Instructional Design Model Analysis

Instructional design models are at the heart of driving effective and engaging curriculum for training/teaching. The ADDIE Model, which stands for analyze, design, develop, implement, and evaluate has always been at the forefront of almost all courses I have written at taught. With those five primary stages, it has been found to be restrictive and heavy on documentation. In order to become more agile and have rapid development process, the SAM Model was created. The SAM model stands for stands for Successive Approximation Model. It has three main stages of preparation, iterative design, and iterative development. This allows instructional designers to be able to loop through the design and develop process as they create their courses. As technology has evolved and we have more multimedia learning, my personal favorite learning theory is Mayers 12 Principles for Multimedia Learning. This blog will be exploring these twelve principles strengths, and areas for refinement, specifically as it is related to educational technology.

Mayers 12 Principles for Multimedia learning are as follows:

1. Coherence: Only add relevant text and images.

2. Signaling: Written text has key words highlighted.

3. Redundancy: Only use spoken words and images; do not add written text.

4. Spatial Contiguity: Related words and pictures are displayed close together.

5. Images: Use spoken words and images, not text.

6. Multimedia: Learner learns better when spoken words are combined.

7. Temporal Contiguity: Show corresponding words and pictures simultaneously, not successively.

8. Segment: Chunk segments for better understanding.

9. Pre-Training: Introduce name, key concepts and characteristics of main ideas

10. Modality: Words should be heard as narration

11. Voice: Use a human voice.

12. Personalization: Make narration conversational and add storied to make it interesting.

The strength of all of these is in the ability to understand how to reduce cognitive load based on how audio, images and text are displayed. When understand how our audio (find the article read last semester about the brain channels and how many are open or closed at a given time.)

One weakness that I have found in Mayers 12 Principles of Learning is that accessibility is not considered. Mayer wrote the principles with the assumption that most learners will not need the text with the audio, or they are able to enable closed captioning. Also, that the images and the layout is for those without any visual impairment. At first glance, it makes multimedia learning seem insensitive to the needs of all learners. Those with audio or visual impairments are left to learn using screen readers and/or text boxes, and within instructional design very little consideration is given to make sure their learning experience can be effective. As educational technology grows, we need to consider how can we not just provide the bare minimum required for impairments but try to provide them with an engaging and rich learning experience as well.

A second weakness with Mayer 12 Principles of Learning is that it does not take into account really complicated information. It would be wonderful to think that as an instructional design, I can put a single image on a slide deck, add the audio, and have achieved perfection for that piece of information. But learning, and information is not as simple as a single image. Often finding an appropriate image that relates to what is being taught is also challenging. While I find the core principles Mayer has created a great guideline and even a checklist for not overwhelming a learner, I also believe it is not a hard or firm guidelines. It needs to be treated as fluid, based on what information is trying to be conveyed. As new technologies in multimedia are created, such as virtual reality courses, or AI continues to become more prevalent, we should be aware of the principles and also aware that they may need to be modified to fit the learning technology.

This leads me to some final thoughts about how I think of most instructional design theories. It is not necessary to say only one can be picked, and to box yourself in, limiting creativity. Typically, I prefer to pair Mayers 12 Principles of Learning with other instructional design models such as ADDIE, SAM, Gagne’s 9 Events of Instruction, Merrill’s, and R2D2. While ADDIE or SAM give the bone structure of the process of the overall project, Gagne’s, Merrills, R2D2 and Mayer provide the methodology of how I am going layout the information in order to take the learner through the journey of instruction. For example, the first event in Gagne’s 9 events is to get the users attention. This is important to do no matter what courseware or curriculum you are writing. Why not mesh several of these together?

I have provided an infograpiic on my top four instructional design models. Please understand, I may select a little from each, depending on the project and the audience, to form the best learning experience for that snapshot in time. At the end of each project, after it has been implemented, I always look forward to evaluating it in the light of the learner, the snapshot in time when it was created, and technology. The saying is that the only things we can count on is change itself. Once a new educational technology comes out, it may be six months and something else is on its heels. Use the instructional design principles as pillars of the craft, and then continue build and rebuild and evolve around them.

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