Instructional Design Foundations and Applications

Course in 4 Modules, each Module to be completed in 1 week. I completed all 4 modules in three weeks, and the number of hours varied a lot, but I think it took me about 30 hours in total.

Course material is very good, and includes videos and recommended reading (online articles), as well as links to websites that might be useful. Very clearly structured, it guides you step by step from basics to more specialized knowledge, with examples, in-video questions and direct links to that week's forum where you can answer and read other student's answers.

Videos are not short (about 10-30 minutes) and pack a lot of information together, and there are about 3 to 8 per module. I have no idea how it looks on mobiles. Estimated times per module indicated in the course (about 2-4 hours) is really the sum of video time plus a few minutes for required reading, and will probably only apply to people who breeze through without needing to stop and think. It's definitely twice or three times that time, especially for beginners.

I took about 8 hours for Module 1 ("week 1" of 4) because I take lots of notes and have a visual/cinestetic learning type, but someone with better recall and auditive memory can probably do it in half that time or less. This is also my very first course on ID and I'm new to the field. As an absolute beginner, this course is fantastic, but I can imagine that people with (empirical) prior knowledge in the field can use it to organize and brush up on their knowledge and skills and learn quite a lot about ID evolution. A lot of ADDIE in the first module, which is great for beginners.

As for video quality, they essentially show a lecturer talking interspersed with power-point type slides, but they are very good slides and it doesn't get boring, except for one of the lecturers who looks and sounds like he himself is bored senseless and falling asleep. Thankfully, the complete transcript is below the video and you can skip forward to the slides and read rather than listen to the lecture. Skipping through the transcript might also be a good idea for people who know most of the stuff and just want to brush up on their knowledge.

In-video questions are engaging and challenging, forum could be better but really depends on student interaction (they don't do very often) so it's not really a shortcoming of the course. Recommended websites are great, elearninginfographics.com is a gem both for students of the course as well as for communicating with stakeholders who can't get the difference between traditional classroom learning and effective and engaging e-learning courses.

Difficulty. Up to module 2 it was smooth sailing, information-intensive but not too difficult on a cognitive level. Module 3 requires more analysis and attention, and module 4 (Task Analysis) was, though the shortest, the one that took me the longest, because I found it pretty hard to apply all those new concepts correctly. No doubt that someone with background in education will find it a lot easier than I did.

Evaluations: you can take the end-of module quiz for free, which is challenging (for beginners), but in order to get the results and the grade you have to pay. Same thing about peer-graded assignment, auditing students can't participate, which is fair.

I absolutely recommend this course for beginners as well as a review tool for advanced learners.