Innovative Approaches to Instructional Design

EDUCAUSE LEARNING INITIATIVE | MARCH 2015

The resources below explore a wide range of considerations—from the conceptual to the highly specific—about the developments that technology is bringing to the field of instructional design. Due to a variety of factors, higher education is experiencing unprecedented change, and new models and tools call for innovations in instructional design and assessment.

Interactive Course Re/Design for Higher Education Instructors (2013)

This paper describes a model developed at Purdue University that provides a pedagogy-based approach to course design, focusing on active learning and “backward design,” in which desired outcomes are determined prior to designing learning activities.

Instructional Design in the Age of Learning Analytics (2012)

This presentation from an ELI focus session examines both the opportunities and challenges of instructional design in the context of real-time analytics data about students. A recording of the full presentation is available.

E-Learning Design Resource List (2015)

This site presents a series of posts that highlight emerging trends in instructional design, as well as important considerations and innovative approaches. The site includes links to numerous other resources related to e-learning.

Adapting eLearning for Mobile: Learning from Wonderful Mistakes (2014)

This article focuses on adapting e-learning content to mobile environments, with distinctions between phone and tablet formats. It includes examples and recommendations about specific issues that arise in mobile platforms.

Innovating Pedagogy 2014 (2014)

This report considers trends in teaching, learning, and assessment related to interactive learning and discusses 10 innovations that are expected to have significant impact on educational practice in higher education.

Threshold Concepts: Undergraduate Teaching, Postgraduate Training, and Professional Development (2015)

This site explains how the notion of “threshold concepts” applies to pedagogy. It features an extensive list of resources—organized by discipline—related to how threshold concepts can be incorporated into instructional design.

Instructional Design: The Times They Are A’ Changing (2011)

This post reports on an instructional design workshop that covered high-level questions about the ways in which new technologies, models, and expectations of education require new approaches to teaching.

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