Page 41 - Educational Technology A Primer for the 21st Century

28 1 Introduction to Educational Technology
• Evaluator—responsible for the formative and summative evaluation of lessons,
courses, programs, instructional systems, and/or learning environments
• Instructor—responsible leading units of instruction, tutoring students, and/or
providing learning guidance and feedback in the context of formal learning
contexts.

Another way to represent the complexity of educational technology is in terms of
Robert Tennyson’s(1995) Fourth-Generation Instructional Systems Development
(ISD) model (see Fig. 1.4). Note that in this context, the notion of “development”
covers the entire life cycle of planning, implementing, managing, and evaluating an
educational effort. Some practitioners refer to this notion of development as big D,
and some also use design in the same big D sense to cover the entire life cycle. In
this volume, we generally use design and development to refer to specific tasks
rather than the entire process.
Terminology is often an important component of gaining competence in a
particular domain. For that reason, we have included definitions of key terms in
each chapter in an effort to use those terms as would most educational technologists.
Nonetheless, different uses do occur in various situations. That is particularly true
with regard to terms “assessment” and “evaluation” which are treated later in this
volume. In general, and by way of an advance organizer, “assessment” is most often

Fig. 1.4 Tennyson’s Fourth-Generation ISD model (used with permission)