A Conceptual Structure of Knowledge as a Basis for Instructional Designs

As in the knowledge economy life-long learning is becoming the rule, instructional design requires a similar solid base as e.g., bridge engineering. Bridges seldom fall apart thanks to design in accordance with well tested and commonly accepted design rules, based on a even more thoroughly tested and commonly accepted model, namely physics. Given the increasing importance of instructional design (Merrienboer, 2002), well tested design rules become desirable for instructional design as well. As a contribution to the discussion of design rules, this paper proposes a model for verbalizable knowledge from which a complete set of design rules follows and which bases instructional design for cognitive tasks solidly on logic, the intrinsic structure of knowledge and proven didactical principles. This model for knowledge driven instructional design (KD-ID) allows for extensive quantification in instructional design and training and is compatible with modern ontology approaches, especially the World Wide Web standard OWL (Dean and Schreiber, 2004)