Instructional design is all about increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of instruction.  The principles of instructional design can really be applied to almost any problem-based scenario:

• How can I make this more effective?
• How can I make this more efficient?

Instructional design requires the use of creative analysis.  Quality in the online learning environment is rapidly evolving in response to research, best practices, and scalable solutions.  Here, find resources, research, emerging ideas, and other information all focused on making not only instruction, but the educational system, more effective, and more efficient.  Interested in learning more about the roles in the design and development process?  Check out this illustration of the roles and their interaction. Are you an instructional designer, faculty member, or administrator interested in learning more about instructional design in practice?  Check out the Instructional Design Toolkit.  These resources are easy-to-understand, and break down instructional design concepts while providing examples to be used in the design process.  The toolkit is also a Sloan-C Best Practice. (Sloan-C is now OLC – the Online Learning Consortium).

The Instructional Design Toolkit

• Aligning Through Language – This doc is the most useful “cheat sheet” for instructional design.
• Combined with the Alignment Map Example and Template, they make up the two critical resources for any new instructional designer.
• The Right Assessment for the Job
• Recommended Hybrid/Blended Models
• Hybrid Alignment Map Template and Example
• Navigation Map Template and Example
• Three Examples of Rubrics in Online Environments
• Holistic and Analytic Rubrics in Online Environments
• Example of a Poor Quality Online Rubric

All of the resources in the above Instructional Design Toolkit are Creative Commons licensed a Noncommercial Share Alike 3.0 license – free for non-profit educational institutions to use, remix, and share with citation.

Interested in learning more about Online and Blended Course and Program Design?  Check out the Google Site created for the 2014 Educause presentation.  It’s a bit of a archive of a “moment in time” as well, as it involved co-creation of notes in real-time, collaborative content curation on Pintrest, and live tweets.

Quality Matters Website Quality Matters (QM) is a faculty-centered, peer review process that is designed to certify the quality of online and blended courses. QM is a leader in quality assurance for online education and has received national recognition for its peer-based approach and continuous improvement in online education and student learning.

OLC’s Five Pillars of Quality A quality framework for online learning. Not a rubric, but a philosophical basis.

OLC’s Quality Scorecard for the Administration of Online Programs This scorecard is for measuring and quantifying elements of quality within online education programs in higher education. It is an easy-to-use tool for online administrators for program evaluation. By evaluating each of the respective quality indicators within the established categories, an online administrator can determine strengths and weaknesses of their program.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.