners, we want prescriptions that will suggest solutions to instructional problems. Therefore, the goal of this course is informed application; that is, we study these topics to facilitate the process of deriving prescriptions for instructional practices.

One of the difficulties in an introductory-level course concerns the number of topics that must be covered. Students may come away with fragmented knowledge of a number of topics and little depth of understanding. To counteract this problem, you will build your own models of these theories representing your understanding of what they are, how they relate to each other, and how the instructional designer applies these theories into practice. This model is referred to as a knowledge base (KB).