Course Reflection

The current course on Instructional Design at Walden University I followed was very helpful to me to get better knowledge and experience from the point of view of Instructional Designer and learner.


The learning theories I studied earlier were not categorized as behaviorism, cognitivism and constructivism. This course was very helpful to me to identify the differences and similarities between learning theories categorizing above. It is also useful to understand how people learn, especially with reference to the learning styles of young and adult learners. In the instance of young learners in schools it is appropriate to apply constructivist theories. In my country we have already commenced the use of constructivist theories in school education. This course serves me immensely in the application of constructivist theories as an Instructional Designer in the development of Educational Software for the school system. Already, I had encountered certain conflicts with respect to constructivism in the 5E learning system implemented in schools. On learn these theories in depth I have been able to solve these conflicts on my own.


Behaviorist learning theories describe learning as implementing behavioral changes. The cognitivist theories explain cognitive learning. During my school days, my teachers had studied these theories and applied them in our school education. It is now that I have learned these theories through this course that I realized my teachers had been applying the cognitive concepts they had learned in the course of their professional education.


In my teaching I have applied several teaching styles that I had acquired in the course of professional education. It is now that I realize that these theories have to be applied in terms of student age. I recall that during my school days my teachers conducted brainstorming sessions and used problem solving method in the classrooms to promote student motivation along with feedback and special attention to the appreciation of student work. When I studied in universities, the lecture method was the main method used by university lecturers. Although the learning styles in schools are better than university studies both teachers adopted the teacher centric method. This teacher centric learning style has been converted to student centric learning style by the constructivist theories and social learning theories. The role of the teacher has been changed to that of facilitators by these theories involving guidance and monitoring of the student learning, facilitating the student by providing the necessary self learning materials for the lesson. These recent theories studied in this course are essential for an Instructional Designer.


In the course we discussed about educational technology also. As an Instructional Designer and Educational Software Developer this course is very useful to make educational software I developed and I instruct teachers to developed more attractive to ensure motivation of students. Internet with communication, search engines, web 2.0 tools and web 3.0 tools make a remarkable contribution. The web 2.0 tools like blog sites, wikis and youtube are useful for the learning of students. Creation of personal web sites is possible using blog sites in the Internet free of charge. Hence students can actively participate in the lesson creating blog sites.
We discussed about the advantages, disadvantages and appropriateness to age level, of online courses. Constructivism can be applied to online courses very effectively for large audiences in different locations even though they are in different countries. The techniques to be used for the motivation of the student to the course are also discussed. This also has been very useful to me because I am in the process of developing course materials for an online teacher training course for ICT teachers.