The Gerlach and Ely Instructional Design Model: A Comprehensive Guide for Course Writers

Most instructional design models present themselves as a strict sequence: analyse, design, develop, implement, evaluate, in that order, one step feeding the next. The Gerlach and Ely model, developed by Vernon Gerlach and Donald Ely, takes a different position — it treats content and objectives as two interdependent starting points that shape each other, and it's built as a cycle rather than a straight line. For course creators who've found rigid linear models frustrating in practice, because real course design never actually happens in a straight line, Gerlach and Ely can feel like a more honest map of the work.

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Two starting points instead of one

Most models insist you must define learning objectives before anything else can happen. Gerlach and Ely instead treat specifying content and specifying objectives as parallel, mutually influencing steps. In practice, this matches how experienced course builders actually work: sometimes you start with a clear objective and figure out what content serves it; other times you start with content you know needs to be taught — a regulatory requirement, an established body of knowledge — and the objectives get sharpened as you work out what a learner genuinely needs to do with that content. Neither direction is wrong, and the model doesn't force you to pretend otherwise.

The practical benefit is that it removes a common stalling point in course design: the feeling that you can't move forward until objectives are perfectly written. Gerlach and Ely gives you permission to draft objectives roughly, start shaping content in parallel, and let the two refine each other over a few passes.

Assessing entering behaviour before designing the path

Related: Coursewriter - Expert Advice for Effective Course Design.

A distinctive element of the model is its explicit step for assessing entering behaviour — what learners already know and can do before the course starts. This sounds obvious stated plainly, but it's one of the most commonly skipped steps in real course design, especially under time pressure. Skipping it produces one of two failure modes: a course pitched too high, that assumes prior knowledge learners don't have, or a course pitched too low, that bores learners who already know the basics and disengages them before the material that would actually challenge them.

Gerlach and Ely treats this assessment as a formal, non-optional stage rather than an assumption. In modern terms, this might be a short diagnostic quiz before the course begins, a self-assessment survey, or simply a review of prerequisite completion data if the course sits in a sequence. The point is to make the assumption explicit and checked, rather than implicit and hoped for.

Determining strategy: expository versus discovery

The model draws a clean distinction between expository strategies — presenting information directly, telling learners what they need to know — and discovery strategies, where learners work toward a conclusion through guided exploration or problem-solving. Neither is treated as universally superior; the model asks the designer to choose deliberately based on the content and the objective, rather than defaulting to whichever style is more comfortable to produce.

• Expository strategies suit factual, procedural, or foundational content where efficiency matters.
• Discovery strategies suit content where the reasoning process itself is part of what's being taught.
• Most real courses need both, applied deliberately at different points rather than picked once for the whole course.

Organising groups, time, and space as design decisions

See also: Coursewriter Best Practices for Effective Learning Design.

Where many instructional design models treat logistics as an afterthought handled after the "real" design work is done, Gerlach and Ely elevates group size, time allocation, and space into design decisions with the same status as content and strategy. Should a given activity be done individually, in small groups, or as a whole cohort? How much time does this specific lesson genuinely need, rather than how much time is convenient to allocate? What physical or digital space does this activity require to work?

This matters more in online course design than the model's mid-century origins might suggest. "Space" for a modern course creator might mean whether an activity works better as an asynchronous forum post or a live breakout room; "grouping" might mean whether a peer-review exercise pairs learners or puts them in fours. The underlying discipline — treat these as decisions, not defaults — transfers directly.

Evaluation and feedback as a loop back into the model

The final two elements, evaluating performance and analysing feedback, aren't treated as an endpoint the way a linear model's "evaluate" phase often is. In Gerlach and Ely, the feedback loop feeds directly back into the content and objectives at the start of the cycle, closing it into something closer to a continuously refined system than a one-time project. This is a genuinely useful mental model to carry into any course you build and revise over multiple cohorts: the first version is a hypothesis, not a finished product, and the evaluation stage exists to generate the next revision, not just a grade.

Applying a model like this by hand across every module of a full course is genuinely time-consuming, particularly the parallel work of refining content and objectives together and keeping strategy decisions consistent across lessons. Course Writer is built to absorb that structural load — it generates a complete curriculum, sequenced lessons, and assessments in under thirty minutes and exports directly into Canvas, Blackboard, or Moodle, giving you a solid first pass to apply exactly this kind of evaluate-and-refine cycle to, rather than starting the structural work from a blank page.

Why the model still holds up

Gerlach and Ely predates the LMS era entirely, yet its core insight — that content, objectives, strategy, grouping, and logistics are interdependent rather than sequential — maps unusually well onto the messy reality of building online courses. For course creators who've felt boxed in by rigid linear frameworks, it's worth treating this model less as a historical artefact and more as permission to design the way you probably already work: iteratively, with content and objectives shaping each other, rather than pretending the process is a straight line it never actually is.