ABSTRACT
Silber (2007) suggests that instructional design is not the systematic procedure described in leading textbooks and taught in universities but rather the moderately to ill-structured problem solving that makes use of principles and design thinking. Silber advocated for a cognitivist approach that involved presenting learners with principles and their relationships, use of “heuristics for defining the problem space and solving the problem” (p. 12), scaffolded practice, and opportunities for reflection on outcomes. While this approach more closely approximates the ways in which instructional designers operate in workplace settings than the procedural approaches found in many instructional design textbooks (see, for example, Smith & Ragan, 2004, or Dick, Carey & Carey, 2005), it fails to address some fundamental issues. One danger is that novice instructional designers will attempt to design instruction by slavishly applying rules, a practice that is painfully apparent in the one-size-fits-all approaches one sees in many corporate training departments. The other problem is that even skillful application of the principles is no guarantee that the end result will be an effective instructional product. As Rowland (1994) describes with regard to a music composition course, rules do little to help one create or transform bad ideas into good.
