/ instructional design
Instructional Design That Starts From What Learners Must Be Able To Do
Objectives first, evidence second, activities last. In that order, on purpose.
Instructional design is the discipline of deciding what a learner must be able to do, deciding what would count as proof they can do it, and only then designing the instruction that gets them there. Done in that order it produces courses that hold together. Done in the usual order, which is activities first and objectives written afterward to justify them, it produces courses that feel busy and teach less than they should.
Claorova designs learning for K to 12 and higher education, and for workforce and corporate training where the measure is whether someone can perform a job task afterward. The work is grounded in real teaching: instruction across more than twenty STEM courses at Arizona State University, with the course materials and syllabi designed alongside them.
What is backward design and why do you insist on it?
Backward design means writing the learning objective first, then defining the assessment that would demonstrate it, then building the instruction. The name comes from the fact that most people do it the other way round.
The reason to insist on it is that it exposes a specific and very common failure: instruction that is enjoyable and well delivered but does not actually produce the capability it claims. When the assessment is designed last, it gets written to match the activities that happened rather than the outcome that was promised, and everyone passes a test of the wrong thing.
In practice this means the first thing we hand you is not a lesson plan. It is a list of objectives written as observable performances, and the evidence that would satisfy each one. If that list is wrong, everything downstream is wrong, and it is far cheaper to argue about it at that stage.
How do you write a learning objective that is actually usable?
A usable objective names an observable action, the conditions it happens under, and the standard it has to meet. Given a labeled circuit diagram, the student calculates total resistance to within two percent. That can be taught to and it can be assessed.
Objectives that use verbs like understand, appreciate, or be familiar with cannot be assessed, which means they cannot really be taught to either. They are statements of intention, and they are the single most common thing we rewrite when auditing an existing course.
We also keep the count honest. A course with forty objectives has none, because nothing can be prioritized. Part of the job is deciding what the course is actually for and cutting the rest to secondary status.
What does cognitive load have to do with how a course is built?
A great deal, and it is where most well-intentioned material goes wrong. Learners have a hard limit on how much new information they can hold and manipulate at once, and instruction that ignores that limit produces the experience of having read something carefully and retained nothing.
Practically, we sequence from worked examples toward independent problems rather than starting with independent problems. We separate the introduction of new vocabulary from the introduction of new procedure, because doing both at once doubles the load for no teaching benefit. We put explanatory text next to the diagram it explains rather than on the facing page. And we cut decorative material that competes for attention with the thing being learned.
None of this is stylistic preference. It is the difference between a learner who can do the thing next week and one who could do it during the lesson only.
How do you design assessment that measures learning rather than compliance?
Start by separating the two jobs assessment does. Formative assessment exists to tell the teacher and the learner what has not landed yet, while there is still time to act. Summative assessment exists to certify that it did land. Using one as the other is a design error and it is extremely common.
For formative work we build fast, low-stakes checks that surface specific misconceptions rather than producing a score. A well built check tells you which of four wrong mental models a student is holding, not just that they got it wrong.
For summative work we build tasks that require the actual capability. If the objective is that a learner can diagnose a fault, the assessment presents a fault to diagnose. Multiple choice has a real place, mostly for efficiently checking factual and conceptual recall at scale, but it cannot certify a performance objective and we will say so rather than build a cheaper thing that looks defensible.
Do you use a formal model like ADDIE or SAM?
We use backward design as the design logic and run the project iteratively, which in practice resembles SAM more than a strict linear ADDIE. Objectives and assessments are settled early, then instruction is built in reviewable increments so you see real material quickly instead of receiving everything at the end.
We are not dogmatic about the label. If your institution requires a specific documented process, for accreditation or for internal governance, tell us and we will work inside it and produce the documentation it expects. The models mostly agree on the substance and differ on the paperwork.
How is instructional design different from curriculum development?
Curriculum development answers what gets taught, in what order, across a course or a program. Instructional design answers how any given piece of it is built so that it actually teaches. They overlap heavily and most real projects need both.
The practical distinction is scope. If you have a subject and no course, you need curriculum development. If you have a course that exists but is not working, or training material that people sit through without changing what they can do, you need instructional design. If you are not sure which, the audit tells us, and it is a short piece of work.
Frequently asked questions
Can you redesign a course we already run rather than build a new one?
Yes, and it is often the higher value project. We audit what is there against its own stated objectives, which usually reveals that the objectives, instruction, and assessment are measuring three different things, then repair the alignment.
Do you design for asynchronous online learning as well as live teaching?
Both. Asynchronous design has to work without a teacher present to notice confusion, so it needs more built-in checks, clearer segmentation, and more explicit worked examples. We design for the delivery mode you are actually using rather than converting one into the other and hoping.
Do you write the content or do we supply it?
Either. In STEM and engineering we write it. In other subjects we typically pair with a subject matter expert, yours or ours, who supplies and verifies content while we handle the instructional structure, assessment, and materials. Which arrangement applies is stated in the proposal.
Can you help us meet accreditation requirements?
We can build the learning outcomes, the assessment map, and the evidence documentation that accreditation reviews ask for, and we have built to ABET-style criteria. We are not an accreditation consultancy and will not represent ourselves as one.
How do you handle accessibility?
It is designed in rather than remediated afterward. That means readable structure and headings, alternative text for anything that carries meaning, captions and transcripts for media, sufficient contrast, keyboard-operable interactive elements, and materials that do not depend on color alone to communicate.