An Instructional Design Model for Information Science

Abstract

Effective instructional design models facilitate active, multi-functional, inspirational, situated approaches to intentional learning. Instructional design is an iterative process of planning performance goals, selecting strategies, choosing media, and conducting evaluation. Proper instructional design is fundamentally student centered, responsive, generative, complex, innovative, authentic, a collaborative process, practical, and inspirational. Good instructional design promotes activities that are creative, systematic, systemic, and cybernetic. Models help us conceptualize representations of reality. A model is a simple representation of more complex forms, processes, and functions of physical phenomena or ideas. Models of necessity simplify reality because often it is too complex to portray and because much of that complexity is unique to specific situations. Although instructional design is a social construction, complexity as a fundamental principle tends to be underestimated, over-simplified, and otherwise insufficiently addressed in many instructional design models. Information is part of the data-information-knowledge continuum with the aim of creating, replacing, improving, or understanding information systems. Information science professionals study and apply the effective use of knowledge within organizations as well as the interaction between people, organizations, and information systems. Information science provides ways to analyze, collect, organize, store, and retrieve data. Therefore, an appropriate instructional design model can facilitate the transition of data to information, and, subsequently, the construction of knowledge. A basic instructional design model for information science is introduced in this paper.