For newbie’s in e-learning to achieve greater success, there’s a need for them to familiarize themselves with the instructional design best practices. With several instructional design models out there, only a few have been widely accepted.

Getting familiar with these models can help you structure and plan your online training. Below are the four widely used instructional design models to keep you going in your learning program.

The ADDIE instructional design model

The ADDIE model is one of the first instructional design models. While some designers think it’s less useful to meet up with learners’ needs, many designers still make use of it for creating their e-learning courses.

ADDIE is an acronym that stands for Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, and Evaluate. These are five different phases of the process for developing instructional materials. Here’s a brief description of each stage as they contribute to e-learning development.

• Analysis – In this phase, an instructional designer carries out a need analysis to determine the pre-existing skills and knowledge of learners. The feedback from this analysis drives both design and development.

• Design – In this phase, the instructional designer writes the learning objectives, and figure out the best instructional strategy to achieve the goals.

• Develop – The agreed-upon outcome from the design phase is employed to start the development process of the e-learning course.

• Implement – In this phase, the courses are implemented on the appropriate learning management system and rolled out to the learners while the impact gets monitored.

• Evaluate – The instructional designer makes use of feedback features to evaluate the course. That helps in determining the effectiveness of an e-learning course.

Gagne’s nine events of instruction

Robert Gagne made a framework proposition of nine events of instruction, which was based on a behaviorist approach to learning.

These nine events of instruction include;

• Gain your learners’ attention – This usually involves striking the emotional side of your learners with storytelling or thought-provoking questions.

• Inform your learners of the objectives – Clearly state down the expected outcomes and learning objectives to your learners with them having in mind the criteria for measuring successes or failures.

• Stimulate recall of prior knowledge – Use the learners’ existing knowledge to introduce the new experience and build on it. You can familiarize your learners with the information by relating it to their already acquired knowledge.

• Present the content – Avoid content overload by delivering the content in bite-sized chunks.

• Provide learner guidance – Support your content with practical examples and case studies to engage and motivate learners.

• Elicit Performance – Engage your learners with different types of activities that evaluate knowledge.

• Provide Feedback – Strengthen learners’ knowledge with immediate feedback.

• Assess Performance – Assess your learners’ performance with already established criteria.

• Enhance retention and transfer to a job – Enhance your learners’ retention ability by employing content retention strategies to enable them to apply knowledge in real-time situations.

Merrill’s principles of instruction

In 2002, David Merrill proposed a framework that integrates five principles of learning.

• Task-centered principle – Learning begins with real-life tasks. Learners should possess the ability to relate to the problems and tasks they can execute.

• Activation principle – Learners tend to connect pre-existing knowledge with the new experience if a course activates their previous knowledge.

• Demonstration principle – To boost learners’ retention ability, a course must demonstrate knowledge in different ways, including storytelling.

• Application principle – Enable your learners to apply new information on their own to help them realize their mistakes and learn from them.

• Integration principle – The course must possess the ability to integrate the knowledge into learners’ world through the presentation, and interaction.

Bloom’s taxonomy

Bloom’s taxonomy, proposed by Benjamin Bloom in 1956, was revised and modified by Anderson and Krathwohl in 2001 and referred to as ‘Revised Taxonomy.’

Bloom’s taxonomy ensures that learners push through the lower level of comprehending new information and remembering it, analyzing, evaluating its impact, and applying it. That enables them to solve problems with the acquired knowledge uniquely.

While all these four instructional design models are effective, they also have their merits and demerits. An instructional designer should get familiar with these models, and many others, and then choose the ones that best fit the problems they’re trying to solve with their course.