What is Instructional Design Theory

The importance of design for instructional programs — whether on campus or online or at a distance — increases with the possible combinations of students, content, skills to be acquired, and the teaching and learning environments. Instructional design —as a profession and a process— has been quietly developing over the last 50 years. It is a multidisciplinary profession combining knowledge of the learning process, humans as learners, and the characteristics of the environments for teaching and learning. The theorists providing the philosophical bases for this knowledge include Dewey (1933), Bruner (1963), and Pinker (1997). The theorists providing the educational and research bases include Vygotsky (1962), Knowles (1998), Schank (1996), and Bransford, Brown, and Cocking (1999). Instructional design offers a structured approach to analyzing an instructional problem and creating a design for meeting the instructional content and skill needs of a population of learners usually within a specific period of time. An instructional design theory is a “theory that offers explicit guidance on how to better help people learn and develop” (Reigeluth, 1999).