It is now time to see what might be involved in building an instructional design theory. What steps should one engage in in such a venture? Below are the crucial prescriptions I derive from the analysis above. Listing them here in summary form should not give the impression that they will be easy or that a theory will magically appear upon engaging in them. They merely provide some needed structure to remind us of the important prolegomena for such a theory.
Prescriptions for instructional design theorizing:
1. Determine the nature of learning and explicate it. This step is a tremendous challenge, but nevertheless needed (even if often deficient in contemporary theorizing). After all, the whole point of instruction, and thus ID, is to influence learning. Given the ragged state of learning theory today, it is essential for the instructional design theorist to be somewhat explicit about personal views regarding learning.
2. Characterize the interaction space leading to learning. The interaction space is the confluence of processes and products that engage the learner and shape his or her interactions from which learning results. Theorizing involves structuring this space, determining what the ingredients are and how they relate to one another.
3. Subjugate all content to the instructional function. Just as teaching should not be baby-sitting, so too instructional design theory should not provide means of artificially motivating students. Content needs to motivate! Processes for fashioning content to do so are central to instructional design theory.
4. Keep out of curriculum decisions. Deciding what students should learn is a societal decision, not a theorist's. The latter must seek neutrality in this debate, lest the resulting theory be narrowly applicable. It is wise to remember that a theory is a scientific endeavor, not an educational one.
5. Attempt to devise rules of instruction. The more explicit these rules can become, the better, while however preserving generality of application. Rule forming is essentially a heuristic mechanism that can lead to refinement of one's views and hence greater theoretical utility.
6. Situate and confront. The sociology of theorizing needs to involve all theorists in academic confrontation of a healthy and highly useful nature. Comparative analyses of one's ideas in relation to those of competing ideas is the gist of scientific progress, just as much in instructional design as in other sciences of the artificial.
As one can judge, these guidelines are themselves far from free of personal stances and remain in many cases far from explicit and full of innuendo. This only points out, I feel, the difficult nature of instructional design theory, as well as its high aspirations.
Theorists in our field are adventurers. Out of the complex context that schooling constitutes and despite the poverty of learning psychology, they fashion theories to guide the design of instruction and by extension a great deal of humanity's learning enterprise. Noble adventurers they are.
The adventure of instructional design theory needs to also be strongly supported for its synthesizing goal. It is a sense-making effort that is integrative in nature, bringing together support from research and innovations in practice and melding them together with core perceptions regarding the nature of learning and the psychology of motivation. This is always a highly creative venture.
A good measure of synthesis is needed now in the field to counter the creative but unruly diversity that is emerging from instructional design theory. In the end, only one theory is viable, all others becoming elements within it. What the rules of this theory will be remain to be fashioned--that is the great challenge now confronting instructional design theory. Such a theory would show characteristics of fullness: comprehensiveness (its coverage of all domains), abstractness (encompassing all processes), utility (its practical usefulness), validity (grounded in psychology). This of course remains a dream, an aspiration to guide theorizing and to engage the minds of those in the field with a theoretical bent.
I believe that learning and instruction are tractable scientifically, i.e., that they can be described in terms beyond those of human stances regarding educational values. That belief is fundamental to the hope for a full theory of instructional design and it is in support of that belief that I have explored the prolegomena of such a theory in this article.
Many of these prolegomena may seem provocative and they are certainly debatable. We must ask what are the consequences of these perspectives--how do they help us see things better? My hope is that they may help in defining more cleanly what we are dealing with. For instance, evacuating curricular decisions from instructional design gives it a different slant than the currently prominent one. Reframing motivation within a content perspective rather than an artificial process one redefines instruction to some extent, and instructional design as well. Our big challenge, of course, remains defining learning, for that is what instruction is an influence upon.
The prolegomena discussed here are an attempt to frame the discussion space for instructional design theory. This effort is but an initial one in this vein, hopefully pursued by many more of its kind. Reigeluth's (1998a) work--and that of others--at bringing together current theorizing in the field will hopefully lead to much new theorizing and to integrative attempts that seek to extend and consolidate current views.
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[1] Prolegomena is the plural of the term prolegomenon, often found in the philosophical and religious literatures. Prolegomena are not an introduction to a subject, but rather a discussion of the issues that must be considered in defining and situating a subject--they thus constitute the preliminaries to a subject. The term is used deliberately here to emphasize the view that there are strong presuppositions to our general use of instructional design theory and that it is useful to step back somewhat to consider these in perspective.
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