The Importance of Educational Theories on Instructional Design: a practical guide

CAUTION! This blog may will take you about 5 minutes to read and lifetime to complete. You have been warned.

For us, as 21^st century instructional designers (ID) in the digital space, the subject of educational theory should be integral to our work. This is because the effectiveness of training now falls squarely on our shoulders; there is no instructor who can turn a turkey of a course into a sumptuous Christmas dinner.

This being the case, it is always a bit of a disappointment to read the abstracts on those ID webinars that appear in my inbox on a daily basis. I have never seen one that even loosely references any educational theory. They regularly boast that if I follow their five/seven/ten (delete as non-applicable) rules for <insert topic> then I will have wonderful and engaging elearning or mlearning or whatever. I am sorry to admit that I seldom bother reading these pearls anymore, because they have yet to provide me with anything more than the rehashed opinion of someone who may or may not be an industry guru. 

An admission

I have never read Vygotsky Mind and Society in Russian. There you go; I am outed.

One of the problems for most of us who work in the digital learning ID sector is that there is barely time to keep up with technological advances, without wading through 300 pages of the Piaget’s The Language and Thought of the Child. And where do you start? The psychology of learning, the physiology of memory, the philosophy of education? How about the educational theories; behaviourism and Skinner, cognitivism and Bloom, constructivism and Piaget, Social Development Theory and Vygotsky, Dewey, Bruner, and on and on.

It’s a big field and there are plenty of theories, quasi-theories and paradigms to go round.

So where do we start?

The road to…

Like most of the world, start with Wikipedia to get the basics. The Educational Psychology page gives a fair breakdown of the runners and riders in the world of educational theorising. From there you just follow the hyperlinks or do new searches based on what you have just read: listen to people talking about educational theories on YouTube; start to pick up some TedTalks on the subject. Give yourself an afternoon and you will soon realise that you will need a few years.

But then, think about what you have just been doing.

I have set you a problem, without a ready-made solution. I may have told you about one Wikipedia web page, but from there you were on your own. This is what real education is about. This is Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development in action. You know some stuff (even if it is just that you don’t know lots of other stuff) and you have used a series of Internet-based More Knowledgeable Others (Vygotsky again) to help you learn something more. And all of this knowledge, these theories, anti-theories, musings and comments, are coalescing in your head in a very constructivist manner. Try going the whole hog and getting some colleagues to do the same thing, then meet up over coffee and discuss what you have discovered. Social constructivism in the office; it’s a heart-warming thought.

An apology

So you have taken the first steps to becoming a substance-based ID, rather than one who is just chasing the next fad (complete with some handy acronym). But I am afraid that that is not the end.

What you have done (or will do) is now going to inform your digital learning development from here on in. The next time that you start designing a course you will be thinking about how the content is going exploit one or more of the educational theories that you have been investigating. You will no longer be happy to design some click-through rote-learning sheep-dip. Your assessments will no longer just ask students to regurgitate the piece of information from bullet 3 on page 6 of your course. You are going to want to set them challenges where they take control of their learning. You are going to want to develop active learning content.

Sorry about this, but you are never going to be satisfied with an MCQ again. 

A reality check

But don’t think that you will never be limited in your ambitions again. Resources (skills, time and money) will still constrain what you can create. You may feel that your learners should be taking your training out into the workplace with a series of situated learning assignments, while your stakeholder says that they just want 10 True/False questions with a pass mark of 80%, and you will do what the budget allows.

Another admission: I do.

However, when you next talk to a customer about what they could do to make their digital learning successful it is going to be different. You are going to blow them away by your knowledge and understanding of what makes a good course and why. You probably won’t name-drop Jerome Bruner or any of the others, but you will be able explain that sound educational theories will make the training that you design effective.

Enjoy!