Instructional Designers Needs to Consider Learning Theories in Technology

In my eyes, an Instruction Designer role is very similar to the role as a Behaviorist in the school setting.  Both roles work directly with students and the ability to train staff, especially teachers.   When working with students, one has to consider how am I going to effectively engage the student to learn?  In the readings we learned about how to motivate a student and where a student may fall in the different kinds of learning theories and what type of learning styles can be used to increase learning.

Behaviorism theory has always been the center of my belief system when it came to learning.  I have always thought my own skills were built from this theory until now.  In this course I have learned multiple theories; Cognitivist, Constructivist, Connectivism, Social Learning (Ormrod, 2009).  Post conversations with my peers have presented me that not everybody falls under Behaviorism and that the other theories can relate to their needs of learning.   As I implemented ideas from these theories to try to figure out my students learning styles, I came to realization that there are only two kinds of learning theories, Cognitive and Behaviorism theory, everything else falls into these theories.  My most recent blog entry before this has my reason why I believe this to be true. 

When I train teachers I would always consider their input before I would implement interventions for the classroom or student. This course had me think: if I can figure out how the teacher’s learning style is then this will help in what type of approach I can use to train them.    All of these face to face interactions have been wonderful on implementing interventions for my program, but as an instructional designer I will not have the advantages of having face to face interactions.  I will have to learn how to transfer all of personal interactions onto a computer program.  I have already been able to utilize programs like excel and online programs to help view my data.  When I would show teachers graphs on theirs students learning performance, they are amazed to see the numbers.   I would tell them the data is always there, it just needs to be organized and this information can easily be formatted by technology.  As I start to convert from behaviorist to instructional designer I will now need to find ways to convert my skills to be utilized completely by technology.