Instructional design: Theory into practice

How should I design my course or my lesson before entering the classroom?

Some teachers focus mainly on the teaching content and its organization. More experienced may also consider how these knowledge should be delivered and assessed. Well, these are all important factors in teachers' point of view. The easily neglected but equally important factor is the design of the learning experience of your students. The concept of instructional design is a more encompassing answer to the above question.

Instructional design involves the purposeful and systematic planning of a course. It is a process that usually begins with an analysis of the intended learning outcomes, identifies teaching strategies and student activities (and experience) to enable students' achievement of the outcomes, and ends with the development of assessment tools to assess whether and to what extent the outcomes were achieved.

An instructional design model is used to define the activities that will guide you designing a course or a single lesson. There are many instructional design models and a classic one is the ADDIE model.