According to Kerr (2000), the notion of instructional design is a curious one in that while all teachers and instructors are presumably concerned about providing good instruction and most of them are likely to think in terms of preparing or planning for the teaching they do, relatively few use the term "instructional design" to refer to the process. The term and the concept of instructional design gained wide popularity in the United States in the early 1970s. It was used first and foremost to refer to the process of preparing instructional programs or materials initially used in either business and industrial training or in large university courses requiring some extra element of organization. Kerr (2000) further noted that elements of technology, while not seen as central to instructional design, have typically played a role in carrying out the resulting plans.
Blanton (1998) identified a model for instructional design that begins with educational goals that include learner analysis, society, and subject content. The goals should include learner needs and interests, reflect the concerns of society, and make every effort to ensure that goals are focused at least toward the present and, hopefully, to the future needs of the learner. Blanton (1998) also considers instructional design to be a byproduct of schema theory and scaffolding theory as promulgated by such theorists as Lev Vygotsky and Jerome Bruner. Instructional design, accordingly, refers to several different models or processes by means of which all of the disparate processes of learning are oriented toward the acquisition of knowledge as well as higher order skills (i.e., problem-solving, critical thinking).
While any number of researchers have examined instructional design in the context of multiculturalism and cultural diversity (Zhang, 2001), others have tended to focus on the ways in which electronic and computerized technologies can be employed to foc...