Instructional design is all about choices. Well … and constraints. Oh, and requirements. And, let’s not forget preferences. Pretty soon our choices feel limited. I’ve been told my designs are too text heavy. However, there are reasons:
- Openness: David Wiley notes in his overview of the 5R permissions (i.e., retain, reuse, revise, remix, redistribute) that “poor technical choices make content less open”. Text (while certainly not the ONLY option) is a good option to allow others to take advantage of those permissions.
- Mobile Access: Increasingly, students are consuming content on their mobile devices. Highly stylized web pages don’t play nice with apps and small screens.
- Faster: Creating good quality content in other formats (e.g., video or audio) can take a looooooong time. Also, edits, corrections, and updates are more difficult and time-consuming, and a student can skim through (and quickly return to) a page of text-based content a lot faster than watching and returning to a specific spot in a video.
- Accessibility: Captioning audio and video is getting faster, but it’s also a time-consuming step.
I’ve taken and given my share of instructional media courses to know all of these defenses I’m giving can (and often should) be overcome to improve the message design. However, these are the day-to-day realities that impact my choices.