Fall 2021 • Nicholle Stone

This course provided an in-depth comparison of current instructional design models and adult learning theories. It also addressed techniques for gaining and maintaining learner motivation, supporting skill transfer, and preventing cognitive overload. Students explored the front-end analysis process through identifying an instructional need and target audience, conducting a learner analysis, goal analysis, and task analysis, and by creating the behavioral objectives to support the instructional intervention.

Course Learning Objectives:

Upon completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Analyze processes of designing instruction and summarize the components of instructional design models.

• Compare and analyze several models for instructional design.

• Apply motivation theory to the instructional design process.

• Apply and summarize adult learning principles.

• Compare learning theories and create a learning philosophy.

• Research and analyze components needed to conduct a front-end analysis for an instructional product.

• Apply the Morrison, Ross, Kalman & Kemp (MRK) design model to an instructional problem.

Course Project

Overview

Learning to create—and stick to—a budget is not an easy task. Thankfully, the company You Need a Budget (YNAB) has created a life-changing product that combines a simple budgeting philosophy with award-winning software to help people take control of their finances.

Often, the hardest aspect of implementing YNAB is understanding how to use credit cards with their system. Mastering Credit Cards in YNAB will be an online, self-paced course for any YNAB user who wants to gain a more in-depth understanding of how to correctly record their credit card activities in YNAB. It will also address how YNAB handles these transactions in order to align with their budgeting philosophy. By addressing the biggest challenge YNAB users have with the software, this course will significantly lessen the YNAB learning curve.

Course Design Document

This course design document (CDD) has been developed over throughout this course as I've learned the process of identifying an instructional need and completing a thorough front-end analysis. The course objectives—both terminal and enabling—are listed in detail and lead into the Enabling Objective Matrix and the development of a job aid to support the course project.

Enabling Objectives Matrix

This matrix serves as a transition in the instructional design process, linking the instructional objectives with planning the learning strategies that will inform the course development.

For this project, I chose just one of my terminal objectives to break down and explore. By comparing the level of Bloom's taxonomy with Merrill's content type, as well as the delivery method for the unit, I was able to determine the most effective learner activities, which directly align with the performance-based enabling objectives.

Supporting Content

Our final activity in the instructional design process for this class was to develop a piece of supporting content that could be used to support the learners in our course project before, during, or after training.

I chose to create a job aid that serves as a single reference point for all of the procedures covered in the training. This handy list will help learners consistently follow procedures related to credit cards. It also explains what YNAB does in the background so that they can see how the software handles their money in alignment with YNAB's philosophy.