Instructional Design Toolkit

Educator? Instructor? Professor? Lecturer? Librarian?:

Process is a part of preparation. Taking time to think about our process and what it accomplishes in relation to our students is important in providing for success in our efforts to educate. This is for anyone tasked with teaching. Faculty and Librarians must be involved in the process of knowledge transformation, because we are instructing students in various ways. Simple instruction sessions are fine, they are a good starting point, but engagement with information resources can be more lasting if we motivate those we are teaching...

Presentation of information doesn't guarantee learning, the absorption and process of integrating that information into knowledge is what defines 'learning.' ID is meant to get the educator thinking about how best to shape the instructional process to enable learning by those being taught.

Attention, Relevance, Confidence and Satisfaction (ARCS)

This toolkit is meant to provide you with resources to help you apply instructional design concepts, strategies, and methods to your practice as an instructor.  First, some key concepts related to instructional design...

Design thinking is important to transforming your information literacy instruction based on your users' needs, but it also transcends instruction and could (or perhaps, should!) pervade all aspects of academic libraries.  Bell and Shank (2007) highlight three core elements to design thinking:

• The ability to put oneself in the place of the user of the product or service in order to understand how the user can receive the optimal learning experiences
• A willingness to thoughtfully and creatively move through a series of gradual changes in developing a product or service and use this prototyping method to arrive at an optimal experience for the user
• A commitment to both formative and summative evaluation in determining how well a product or service meets the needs of the user, and then making the necessary adjustments to improve the performance of that product or service to ensure a good library or learning experience for the user (pp. 20-21).

(Bell, S.J., & Shank, J.D. (2007). Academic librarianship by design: A blended librarian's guide to the tools and techniques. Chicago, IL: American Library Association.)

"Instructional Design involves purposeful and systematic planning of a course (or components of a course). It is a process that begins with an analysis of the intended student learning outcomes, identifies teaching strategies and student activities to enable students' achievement of the outcomes, and ends with the development of multiple methods to assess whether and to what extent the outcomes were achieved. As noted, the process includes the development of instructional materials, activities, assessments, and evaluation of the effectiveness of the design and delivery. The process utilizes research on how students learn, best practices in teaching and learning, and guiding principles of Instructional Design practice. Much like carpenters with a large collection of tools and resources, the faculty and instructional designer collaborate in building a course or components of a course that will affect deep and positive student learning." (From Ferris State University)

Instructional Design is inherently tied to instructional sessions by librarians. Listed below are resources, including materials collected by Walsh University and accessible online:

The phrase instructional literacy was coined by Char Booth in 2010 to describe the four domains that are necessary to incorporate into teaching practice in order to be effective teachers.  These four domains include:

• Reflective practice
• Educational theory, including learning theory, instruction theory, and curriculum theory
• Teaching technologies
• Instructional design

Instructional Literacy doesn't have to be specific to library instruction. Being aware of multiple facets of engagement, taking ownership of (as an instructor) your own professional domain (teaching) requires thoughtfulness and a building up of one's own knowledge base. 

Please visit the following sites for more information related to instructional literacy:

"Humans cannot process everything they experience at once, and if it is not processed it cannot be learned."

From UC Berkeley-Center for Teaching and Learning (retrieved 2-28-18) at: https://teaching.berkeley.edu/resources/learn/foundational-principles

Learning is a process that:

1. is active - process of engaging and manipulating objects, experiences, and conversations in order to build mental models of the world (Dewey, 1938; Piaget, 1964; Vygotsky, 1986). Learners build knowledge as they explore the world around them, observe and interact with phenomena, converse and engage with others, and make connections between new ideas and prior understandings.

2. builds on prior knowledge - and involves enriching, building on, and changing existing understanding, where “one’s knowledge base is a scaffold that supports the construction of all future learning” (Alexander, 1996, p. 89).  

3. occurs in a complex social environment - and thus should not be limited to being examined or perceived as something that happens on an individual level. Instead, it is necessary to think of learning as a social activity involving people, the things they use, the words they speak, the cultural context they’re in, and the actions they take (Bransford, et al., 2006; Rogoff, 1998), and that knowledge is built by members in the activity (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2006).

4. is situated in an authentic context - provides learners with the opportunity to engage with specific ideas and concepts on a need-to-know or want-to-know basis (Greeno, 2006; Kolodner, 2006).

5. requires learners’ motivation and cognitive engagement to be sustained when learning complex ideas, because considerable mental effort and persistence are necessary.

(Berkeley Center for Teaching & Learning)