What are Instructional Methods?

What are Instructional Methods?

(Excerpted from Beatty 2002)

Learning goals, whether stated or not, form an important basis for choosing instructional methods. The core of each of the descriptive case studies is the report of specific instructional methods that utilize (create, facilitate, sustain, etc.) social interaction among the participants in an online learning environment. One of the guiding research questions for this study concerns identifying effective combinations of instructional methods in online learning environments ; therefore, the instructional methods reported in each case are central to this research. Instructional methods are simply the answer to the question, "What does the educator 'do' to facilitate student learning?" Examples of instructional methods from cases in this study include:

Students work in small groups to complete a joint project that requires communication and file sharing among group members (Ragoonaden & Bordeleau, 2000).
Format course materials and discussion posts so they can be easily downloaded and read off-line (Carswell, Thomas, Petre, Price, & Richards, 2000).
Include students from other locations, especially other countries, to engage in dialog about course content (Bonk, Fischler, & Graham, 2000).
Provide a method for synchronous personal communication between students such as chat, phone, or facsimile (fax) (Curtis & Lawson, 2001).
Each study group sends a periodic intergroup summary report to the other groups, highlighting the major topics of their own discussion and important conclusions they may have reached (Eggers, 1999).

Instructional methods were easy to identify in the case reports. In general, each case report described the instructional methods they used in great detail.

View the instructional methods in the SIO tool

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