Instructional design process in a web-based learning management system: design, implementation and evaluation issues

by Njenga, James Kariuki

Web technologies have necessitated a transformation culture in higher education

institutions. Many of these institutions are employing web technologies whose

development, for varying reasons, is not supported by research in their field and

domain of use. One such field is instructional design for the web learning.

Although there is a lot of research on the most effective instructional design

strategies, the use of research for web-based learning applications has been

limited.

This thesis reports on a study aimed at transforming the research on instructional

design into practice by designing an instructional design system and providing an

argument for its implementation. The argument is intended to facilitate the design

and development of an instructional design subsystem of the web, that would in

turn offer effective and efficient ways for creating web-based learning materials

to instructors.

The study started by examining the various paradigms, theories and practices of

instructional design with the intent of using them to enrich and improve the

practice of instructional design in web learning. It undertook a thorough and

systematic review of the literature on instructional design in order to come up

with an instructional design system. The design approach used successful design

patterns that have been used elsewhere, e.g. in software design, to create common

responses or solutions to recurrent problems and circumstances. Instructional

design patterns were identified in this study as the recurrent problems or processes

instructional designers go through while creating instructional materials, whose

solutions can be reused over and over again.

This study used an iterative developmental research process of finding and

modelling an instructional design process as the research methodology. This

process follows and builds on existing research on instructional models, theories

and strategies, and ensures that the same methodology can be used to test the

theories in the design, thus improving both the research and the design.