The Four Pillars of Instructional Design

The Four pillars of designing an instructional online distributed course.

Many of us believe in the view that technology by itself does not improve teaching and learning, but well structured and pedagogically sounded practices and approaches do. Using the right blend of technology tools to create an effective learning setting that caters for all the learners is the key to successful course. The content of the course which I am trying to setup is about teaching contents using the “virtual” classroom environment. How the whole learning and teaching styles have been altered to cater for this new emerging environment. My vision for this ideal and to be successful course is to create one that has great interactions between the following pillars: contents, teachers, students and the online course interface (if it is online). Learning is a social activity as well as individual activity. Therefore interactions and collaboration suppose to be an important component of an online course (Harasim, 1995). Brown (1989) emphasized that learning does not happen in a vacuum, but within a culture and setting of a particular discipline. Using the right mixture of emerging technology tools can help tremendously in creating relationship and great interactions between all four pillars. As the contents of the course are for teachers and students, different media types will be used to deliver the course. I am a big believer of using different media to suit the particular situation. Somehow I tend to disagree with Clark (1994) that media does not influence learning. With the new emerging technology such as wiki’s and blogs, there is great evidence how these technology tools are improving learning in many subject areas.
I found reading the article by Rigney’s (1978) on learning strategies and assessment is interesting useful. I realize that certain things about my cognitive strategy need to be improved. I am convinced now that more frequent feedback is very important for motivation also is greatly appreciated by students. Therefore, Learning will be greatly enhanced when the instructor is present to provide ongoing support and opportunities for interactions between her and the students. As a result, it is important for online instructors to use PDA or Blackberry devices to respond to emails and postings on the discussion forums almost immediately. Technology tools that could be used to promote this interaction are: email, discussion forums, wikis and blogs. Interactions between students themselves could benefit them tremendously as mentioned earlier in the paper. Emerging technology tools that promote this type of interaction are: Wikis, blogs, and discussion forums. Finally, for any course to be successful we should always remember that Pedagogy is first and technology is second.




REFERENCE
Clark, R.E. 1994, “Media will never influence learning”, Educational Technology Research and Development, vol. 42, no. 2, pp. 21–9.
Cobb, T. 1997, “Cognitive efficiency: Towards a revised theory of media”, Educational Technology Research and Development, vol. 45, no. 4, pp. 21–35.
Harasim, L., Hiltz, S.R., Teles, L. & Turoff, M., 1995, Designs for learning networks, Learning Networks: A Field Guide to Teaching and Learning Online, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, pp. 125–44.