Pedagogical/instructional design

Pedagogical / instructional design According to Reigeluth (1999), “an instructional design theory offers explicit guidance on how to help people learn and develop”. In other words, instructional design is a systematic process by which effective instructional materials are designed, develop and delivered. The term is connected to educational technologists, management, graphic designers, web/ software developers, educators and students/ users. Hence, the Instructional Design pays special attention to the analysis of the problem, the activity to carry out, learning needs and learning environment in order to define our objectives, taking into account knowledge and practical experience. In simpler terms, instructional design is: focus on the study of how people learn identifying what tools are best suited to meet a learning goal identifying where the problems may arise in the implementation of instruction knowing why instruction is effective or ineffective Nowadays, we can find different types of inscriptions: texts, images, graphs etc In learning research, all these “external representations” are used to designate any configuration of inscriptions on a computer screen that has been created by a teacher, an instructional designer, or a learner and that allows the learner to interact with some content domain. These configurations are external, I mean, an idea outside the head of the learner, and, furthermore they represent the objects of a content domain. The arrival of the computer technology puts forth a new question: how do the learners construct internal representations from the multiplicity of external representations offered to them? The Kaleidoscope Network of Excellence explored the interaction of the internal and external representations and the resulting blend of different approaches leads to the observation that several theoretical perspectives coexist. It can emerge the situation where a learner’s interpretation do not match with the designer’s intention. Externals representations that comply with a formal code in the eyes of the constructor are not necessarily interpreted in a unique way by the learner reading or manipulating them in a learning context.