Phil Harris: . . . with Phillip Harris, Executive Director of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology, AECT. It seems to me that it’s hard to identify one single issue with respect to instructional design. There is no single instructional design model that has dominated the field. We have probably seven or eight major models that are most often utilized in instructional design activities. I don’t hear this as an issue as much as I see the absence of it in the literature and presentations. We don’t have any serious comparison to look at, whether following instructional design method 1 versus 2 versus 3 produces more efficient learning. Does it do it a shorter period of time? Is there greater retention? Are there certain kinds of learning settings that would support the use of particular models? There are a variety of ways an evaluation could be done to try to identify if there are certain conditions in which some models work more effectively than others. So I see the absence of this as a key area in the instructional design field.

Resource: http://www.ait.net/technos/e-zine/interviews/phil_harris.php