 Instructional design is essential to the development of quality, open and distance learning materials. But what exactly is instructional design? Well, it has a long history dating back to the Second World War and the development of training materials for American military personnel. Academics have spent careers theorizing about instructional design and developing a variety of different instructional design models. All of this has given instructional design a certain mystique that obscures the fact that at its core it really is largely common sense or at least common sense for educators. Instructional design is all about alignment, aligning learning objectives to learning activities and aligning those to the assessment. It means carefully crafting learning objectives at a level appropriate for the knowledge and skills that are being developed, then designing learning activities that help learners to develop their understanding of the content and to develop the skills that are being taught. Teaching is more than just transmitting content and learning is more than just memorizing facts. Learning is about developing one's own understanding of content and integrating it into one's own mental framework. Teaching man is about designing activities that will enable this. All of this activity is what I call instructional design. All too often when teachers or instructors sit down to plan a course they think solely in terms of content or what they want to teach the students. Instructional design forces us to move away from this content-centered perspective to a learning centered perspective. So instead of starting with a question what am I going to teach we start with what do I want my students to learn or what do I want my students to be able to do at the end of this course. Approaching teaching from this perspective helps ensure that everything we do as a teacher is in support of some learning outcome or objective. If we have a clear idea of what we want students to be able to do at the end of a course it guides our selection of content and the kinds of learning activities that we develop. This is what instructional design is all about. Now the key to good instructional design is formulating good learning outcomes. Again there has been a lot written on this topic and often people are overwhelmed with learning objectives to the point of paralysis. It really shouldn't be that way. Writing a good learning objective should be fairly straightforward. It's all about being clear, concise and specific and making sure you have stated the outcome in terms of what the learner will be able to do. It's also important to cover an appropriate range of levels of learning so that you aren't only dealing with basic knowledge acquisition but are covering higher levels of learning when it's appropriate. If the learning objectives are well developed then you will have a much clearer idea of what content needs to be covered and you should be able to think of the kinds of activities that you want the learners to engage in to help them achieve the learning outcomes. And of course doing all of this will help you ensure that your assessment activity is truly measuring the student's achievement of the learning outcomes. Using instructional design also helps us to make appropriate media and technology choices. It's tempting to use a variety of different technologies just to spice things up. But if the technology isn't chosen carefully it can distract, confuse and frustrate learners. By aligning your technology selection to your learning activities and learning objectives you help avoid that as the rationale for using a particular technology will be clear to the learner. Now this is obviously a simplified explanation of instructional design. The mechanics can get quite complex and there are a variety of different methods and tools but underlying all of them is the fundamental process. First specifying learning objectives then selecting content, developing learning activities and finally designing assessment activities that are all aligned and all contribute to the achievement of those learning objectives. It's important to remember too that this isn't a lockstep linear process. Often we will have to cycle back from developing content or activities to revise the objectives or we may find that once we start developing the assessment we realize we've left out something and need to go back and revise some of the content which in turn leads us back to revising the objectives. Instructional design is an iterative process. At its core though it's about moving from a teaching and a content perspective to a learning and a learner perspective.