Practical Principles of Instructional Design, Media Selection, and Interface Design with a Focus on Computer-based Training / Educational Software

This book is intended for students, instructional designers, professors, instructors, teachers, trainers, software developers, and development team leaders who: are taking a course on creating computer-based training/educational software applications are or will be working on a computer-based training/educational software development team need to expand their skills into the multimedia technology field are excited about the possibilities of teaching with multimedia have worked on their own and unsuccessfully tried to do it all may have created mediocre computer-based training/educational software want to do it right the first time need a practical reference need practical guidelines for creating computer-managed presentations This book focuses on the practical principles of creating computer-based training/educational software applications and computer-managed presentations. In computer-based training/educational software applications, the computer assumes the teaching role. In computer-managed presentations, you maintain the responsibility for teaching the learners and use what is contained in the presentation as a resource. In a sense, computer-managed presentations are a subset of computer-based training/educational software applications. Their differences will be highlighted throughout this book. This book will not make you an expert in designing computer-based training/educational software applications. Expertise comes through years of experience and continual learning. However, this book will provide you with the foundations for creating professional, instructionally-effective products. To gain support for your computer-based training/educational software applications and computer-managed presentations and to silence the critics, it is important to create excellent products. People will notice quality much more than quantity. This is especially true for your first project. This book, with its numerous practical hints, will help you do it right from your first project onward.