Five Basic Building Blocks of Instructional Design

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At the heart of Dialogue Education you’ll find an eight-part framework to guide you through the process of instructional design.

This framework begins with a series of prompts inviting designers to think more deeply about their students: their struggles and aspirations, the contexts in which they live and work, and the objectives they aim to achieve through learning.

These prompts help define the constraints designers must work within to craft an engaging and impactful curriculum — and when it comes to any kind of design, constraints are essential.

But once the constraints are made clear, what are instructional designers designing with? What are the elements or building blocks they piece together, pull apart, arrange and rearrange to construct a curriculum?

Here are Five Building Blocks of Instructional Design that I believe you can find in almost any well-crafted curriculum, starting from the ground up.

Content + Media

Content, coupled with the media used to convey that content, is the first building block of instructional design (not to be confused with the first step in an instructional design process).

Content is a well-defined chunk of a skill, concept, or perspective that a student will come face-to-face with, often for the first time, as a participant in a class or workshop. Content is simply the stuff we learn as students:

A new skill, like “Ten Steps for Making a Simple Household Budget;”
A new concept, like “Five Elements of Any Good Household Budget;” or
A new attitude or perspective, like “Three Reasons Why Household Budgets are Valuable for Any Family.”

We use Media to deliver Content, and we can use different types of Media to deliver the same content. For example, the skill of “Making a Simple Household Budget” might be demonstrated in a video recording of an instructor building a budget in a spreadsheet, or it might come through as a narrated step-by-step in an audio recording or a live lecture.

Application

Application, or what folks in the Dialogue Education tradition simply call “the Apply,” is the second building block of instructional design.

Every time students are presented with a new chunk of content, they must be given an opportunity to immediately apply what they’ve learned in a meaningful, relevant, and accomplishable way. For example, if an instructor delivers a live demonstration on how to build a simple household budget in a spreadsheet, the moment of application might:

Invite students to think of 3–5 expenses they typically have each month,
Build a simple budget based on those expenses, and
Spend a moment with one other student prioritizing the expenses in their budget.

This moment of Application differentiates a curriculum from a mere reading list, video queue, or any other collection of content-rich media. It makes the learning come to life and gives both students and instructors immediate evidence of what is (and isn’t) getting across.

Tasks

Tasks (or “Activities” or “Exercises”) are the third building block of instructional design. Tasks are simply the pairing of a chunk of content with a moment of intentionally crafted application.

A chunk of Content on its own doesn’t make an Task; nor does a free-floating moment of Application that hasn’t been preceded by a new skill, concept, or attitude introduced to students through an appropriate medium. It takes both to make an Task students can truly work with.

Tasks in the Dialogue Education tradition can include two additional elements: a moment for students to reflect on how the new content they’re exploring relates to their lives and work and a moment for them to forecast how they’ll take their newfound learning away with them and apply it beyond the classroom. While these two elements aren’t essential, their value is significant (and best explored in depth in another article).

Content combined with an action results in a learning task. — Content combined with an action results in a task.

Classes

Classes are the fourth building block of instructional design. A Class (or a Workshop, Session, etc.) is a time-bound event made up of a string of carefully sequenced Tasks.

A well-designed Class will often begin with a moment to frame and anticipate the work that students will accomplish during the duration of the Class. Similarly, a well-timed Class will include a reflective moment at the end to review everything that was accomplished and look forward to the next class coming up in the same Course.

Designers rarely have the luxury of choosing the timing of the Classes they create. Universities aren’t the only places with strictly controlled time-tables — my local county Parks and Recreation department has an entire catalogue of educational offerings that are carefully scheduled to meet the needs of different audiences all using the same limited number of classrooms. More informal Classes, like a community gardening workshop or a training session for a get-out-the-vote canvassers, typically run for no more than one or two hours.

Courses

Courses are the fifth and building block of instructional design. Just like Classes are made up of strings of Activities, Courses are made up of strings of Classes. In formal settings, like higher education, Course length is often standardized with few opportunities for deviation. Designers will often have more flexibility to experiment with different course lengths by adding and subtracting Classes when developing a new program for a more informal setting, such as a Course for Master Gardeners sponsored by a local Botanic Garden or Extension Program.

Conclusion

Content (delivered through a particular medium) and Application are the first two building blocks of instructional design. Paired together, they form the third building block — a Task. A sequence of Tasks creates the fourth building block — a Class. And a series of Classes result in the fifth building block — a Course.