What is instructional design? This is the question we will focus on this week as we continue in our journey to understand how librarians can make us of the instructional design process to enhance their design of library instruction. The following site provides a good definition of instructional design (http://www.umich.edu/~ed626/define.html). Now that we have a common framework, we can move on to gaining a better understanding of the discipline. The following materials are a very condensed listing of resources that can provide a basic self-study to help librarians understand the basics of instructional design.

1. A good site to learn more about basic instructional design principles is the IDD workbook created by graduate students at the University of Southern Alabama (http://www.southalabama.edu/coe/idbook/home.html).
2. Also, the following audio files provide a nice overview of instructional design (http://www.ltgreenroom.org/episodes/22) & (http://www.archive.org/details/tonywhiteDesignforPodcasts).
3. Finally, the following multimedia recording from CIDDIE @ the University of Pittsburg provides a good overview of a basic instructional design model (http://mediasite.cidde.pitt.edu/MediaSite/Viewer/?peid=87fe9bdc-9d61-44a0-917b-5398ab903319)
4. To learn more about instructional design models Martin Ryder’s site is quite useful (http://carbon.cudenver.edu/~mryder/itc_data/idmodels.html).

Once you have immersed yourself in the above materials you should have a better understanding of what instructional design is. In the next blog we will look at what basic instructional technology is.