ISD From The Ground Up, 4th Edition

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A Brief History of ISD

Anyone working in ISD should know some of the history of the field and how various, somewhat loosely linked areas of academic research led to the work we perform today. Instructional design is a professional endeavor that doesn’t rely on a rich history or linkage with anyone particularly famous outside of academia to bolster its image or to feed its success. In fact, it sometimes seems to delight in its somewhat obscure origins. For those reasons and others, this brief unofficial history of ISD is offered as a background to fill in this vacuum of information.

While this anonymity isn’t a negative, spending a little time looking at how ISD evolved certainly adds a foundation of confidence to new designers and a historical ...