Book Review: First Principles of Instruction - Identifying and Designing Effective, Efficient, and Engaging Instruction

Education and time spent on learning is always pays back, right? Does professional looking instructional media means effectiveness? Is education and training are the same? Perhaps many questions popping up in our minds similar to that nature. In many cases, technology becomes a savior for those of us whom may have more questions than answers. E-learning and other fancy gagetary mock ups can dazzels many eyes, nonethless it’s not sufficent for easing up pains in many hearts and minds. Professor David Merrill, a distinguished scholar in the instructional design field calls e-learning as e3 effective, efficient, and engaging learning environment, content, and design. First Principles of Instruction: Identifying and Designing Effective, Efficient, and Engaging Instruction is published by Pfeiffer Publishing in 2012. The first edition of this book is intented to identify and design e3 instruction in all instructional settings, for learners of any age, and for all subject-matter areas, both in training and education. Many valuable researchers, academics, and respectful scholars produce very illuminating studies, by the same token academia fails short in most times to come up with practically applicable theories, models or ideas. This is the start point of this book as the author stated. Merrill, by pressing his finger to this fact by stating that he in 2002 published a paper in Educational Technology Research and Development titled First Principles of Instruction. Although the principles written in the paper seemed obvious to many practitioners, applying these principles to instructional designs appeared complex. This book was written to bring more of an applicabilitiy of design and instruction principles written in that journal article.