Making the process of learning more insightful and attractive to students is one of the most challenging tasks for a teacher. Demanding not only that the students should be properly motivated, but also that the strategies and goals for specific lessons should be defined clearly and efficiently, it presupposes that numerous factors of learning environment should be taken into account.
Incorporating the basic principles of instructional design will help both address the needs of the students and introduce a proper motivation for an entire class, therefore, enhancing the learning process and contributing to better understanding of the lecture material, acquisition and training of the necessary skills and efficient application of theories to practice.
To help the students that have enrolled into the MATLT project learn to demonstrate the knowledge and skills related to learning using technology, such changes as the integration of the recent technological innovations along with information on the effects of these technologies must be provided.
In the given process, it is essential to make sure that the principles of Constructivism and Interpretivism are being used, for these principles allow the students to see the numerous ways in which the same task can be accomplished (Instructional Design Knowledge Base, n. d.).
By showing the students the variety of methods, which are all attributed to the same goal, one can make sure that in their teaching practice, students will be capable of integrating various strategies in order to approach a specific issue in q unique manner by analyzing the specifics of the case in point.
Another challenge related to the MATLT program, which its participants are most likely to face in educational setting, concerns the demonstration of knowledge and skills in current and emerging instructional technologies (Horton, 2012).
To help the participants of the program embrace the opportunities that current technological advances open in front of them, it will be required to create activities combining “instructional design, media and computing” (Newby, Stepich, Lehman, Russell & Ottenbreit-Leftwich, 2011, p. xvii).
In other words, the activities that demand to draw further lesson designs from the feedback acquired from social networks and other types of modern media that can be used in the course of the lesson, should be created. It is imperative that the learners should understand what potential new media and technologies open for both teachers and students.
Such understanding can be shaped by offering students tasks on analyzing the benefits of the latest technologies, such as the exercise demanding to define key positive features of specific devices for students and teachers. For instance, the activity of the given kind can include listing the qualities of such devices as smartphones and iPods, which can be used for interactive learning and efficient note-taking process.
Despite the fact that in the process of distilling the instructions that will allow for defining the further course of learning, crucial mistakes can be made and, therefore, basic obstacles might appear, instructional design is worth appreciating and considering solely for the opportunities that it opens to teachers and students.
Creating the premises for teachers to consider both the individual progress of each student and the overall evolution of the class, instructional theories help create a unique pattern for teaching to a particular group of students, thus, introducing the latter to the concept of self-education and the following lifelong learning.
Reference List
Horton, W. (2012). E-Learning by design. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons.
Instructional Design Knowledge Base (n. d.). Select instructional models/theories to develop instructional prototypes. Web.
Newby, T. J., Stepich, D. A., Lehman, J. D., Russell, J. D., & Ottenbreit-Leftwich, A. (2011). Educational technology for teaching and learning (4th ed.). London, UK: Pearson.