Instructional Design

Instructional Design for your e-Learning Courses

Mediasphere offers clients instructional design services to assist with the planning, development and publishing of your online courses. The instructional designer is the architect of your courses and is the key player in ensuring that your courses are relevant, accurate and effective in delivering your prescribed outcomes.

Our instructional designer can transform your training documents and existing presentation into effective online courses by abiding our course design principles. Our team has the capacity to translate your existing paper based resources into a suite of courses or can start from client briefings and create the course or courses from scratch.

The Instructional Design Principles in Building Online Courses 

When developing your online courses, our instructional design team applies the following principles:

1. Make sure that you write the courses to suit the target audience.  Ensure that the content, reader-level and use of multimedia is appropriate to the users. Understand the user's education level, prior learning and course expectations.
2. Plan and publish specific learning objectives to outline the expectations in the course. In addition to the specific outcomes, the learning objectives should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Targeted to the audience.
3. Make sure that the course information is precise, relevant and contextual to the learner. In online courses, learners chunk blocks of text and on-page text should not extend beyond 150 words. Extended text areas should be added as downloadable documents that the learner can print and synthesis.
4. Provide different learning pathways to cater for the users learning style. Learning styles include visual, auditory and kinesthetic styles. The use of optional voice over, embedded videos, animations, simulations and relevant images assist in building effective courses to cater for different learning styles. 
5. Make sure that the learning stages that are added to multimedia storyboards (for the development of videos, animations and simulations) are sequential and allow the learner to engage with the media asset with controls and navigation menus.
6. Provide self-paced learning environments where the learner has control over their environment. Learners prefer to check their progress, select their own pathway through the content (not linear), try practice tests before formal assessment and generally to have control over their environment.
7. Provide formative and summative tests in a course. Formative allows the learner to understand how the fomal assessment will work and trial questions that are not assessed provide confidence for the learner to attempt the tracked summative tests.
8. Provide the option to complete a pre-test that guages knowledge and then builds a custom course that provides instruction and assessment in areas that are new to the learner.
9. Provide timely and relevant feedback to the learner in response to their progress and test performance

Contact Mediasphere to discuss how we can assist you in the planning and development of your courses. Free Call: 1300 787 611.