History of Instructional Design

1940

Humanity has been designing instructional experiences for millennia.

But it wasn’t until World War II that we began to adopt a more systematic approach. The war brought with it a slew of training needs that required a methodological approach.

Psychologist and educator were recruited by the military

Robert Miller

Robert Gagne

Jeslie Briggs

John Flanagan

Develop training and methods of evaluation

Development of detailed task analysismethodology

1950

1954

B.F. Skinner

Introduced "Programmed Instruction"

1956

Benjamin Bloom

Published Taxonomies of Education

Effective Instruction

Bite sized and immediate feedback

1960

Plato (1960)

Program logic for automatic teaching operation

Robert Mager (1962)

Development of objective based learning

Robert Glaser (1963)

Development of criterion-referenced measures

Michael Scriven (1967)

Formative and summative evaluation

1970

A Rise of Interest in the Systems Approach

Numerous models were developed across military, academia and business.

These models were based on information-processing-approach and used media and ID procedures to improve the quality of instruction.

1980

instructional Design Models

Continued growth in business and industry

increased growth internationally

decrease in academia

rising interest in how the principles of cognitive psychology could be applied in the instructional design process, and the cognitive load theory began to prove its relevance.

1990

In 1991, World Wide Web officially launches

The constructivist theory underlines the importance of “authentic” learning tasks that replicate the actual complexity of the real world environment of traineesas opposed to the theoretical learning approach which preceded it.

2000

The Rise of Online Learning

Deeper internet penetration, better bandwidths and rise of the social media makes online learning a viable, economical & effective medium.

Now is the age of learning technology in all its form

social, mobile and personalized.