Instructional design: ID proposal phase III 1

Introduction

Honest Ally Food International is a global company that is a part of a consortium of

humanitarian NGOs that is concerned about promoting strategic solutions for the food insecurity

problem worldwide. They have identified the need to use instructional solution to develop a

program to promote strategies aimed at addressing food insecurity and educate the local

community in Nigeria. According to a news article in Sky News (2017), Nigeria has major

electricity (power) problem that is possible of affecting internet connectivity. Therefore, as an

instruction designer I will adopt surviving instructional deign strategies and technologies to

implement and educate the HAFI workers. Technological gadgets smart devices will be used.

Mobiles applications embedded with practical videos on food insecurity strategies will be

available at on google market and apple store for download.

Instructional Problem

Honest Ally Food International has expressed the need to develop an instructional

program to address food insecurity to educate the local community, training new workers, and

provide a professional development for existing workers and volunteers to improve their

performance. Due to the travel costs and lodging from sending the employees to get their

training, HAFI prefers an online solution that will greatly reduce the training costs. As

mentioned earlier, HAFI is a global organization, that adds to the considerations the multilingual

nature of the communities that HAFI serves. The target community in this proposal is the

Nigerian community as a starting step of the project. Nigeria has another problem besides food

insecurity which is power loss as mentioned earlier, and this issue is added to the priorities to be

handled in our design.

Instructional design: ID proposal phase III 2

Proposed Solution

The proposed solution is an educational mobile app with embedded instructional videos

as well as embedded assessment tools that will measure the knowledge transferred to the

learners. The results of the assessments will be sent to a cloud database for a later review by the

directors. The administrators of HAFI will have a special tab in the website that will give them

the privilege to review the learners results to help them make their decisions.

The mobile app will be developed on two major platforms which support iOS and

Android and will be available for public download on their corresponding stores which are

Google market and Apple store. These two operating systems are taking a considerable share of

the overall smart devices market in the entire world.

Reasons for Choosing the Solution

The reason behind choosing this solution with this type of mobile technology is because

of the portability and mobility of the solution, mobile applications are becoming a part of our day

use, and smart devices are affordable in our days and are almost in the hands of everyone.

Mobile applications nowadays are used for various purposes like, shopping,

communications, weather forecast, drawing and much more are examples of uses of mobile

applications on smart devices, and the biggest companies have moved towards this solution for

the sake of increasing their profit since they want their products to be in the hands with few taps

on the device.

Involving the mobile technology as a solution for the instructional problem of HAFI will

boost the learning process since the mobile application solution will be in the hands of the

majority with low cost compared to other solutions. Mobile applications are now boosting for
Instructional design: ID proposal phase III 3

instructional purposes because of the the high capabilities and support of embedded tools that we

can build up within an app. The support of multimedia and embedding audio visual materials

makes instructions easier to build and hence, instruction will be more effective. Mathematical

modules are now easier than ever to implement with in a small app and make the best use of

them for the purpose of assessments and evaluations.

The effect of the power problem in Nigeria as mentioned earlier, could be reduced greatly

when using this type of solutions, i.e. using a mobile application on smart devices for

instructional purposes. This is because of two reasons; The first reason is that we are using

embedded instructional videos, the videos do not need to be uploaded to the cloud and buffered

through the internet to the smart device, instead, we will upload the whole videos with

appropriate size reduction techniques inside the mobile application itself. This part of the

solution is making the instructional materials (videos) independent of the internet. Also,

embedding the videos inside the application will not affect the smart device storage much since

the smart devices are manufactured with a considerable high capacity nowadays. The second

reason that our solution reduces the effect of the power loss in Nigeria, is because of the charging

ability of the mobile devices, that makes the instructional application usable even when there is a

cut in power or internet interruption. The application is planned to have an embedded database to

store the results of the assessment part of the module, and the results are sent to the webpage for

the directors to review once the mobile device has internet coverage.

Instructional Design Model

The need is identified in the RFP is an expressed need for HAFI to develop an

instructional material to promote strategies aimed at addressing food insecurity. The fundamental

components of our proposed instructional design are as follows:

Instructional design: ID proposal phase III 4

Learners: Learners in this project are current workers in the institution, volunteers, and

the local community. Therefore, to make the design more efficient, effective and less

difficult, learner characteristics will be collected to determine the educational

background, competencies, approach learning and process information. This level is to

help the instructional designer to design the material in the appropriate pace. Using online

survey form will be emailed to the learners individually.

Objectives: Identifying the learning objectives will help the learner to know the main

keys and concepts in the instructional unit that are important for the learner to be aware

of. The instructional objectives will be:

a) To be consistent and professional in the practices food security.

b) To be able to apply mechanisms to prevent food insecurity In Nigeria.

c) To be aware of the organizations policies.

identifying the objectives will help the instructional designer to design the appropriate

material needed for the learner to master.

