Many of you will be surprised to find that you already know quite a lot about designing instruction. You plan for your courses by determining what skills and knowledge your new students already have, create assessments based on the goals of your course, and (hopefully) make adjustments along the way as you evaluate your own teaching in relation to your students' reactions.
However, as we move into using newer technologies in the classroom, many faculty "forget" their good teaching practices to focus solely on the technology. What happens? Weak instructional practices and rather boring lessons: we default to the presentation of facts through a teacher-centered strategy. How many boring PowerPoint lectures have you seen lately?
Using the principles and models of instructional design, we can avoid many of the problems often experienced by new teachers or anyone facing the requirement to use newer technologies in teaching.