An EPSS approach to automated instructional design: Its effect on novice designers' development

The questions of interest in this study were: What is the relationship between the attributes of an EPSS-based AID system and the quality of instructional designs produced by novice instructional designers? What attributes will novice instructional designers find most useful? How will they respond to and make use of the attributes? The participants in the study were 24 male and female graduate students enrolled in an introductory course in ISD in two universities. They were using Designing Effective Instruction by Morrison et al. (2001) and were being trained to use the MRK instructional design model. The MRK rubric for measuring the quality of the ID system designed by the participants and one EPSS questionnaire were used in the study. Qualitative data were also gathered from a student's journal, email communication, an internal electronic monitoring tool and a questionnaire. It was found that usability is significantly more important to novice designers than expandability. Interactivity and relevance were also important attributes to novice designers. A significant correlate of usability was the ability to figure out what to do. Good correlates of being able to figure out what to do were: enabling understanding of the system and provision by the system of access to all its links and resources. Significant correlates of relevance were: relevance to the need of the designers and relevance to the domain of study. Relevance of the system's responses to questions or queries was significantly related to relevance to the need of the designers and relevance to the domain of study. Learning Mode and Example Mode were used most frequently. Novice designers were primarily interested in mastering the design of Instructional Objectives and Instructional Problems as opposed to Message Design and Instruction Evaluation. From this study it appears that novice designers should be given systems that are usable, relevant and interactive. Continued work should be done to identify more features that are good correlates of these attributes. Decision making should be more under the control of the system than under the control of the user for novice instructional designers.