If I were a millionaire, I would give away T-shirts with a special emblem; designers of instruction (myself included) would get four each. The emblem reminds us of a fundamental truth about ourselves and about our students. This truth has been mentioned before (par. 1.10): each of us has four quadrants in our make-up. If, in thinking up and working out designs, we forget this, we will have made a fundamental fault.
Our most effective and efficient designs will not be valued and will not be liked. Nor will our most valued and liked design be effective and efficient. A design is something we experience. It touches the intellectual, emotional, spiritual and physical in us. A designer of instruction needs to be constantly aware of this in thinking up and working out a design and in interpreting the results obtained in developmental testing of a design.
You have met eight common faults which you may have to diagnose and cure when you test a worked-out design. There are, of course, very many more which could also have stolen into the design despite the use of the four referents and care in working out your design. You will find that a knowledge of faults is not only significant for troubleshooting worked-out designs at the time of developmental testing, but it also helps you think up better designs, work out designs in a better way and be a better diagnostician of things that have gone wrong. In time, you will find yourself thinking up, working out and testing designs all at the same time in your think tank. This is a signal that you have the art and craft of the design of instruction coming into your fingertips. You’ll see it in the ‘fingerprint’ that your decision-making will put on your courses or lessons: their designs will be effective, valued, liked and efficient.