Learning designers became the "first responders" during the great onlining due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this innovative practice article, we share the experiences of a team of digital learning designers created to support the university community's pivot online. This project adopts a case study methodology. The case study of the…

Teachers' decisions for instructional design and technology integration influence their teaching practices and student learning performances. Technology-integrated learning environments have been widely leveraged due to the recent global health crisis and student learning needs (Polly et al., "TechTrends," 65(3), 240-242 2021). Teachers…

At Athens State University, every student is a transfer student. As an institution that enrolls mostly non-traditional students, faculty and instructional designers understand the importance of accommodating the unique instructional needs of each student in order for them to have a seamless transition into the environment of an upper-level…

Although designing and developing courses curricula are often the primary foci for online learning, instructional considerations are just one part of an educational ecosystem contributing to the online educational quality and success for online learners. In this paper, we explore systemic planning for online learning organized around the idea of…

A growing, research-based consensus supports addressing our nation's literacy crisis through instruction aligned with the Science of Reading (SoR). We recognize, however, that the complexity of SoR content, alongside the multiplicity of instructional decisions and practices, and the unique features of each classroom and school, make simple…

At the onset of widespread COVID-19 in early 2020, institutions of higher education were abruptly faced with the need to rely on educational technology as a primary mode of teaching students, referred to as emergency remote teaching (ERT). Almost overnight, there was a corresponding and urgent need for instructional designer support and expertise.…

Backward Design is a well-known method for curricular development in which an instructor first identifies desired learning ends and then "works backwards" to determine the necessary means to these ends. Unfortunately, its use in the design of undergraduate chemistry curricular components is not necessarily widespread. This paper will…

After four decades of research and development on language in mathematics classrooms, there is consensus that enhancing language is crucial for promoting students' mathematics learning. After briefly sketching the theoretical contexts for work on this topic, in this paper we present six design principles for instruction that enhances language for…

For decades, researchers in our field have explored what it means to possess instructional design expertise. This systematic review provides a current synthesis of research related to cultivating expertise in instructional design coursework. A search on instructional design pedagogy and the development of expertise yielded 34 peer-reviewed…

Studies in learning analytics (LA) have garnered positive findings on learning improvement and advantages for informing course design. However, little is known about instructional designers' perception and their current state of LA-related adoption. This qualitative study explores the perception of instructional designers in higher education…

This dissertation describes a contextualized instructional design process based on key missionary-training practices that helps Beautiful Feet missionaries grow in their ministry of making disciples. The issue prompting the study was a misalignment between the current missionary-training process of Beautiful Feet and its vision and mission…

In this paper we offer a call for the development and utilization of originary theory in instructional design. Originary theory, which is generated by scholars within the field of its intended application, can be contrasted with imported theory, which is formulated in one field and later moved or "imported" into another for new purposes.…

The pedagogical development (PD) for educators in higher engineering education is indispensable to the promotion of educational changes and high-quality teaching and learning necessary to train twenty-first century engineering talents. With the expansion of various PD activities in engineering education in recent decades, there is a growing need…

This design-based research (DBR) study had both local and general goals. Its local goal was to increase active learning in the online courses offered at a large research university in the midwestern United States. Its larger goal was to define active learning design principles for online courses in general, so that they might be used to improve…

Background: It is crucial to use innovative tools to gain clinical reasoning skills through experiential learning in pharmacy education, and one of the most effective tools used in this is virtual reality. However, the lack of research that empirically demonstrates the instructional principles of virtual environment design, especially in the…