ID Historical Wrap-up and Look Ahead
In general, instructional design has seen many paradigm shift over that last few decades, but one overarching theme seems to be that there has always been a need and desire for the learner to be centered in his education and educational model. The film and media training successes of the forties laid the foundation for Gagne’s work in the sixties. Gagne’s work sought to shift the paradigm to and event driven model where the learners behavior was the issue and not just the teaching strategies. This led to seeing another distinct shift in education philosophy with Merrill’s first principles. Merrill modeled that learning is facilitated when learners are engaged in solving real-world problems and that existing knowledge is activated as a foundation for new knowledge. This has put the learner in the center of the knowledge model and its evaluation. This eventually led to Gardner’s work in learning styles and multiple intelligence theory, where the learner can now be understood by the way he learns and not just by the behavior of what he has learned. It became well understood that learners learn differently and therefore the definition of intelligence was undergoing a shift as well. Cognitive load theory seeks to understand how much a learner can learn and how to help a learner understand highly complicated behaviors and concepts through smaller pieces that are connected together to form larger schema sets. These schemas allow the learner to journey from novice to expert and be largely in control of where they reside on that journey.
2000 – Educational Technology and the Learner-centered model
The last ten years has seen a rise in the use of and the design and implementation of educational software and hardware for use by instructional designers to deploy coursework to learners. Asynchronous online course rooms and synchronous course modules for existing coursework have captured the educational world through several realities. First the need for educators to understand what the next generation of learners will be requiring and one of the themes that presents itself often is the idea of customizing education (Marx, 2006). Customizing education is attend that will seek to rewrite educational practice by allowing learners to fully customize their education to meet their individual goals. This has created the need of and response to the learner-centered model of education. For the first time, education is seeing a real sift from the teacher centered focus that has dominated education for many decades, to a learner-centered focus where each learner is responsible for his own learning and strategies of completion. Learners have become course evaluators and are often looked to for guidance in making the course more meaningful and significant to the future of the learners who are involved in online learning. Instructional design has answered the call by embracing the e-learning environment and even establishing online universities who specialize in training learners to design coursework for online environments. The instructional design community continues to be on the cutting edge of these new constructs and environments.
