Founders of Instructional Design

To better understand where Instructional Design is now, we should take a look at the foundation of the field to identify the key moments that helped shape Instructional Design to the multi-media, multi-theory field of instruction it is today.

Let's begin with the those who made an impact on the field's inception and progression. The origination of Instructional Design was directly related to the Second World War. During this time, instructional design was created to satisfy the needs of the military, specifically in training the large influx of militia entering the war due to the implementation of the draft.

Robert Gagne

Leslie Briggs

Robert Mager

B.F. Skinner

Benjamin Bloom

Robert Gagne, Leslie Briggs, and John Flanagan spent considerable amount of time and energy into creating and perfecting instructional materials for military personnel, basing much of their work on theories of human behavior, learning, and instruction.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Robert Mager, Bloomberg Benjamin, and B.F. Skinner made progress in the Instructional Design field by focusing on the Programmed Instructional Movement. This movement also sparked the creation of Behavioral Objectives, and with that came the inception of Benjamin Bloom's Taxonomy of Behavioral Objectives.