Since instructional design has professionalized, a few models, steps for accomplishing the design of instructional activities, have been developed. Models offer a path a course designers or design teams can take to create meaningful instruction effectively & efficiently.

On this page, you'll find descriptions and visualizations of three models: ADDIE, SAM, and Pebble in the Pond, and my reflection on the benefits & limits of designing instruction following models from the perspective of someone who came to learn about them only after hands-on experience in developing instruction.

3 Examples of Instructional Design Models

1) ADDIE: Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, Evaluate

Benefits & Limits of Models for Instructional Design

After first encountering learning theories, I reflected that I had unknowingly adopted strategies of learning theories I never knew existed. The same has not been true of learning models which strike me as corporate processes for a practice that has, for me, been a solitary activity.

My own approach to developing, designing & implementing courses has shared elements with the three models described here, but my process has hardly been so structured. It most often involves an initial process of deciding student learning outcomes for the course and module-level goals. Creating materials & activities and implementation occurs more or less simultaneously for each module of the course. Revision takes place the next time the course is offered with improvements to instructional materials, student activities and evaluation.

While the models above offer a convenient blueprint for instructional design, I am not convinced of their usefulness for my purposes as an instructor designing my own courses to teach to my own students. If I were directing a large-scale design of instruction that a team was carrying out for unknown self-directed learners or for another teacher to use in their instruction, I may find these particular models more helpful. I suspect having prior knowledge of these models could have helped me work more efficiently as I was preparing my first courses because it would have forced me to think in advance through the necessary elements of instructional design.

A model of instructional design I have encountered through proselytization by a colleague in my department is backward design. I have not studied this model but since becoming acquainted with it, I find myself returning to the principle of identifying the goal at which the rest of the instruction is aimed whenever developing a new course or revising an existing one. This goal-oriented design can offer a useful tether to a fifteen-week course of study. I believe that if I should fully employ this model it would help me strengthen two areas particularly: the evaluation of student learning and assessment of instructional effectiveness.

I believe there are other instructional design models out there that may be more appropriate to the content, environment, pace, and complexity of my courses, and that would suit the non-linear way I prefer to work. I will continue researching these models for ideas I can apply to enhance the development, design, implementation & evaluation of my existing courses, and those I will develop in the future.