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Design Processes

How a course gets designed — whole-process models a designer works through, rather than anything a learner meets.

18 entries · 0 stable · 18 in review · 0 drafts

In Review

  • Analyze terminal behavior and objectives before manipulating teaching methods in instructional design - Glaser's design orientation sets a task sequence: specify the terminal performance standard, determine student entry characteristics and prerequisites, construct procedures and materials to move the learner from one s...
  • Continuous Improvement of Learning Materials - A post-release design process that treats a shipped course as a hypothesis under test — instrumenting materials so that use and outcome data are collected together, running short build–measure–learn cycles, and using RISE analysis to decide which resource to revise next.
  • Data Wise Improvement Process - The Data Wise Improvement Process is an eight-step, team-based protocol for using student assessment data to drive instructional improvement in schools.
  • Design Thinking - A course-grain design process — empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test — in which a learning experience is built from investigated learner need rather than from a content outline, and revised against evidence from learners before it is finalized.
  • Design-Based Research - A design process run as research. An intervention is designed and revised over repeated cycles in a real learning setting, in collaboration with practitioners, so that each cycle both improves the design and builds or tests theory about learning.
  • Faculty Course Design - The design process as it actually runs in higher education — an instructor designing their own course, part-time, alongside teaching it, with a teaching centre consulting rather than approving, and revision happening between offerings rather than within a project.
  • Grading Policy Decisions - Composing a grade requires teachers to make several separable, often-unexamined decisions — how to weight components, whether to fold in social skills or effort, and whether to grade absolutely or relatively — each with real tradeoffs that a single "best" answer doesn't resolve.
  • Humanizing Co-Design with Educators - A co-design facilitation structure that deliberately makes space for educators' affective and relational experience — through shared contemplative practice, ritualized check-ins, and reflective field-note protocols — treating emotion as a design resource rather than a distraction.
  • Include both range-finding and pin-pointing phases when applying the body of work method - The report stresses that the standard application of the body of work method involves two distinct phases: range-finding, where work samples cover the entire range sparsely, and pin-pointing, which uses only samples n...
  • Increase local responsibility for program compliance through self-review before state validation - The guide's central design principle is devolving compliance assurance to the local level: districts perform a compliance self-review that the state agency later validates, with state technical and management assistan...
  • Iterative, stakeholder-informed instrument development cycle - This development pattern adapts an intervention-development framework to build a descriptive clinical instrument through repeated cycles of drafting, expert consultation, piloting, feasibility testing, and refinement,...
  • Learner Experience Design (LXD) - A user-centred course design process that treats usability as a pedagogical property rather than presentation polish — investigating learners, prototyping the experience, and testing it with real users, on the argument that effort spent operating the material is effort not spent learning.
  • Successive Approximation Model (SAM) - An iterative, agile course design process that replaces a single analyse-build-evaluate pass with short rounds of design, prototype and review, starting from a collaborative Savvy Start and converging on a design by repeated approximation rather than by up-front specification.
  • Systematic Instructional Design - The objective-first design process — ADDIE and the Dick & Carey systems approach — in which instructional goals are analysed into subordinate skills, assessments are written from the objectives, instruction is built to serve them, and formative evaluation feeds revision before the design is released.
  • Ten Steps to Complex Learning - The task-centred design process that produces a 4C/ID blueprint — specify the professional tasks first, group them into task classes of equal complexity ordered simple to complex, then derive the supporting theory and part-task practice from the tasks rather than the other way round.
  • Understanding by Design - Wiggins and McTighe's backward design process plans a course or unit in three stages — identify desired results, determine acceptable evidence, then plan learning experiences — so that activities and assessments are derived from the learning goals rather than chosen first and justified afterward.
  • Use a systematic instructional design process (ADDIE) with a motivational model to diagnose and address motivational problems - The article argues motivational studies lack systematicity and linkage between theory and practice, and proposes pairing a generic instructional design process with a motivational model: \"The ADDIE process is geared t...
  • Vendor Production (Alpha–Beta–Gold) - The contract production process used by e-learning studios — macro design, storyboard, then alpha, beta and gold builds, each ending in a client review, with the final sign-off closing the design to further change.