Building-block solutions for developing instructional software

This introduction consists of five parts. First, the central problem of this dissertation, namely, the difficulties instructional designers experience in ensuring an unequivocal interpretation of their designs by software producers, is introduced by means of an illustrative scenario. Second, this “transition bottleneck” is further explored and, third, possible solutions are proposed, emphasizing new roles for instructional designers who have to interact more and more with the building blocks of the development process normally intended for software producers rather than instructional designers. Fourth, the main research questions of this dissertation are formulated, directed at testing three building-block solutions that support instructional designers in their new roles: (1) The Developing Design Documents (3D) model to support designers in stratifying, elaborating, and formalizing design documents; (2) instructional software templates to support designers in producing software themselves, and (3) an integrative approach to support designers in reusing learning objects. Finally, the structure of the dissertation is presented by briefly describing each of the four reported studies.