Methods: For this project, several instructional strategies will be taken into account. The

learning-related sequencing will be adopted for instructional content sequencing. This

sequencing strategy is based on the learner characteristics and considers pre-requisite

tasks that the learner needs to master before demonstrating more complex tasks. Familiar

food insecurity cases in Nigeria and across the global will be analyzed to broaden

learners understanding of the problem. Less challenging issues, thought-provoking cases

and topics on food insecurity will be discussed as well. Also, integration strategy will be

adopted for designing the instructions. The integration strategy is useful for transforming

information into a more easily remembered form, which allows the learners to describe
Instructional design: ID proposal phase III 5

the information in their own language. The instructional videos will be designed carefully

and confirmed with the SME who will be provided by HAFI organization. The videos

will also by created with multilingual audio tracks to maintain the diverse nature of HAFI

organization.

Evaluation: summative evaluation will be used to assess the learners after watching the

videos of each module. Embedded questions in the app will show up to the learner and to

measure their understanding. The result will be saved in the app and will be sent to the

directors once the smart device has an internet connection.

Task analysis is the most crucial step in the instructional designing process. In training

employees on food insecurity program and strategies, and professionalism across board,

a standardized procedure method will be adopted to ensure order of sequence and steps that

learners must perform to achieve the food security program. A procedural analysis will also be

used to analyze task by identifying the steps required to complete the training.

To increase learners understanding and keep them focus on exactly what is expected of

them a pre-instructional will be used to prepare the learners to be ready for the training. Words,

typography, pictures and graphics will be used to attract thoughtfulness to provide other

information in the text. Graphics and pictures will be used to enhance effectiveness and explain

dimensional relationships described in the text.

A heuristic message designing process will be adopted, this process is for building

effective instructional message that makes it easier for the learner to comprehend and memorize.

Message design will be applied in this project to make food insecurity concrete throughout the

training by using illustrations, graphics, and photos.

Instructional design: ID proposal phase III 6

Food security terminologies will be consistent while a multiple-choice question will be

used when transitioning from one units to another through a mobile application.

Project Implementation

Depending on the information provided in the RFP, the organizations belonging to the

consortium are globally dispersed, and consistency of practices among those organizations

should be maintained. Therefore, the proposed instructional solution for this case is composed of

two parts, a learner's part director's part. The learners part is mobile app that may be

downloaded to mobile devices that run the two widely spread mobile operating systems

(Android, iOS) through the mobile cloud servers (Google store, Apple store). All workers

(current and newly employed) are welcome to download the app to their personal smart devices

which will contain information in video format about the HAFI and its strategies aimed at

addressing the food insecurity problem. It will also contain an embedded assessment test to

reflect feedback to the appropriate departments about the workers.

Due to diversity and the cultural differences of the learners in HAFI, the mobile app will

be multilingual (localized) depending on the language specified on the smart device by default.

Moreover, a manual option for changing the language will be included as well, in case of any

learner who is willing to use the application and prefer another language of instruction. The

instructional videos will also be created with multilingual audio tracks that will play in the same

language specified for instruction.

The main screen of the app will be the sign-in/sign-up screen. The purpose of this stage is

to bind the learner to his/her learning process. The learner must create a profile to use the

application. This will give privacy to the application user and protect his/her results, and it also
Instructional design: ID proposal phase III 7

allows different users to use the same mobile device for learning. Another purpose of the sign-up

stage is to get the learners characteristics by asking the learner to fill out questions in the sign up

form. Moreover, a benefit of creating a profile is the learning flexibility, i.e. the learner can sign-

out and maintain his/her learning achievement, and can also sign back in to complete the learning

process and complete the remaining modules that have not been marked as completed as

explained later.

The next step in the application after the learner sign-up or sign-in if he/she already

created a profile, the learner will have the option to select the topic to be learned, and an

embedded video will play for the learner, after the video is done playing, the assessment for the

section learnt will show up. A series of multiple choice questions which are embedded in the app

will show up to the learner where they will answer and go to the next question. Once the learners

finish the assessment part of the section, the section will be marked as completed and the result

of the assessment part will be sent to HAFI directors to review.

The results will be sent using HTTP communication protocol to a web service that will

receive the results and store them in the cloud database. In case of internet outage, a copy of the

result for each learner is reserved on an embedded database in the smart device itself to be sent

over to the directors later once the device has internet coverage.

The second part is a webpage solution for the directors to be able to review and analyze

the results of the assessment of HAFI workers and volunteers that are sent from the mobile

devices. The directors will need to provide access credentials to access the information and

results of the learners. The credentials are going to be created and provided by our web designer.

The web page contains a database that stores the necessary information of the learners along with
Instructional design: ID proposal phase III 8

their assessment results and has a friendly user interface that will make it easy for the directors to

navigate and access that information.

