One of the data points from our Association E-learning: State of the Sector report earlier this year, is that the use of professional instructional design association online courses is relatively low. More recently, I had a conversation with a client who wanted to “Call 911″ after an estimate received from a vendor for creating online courses from existing classroom-based course materials – meaning mainly PowerPoint. This kind of conversion is pretty easy these days, from a technical standpoint. It’s the time and effort to apply good instructional design principles that increases costs.

I don’t quite know how to prove it, but I suspect there is a relatively widespread view out there – whether conscious or not – that maybe instructional design doesn’t matter all that much. Or, at the very least, that it’s not worth paying the price for. In any case, I’ve had in mind that I would like to provide more instructional design resources here on the Tagoras site, so when I saw that Stephen Downes had referenced Ellen Wagner’s reference to the Instructional Design Models resource page at the University of Colorado Denver, it seemed like a good starting point. In case I lost you there with all the references, here’s that link again:

• Instructional Design Models

Ellen calls it “Everything you ever wanted to know about instructional design models theories, frameworks, you name it.” Maybe, maybe not, but it is certainly a solid resource to add to your bookmarks.

JTC