Modalities of Instruction

According to Dual Coding Theory, individuals tend to learn significantly better when using a combination of instructional medium including text, visuals and audio. As a student and instructor it has been my experience that when learning about a particular matter, the acquisition of knowledge, skills and behaviors is facilitated by using a combination of learning media to enhance instruction. I also believe that when incorrectly implemented, single modality instruction quickly becomes a bore and as a result, makes it harder to instruct and learn from.  It is without question that instructional design based on a single medium modality, compared to multi medium modality falls short of being the most efficient way to instruct a particular set of knowledge, skills and desired behaviors. In spite of this fact, there are variances (text vs visual), when it comes to instructional design efficacy that employs a single modality and there are ways of enhancing that modality (visual design and color theory) to be more dynamic, captivating and conducive to better student learning outcomes.

I learned that using text, singularly as a teaching modality was the most difficult so far. I had to work harder at getting my points across when it came to presenting instruction. I had to keep in mind nomenclature, level of experience and what adjectives to use to explain something that is so much easier to present in picture or video. Teaching with text works, however the instructional designer must me very descriptive and assume that the audience knows nothing about what you are talking about.

It was much easier, in my opinion, to design and implement instruction with the use of only visuals. There is as saying that goes “a picture is worth a thousand words.” I certainly believe that, as that was indeed the case when designing my visual instruction for our week four project. It was a bit of a painstaking challenge however, using Photoshop to meticulously enhance, edit, crop and post a set of pictures with the purpose of providing a set of steps to follow that with the ultimate goal of achieving my instructional design goal.

For this particular project, I enjoyed learning how to use a variety of tools on Photoshop to edit, enhance, and crop photos. I was a total beginner to Photoshop, so I was excited and eager to learn and maneuver the program for this week’s project. On top of this, I became more comfortable with using PDF as a way of portraying my final product.

I have already been using what I've been learning in this class for my current position as a campus instructional technologist. I've recently used PDF and Photoshop to create printed and digital flyers for our upcoming laptop deployment events with great success and feedback. I foresee continually using appropriate visual design and color theory concepts with the use of the mentioned software to create greatly enhanced documents to the end of captivating and dynamically transferring information to the appropriate audience.