Project timeline

Table 1

Initial timeline estimation of the expenses of ID design

Task Task time

Identifying learner characteristics. May 1 2017 to May 15 2017

Objectives and developing instructional May 16 2017 to June 15 2017

materials

Graphical design May 16 2017 to July 1 2017

Units evaluation tests design June 16 2017 to July 1 2017

Webpage and services implementation July 2 2017 to July 23 2017

Mobile application development July 2 2017 to August 1 2017

System testing and bug fixes August 2 2017 to September 1 2017

As we see from table 1, the time needed for the project to be fully implemented is

approximately four months, the instructional designer is responsible for identifying the learners

characteristics, setting the objectives and developing instructional materials, and unit evaluation

tests design. The graphical design task will kick off after the instructional designer identifies the

learners characteristics and objectives, and proceeds to developing the instructional material,

here we notice an overlaps in the time between some of the tasks. The graphical designers job

overlaps with instructional designer while developing the instructional materials, because they
Instructional design: ID proposal phase III 9

both need to work together as the instructional designer needs to develop instructions and

assessment questions that might contain graphics.

The development of the webpage and the mobile application overlap in time also because

they can run synchronously at the same time, the commonly shared items between them are the

graphics that are in common and they need to be delivered by the graphics designer who is going

to work on the graphics needed for the mobile apps after finishing his/her job with the

instructional designer in developing the instructional materials. After mobile development and

webpage and services tasks are done, system testing is going to be performed to make sure that

the mobile application can communicate perfectly with the web service that feeds the webpage

with the learners results to be stored and later reviewed by the directors.

Evaluation Plan

As mentioned earlier, summative assessment will be adopted to assess the knowledge

transfer to the learners as well as the skills acquired and the outcomes of the course. The

assessment will be designed to measure the instructional objectives that have been identified in

earlier stages. An objective test of multiple choice questions will be designed at various levels of

difficulties which are easy, medium, and hard.

The criteria of the implementation of the multiple choice questions in the mobile app is going to

be by will be embedded inside the mobile application that will show up after the user watches the

instructional videos of each module, then the answers are saved to be sent to the cloud data base

that will later be accessible to the directors to make the necessary decisions.

Budget

Table 2
Instructional design: ID proposal phase III 10

Initial budget estimation of the expenses of ID design

Expense Amount in us dollars ($)

Instructional designer $10000

Project manager $23400

Graphics designer $5250

Website developer $3625

Website domain $13

Mobile developer $6000

Total $48288

As we can see from table 2, the total budget of this project is $48288, the instructional

designer will need to work for approximately two months to complete his tasks that are

mentioned above, and the average annual salary for an instructional designer is approximately

$60K according to PayScale (2017), that justifies the instructional designers budget of $10K for

this project.

Furthermore, according to PayScale (2017) the average salary for a graphical designer is

approximately $42K, which justifies the graphics designer budget of $5250 who is going to work

for one and a half months.

For a web developer, the average annual salary is approximately $58K according to

PayScale (2017), which justifies his budget of $3625 for a work duration of three weeks. The

web developer is responsible for creating the web page and its embedded database for HAFI
Instructional design: ID proposal phase III 11

managers for reviewing the learners results, as well as the communication web service that

communicates between the web page and the mobile application. The average annual website

domain costs $13 according to WpSiteCare (2017).

A project managers average annual salary according to Salary (2017) is $70K. The

project manager according to (Morrison, 2013) is responsible for the kick off and the delivery of

the project, assigning the resources and managing the budget, task management, and maintaining

the connection with the client managers and keep them updated about the project progress. As a

result, the project manager is working for the entire duration of the project. Thus, by making the

necessary calculations, the project managers budget in the project is justified by him/her taking

$23400.

According to salary (2017), the mobile applications developer average annual salary is

$71K, which justifies the amount dedicated in the budget as $6K. The mobile applications

developer is responsible for developing the entire instructional mobile application on two

platforms (Android and iOS).

Sample instructional food insecurity module: http://food-insecurity.weebly.com

Instructional design: ID proposal phase III 12

References

Morrison, G., Ross, S. M., Kalman, H. K., & Kemp, J. E. (2013). Designing effective instruction.

Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Krathwohl, D.R., Bloom, B.S., & Masia, B.B (1964). A taxonomy of educational objective:

Handbook II. 6th ed. The affective domain, New York: Mckay.

Smith, P. L., & Ragan, T. J. (2005). Instructional Design (Third ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley

& Sons, Inc.

PayScale (2017). Instructional designer annual salary. Retrieved from:

http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Instructional_Designer/Salary

PayScale (2017). Graphics designer annual salary. Retrieved from:

http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Graphic_Designer/Salary

PayScale (2017). Web developer annual salary. Retrieved from:

http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Web_Developer/Salary

PayScale (2017). Mobile applications developer annual salary. Retrieved from:

http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Mobile_Applications_Developer/Salary

Salary (2017). Project manager salary. Retrieved from:

http://www1.salary.com/Project-Manager-I-Salary.html

WPSiteCare (2017). Website domain cost. Retrieved from:

https://www.wpsitecare.com/how-much-does-a-website-cost/

Sky News (2017). Nigerian power problems. Retrieved from:

http://www.skynews.com.au/news/world/africa/2016/12/07/nigerian-power-problems-

hold-back-economy.html