Institute of Teaching and Learning Excellence

Teaching & Learning Skills

Learning Styles

Media Selection

Principles of Technology Integration

Hierarchy of learning

This section introduces one of David Merrill's approaches for course and curriculum design. His Display Component Theory is based on Gagne's " conditions of learning". This strategy has been effectively used for organizing and designing teaching and learning content. In a simplified version of this approach, the learning content is divided into five categories:

• Teaching and learning factual information
• Teaching and learning concepts
• Teaching and learning procedures
• Teaching and learning process
• Teaching and learning principles

For each category, Merrill has developed three levels of learning activity. I have created a simplified example of Merrill's approach which is presented below. This approach can be used for any course in any learning setting.

Some Benefits of Merrill's Approach:

• Facilitates learning activities at a specific and consistent level
• Enhances ability to provide feedback and evaluation
• Simplifies conversion of learning content into different media formats
• Magnifies the value of the application and problem solving levels
• Streamlines tasks of organizing learning content according to appropriate levels of presentation and display
• Organizes learning content into more manageable segments

The Content-Performance Matrix