Instructional Technologies of the XXI Century

Abstract

The classical idea of an instructional process is to create some new knowledge, skills and abilities, so-called KSAs. If a student has a set of KSAs at the beginning of a learning process and if he or she has a new set of them at the end of a learning period we can say the instructional activity transforms the student from the starting state (state number 1) to the final state (state number 2). One can define such transformation as an effective action. It is possible to describe each action as a set of external impacts. In the case when this set is a series of standard actions, which usually give a predicted result, we can say it is a traditional education technology in so-called triad form: object number 1 transfers into object number 2. It is possible to present this in the form of a matrix equation. This equation is the main one in the general theory of technologies. The main idea of this article is to analyze the effectiveness of an instructional process based on mathematical descriptions, which was developed in the general theory of technologies.