educational technology and education:
Heinich (1970) suggested a paradigm for Instructional management:
- media were seen as a tool in teachers’ hands: (it failed )
- no teachers are involved, only the media (it dehumanize the teaching)
- teachers and media are partners (ideal)
then in 1984 he updated it int believing that Ed tech should not be a part of education but of technology because the first did not help the field to grow into profession. so he believes we should take the field in order to grow outside the public school and away from just alter it or improve it to teacher-based model but it should concentrates on developing an alternative to the latest model. in other words, we need to find alternatives to the traditional education, but why? and why take it out of the public schools? because the latest failed to adapt the technology because the teachers are qualified enough without the technology.
but we need alternative to the traditional education because more people need instruction where there are no teachers, such as in training and distance education.
Technology as “recording medium”:
the idea is to make instruction adaptive and flexible. when when design an instruction to stand alone without a teacher then it should be carefully designed while considering the students carefully. however, instruction has been separated from implementation and that hurts the whole procedure while lost the flexibility and ignored the students. what is needed is a system that allow teachers to make changes during the instruction. it is important to mention that ID starts with behaviorism and it is hard to change this.
Technology imitates teaching:
instructions are tried to imitate the teachers, and most of them are driven from experimental research and teacher-observation while analyze the students. so there is the feedback, attention to the activities, guidness. so here comes the interactive computers. which means re humanize the process without the teachers’ interference.
The theory and practice of instructional design:
so the direction is designers will create systems that design instructions. so they should operate from theoretical principles not from from atheoretical techniques. these first principles are affected by learning theories and instructional theory. so instructions have not been come into cognitive theory (that is more complex) yet because they are occupied by behaviorism.
for cognitive approach, it supports that learning is a generative process.
The provenance of first principles:
since ID depends on experiments and observations, there are 2 factors: does our field needs the basic research (that related to learning and instruction)? and the relationship between descriptive and perspective? believing that instructions should depend on descriptive theory that is taken from basic research (this is the solution for designers) although they would face trial. however, the skilled designers know when to use descriptive theory or perspective theory(that does not tell what but tells how and the consequences).
Instructional design:
when they choose upon the first principle then there is a link between theory and practice. we should reintegrate design with instructional delivery. we can teach designers enough about learning.
so we need to upgrade the status of instructional design from a technique to a true profession.
Skill Up & Thrive 