 There's lots of instructional design models out there and some instructional designers have favorites and some use kind of a mishmash of the different ones. But for faculty members that are thinking about online teaching and learning or blended teaching and learning, it's less about picking an instructional design model. And it's more about just understanding that there are these models out there. Instructional design is a rigorous discipline and just like other disciplines, there's models and theories and research and all these things are going into it. And so the key element regarding any model is that none is perfect and none you just can use without really thinking through the different steps. It's really not a 100% accurate reflection of exactly what you need to do throughout the instructional design process. Rather, models can be useful or not useful and depending on the context, some models are more useful than others. A very common instructional design model that most folks that study instructional design is what's called the ADDI model. And it stands for Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation and Evaluation. And the specifics of each of those steps is it's not really all that important for, especially for faculty, but the key thing is to really realize that there are these steps and there's these questions at each of the steps that need to be answered. And so oftentimes we get really excited about maybe applying a certain technology in the classroom or in an online environment. And what instructional design tells us is that we really need to take a step back and start at the beginning and think about what are those goals or what do we want to achieve as part of this learning experience. In terms of instructional design models, a couple come to mind. One of the ones that we use in our course design institute here at U of T is based on the work of DFINC. DFINC provides a very simple basic model for alignment with a focus on significant learning. So beginning with thinking about what are the significant learning experiences you want your students to have in a global sense from your course. From that distilling down to what the key learning outcomes are across knowledge, attitude, skills, being very explicit about what those are, and then of course from there thinking about that assessment process and aligning the outcomes with the assessment is fundamental to DFINC's model. Then of course once you've determined what those outcomes are and what those assessments are then casting backwards into the course activity design to ensure that all of the components are working towards success in achieving those learning outcomes. Scaffolding is very important, making sure that each of the activities builds on what came before and moves the students through a coherent experience overall within, for example, each learning module in an online course. Instructional design is a type of problem solving, but there is no prescribed algorithm. Every instructional designer is going to solve problems differently and come up with a different solution. But that being said, every instructional design, according to Meagher, needs to answer three fundamental questions. And they are, where are we going? How are we going to get there? And how do we know we got there? And these three questions correspond to three major phases or aspects of every instructional design. The first one, where are we going, is the analysis phase, where we analyze the context, the task, the learners, and at the end of this phase we need to have a list of learning goals. The second phase that corresponds to question how are we going to get there is the instructional strategy phase, where at the end of this phase we need to have clearly stated learning objectives, learning outcomes, instructional strategies, assessment strategies, medium. So this is the core of the design. And the third phase is the evaluation phase, at the end of which we have to make some decisions about revisions and improvement of the course material. It is important to say that this phase is overlap. They are not linear. So whichever instructional design model you want to adhere to, and model is usually simply a visual representation of the instructional design process, they pretty much all have somewhere in them these three important phases. What I described very briefly is something that would most closely fit Smith and Reagan's common instructional design model. When it comes to the design of instruction, there is an inherent risk of imposing one view of learning on the design of online courses. And this is especially true of the more classic approaches to teaching or course design. Instead, rather than asking a question how should I teach or even what should I teach, I think the instructors should ask what kind of learning do I want to see take place in this course, or what kind of learning processes, skills and strategies students should experience in this course, or what kind of understanding students should gain. Starting from those questions allows a different kind of approach to design of courses, which has been called a backward design, in some cases, or a constructivist approach to design of courses. With this in mind, I would encourage the use of learner-centered instructional designs.