EME3351 is the foundations course of an instructional design curriculum — and its subject is a distinction that the field itself spent decades working out.
Florida's statewide description is unusually precise about it: "the distinct purposes of instructional technology and human performance technology are explored in depth in this course. The foundations and evolution of each discipline serve to establish distinct definitions that will be investigated. The similarities and differences will be compared to include the historical basis, models, major tasks," and desired outcomes.
⚠⚠ The distinction is the most useful idea in the field, and it is genuinely counter-intuitive: instructional technology asks how to teach something well; human performance technology asks whether teaching is the right intervention at all.
That second question is what separates a professional instructional designer from someone who makes training. A great deal of organisational training is commissioned to solve problems that training cannot solve. If people are not performing as expected, the cause may be unclear expectations, missing tools, bad incentives, an impossible process, or feedback that never reaches them — and none of those is fixed by a course. Building excellent training for a problem that is not a knowledge problem wastes money and leaves the problem in place.
⚠ Performance technology supplies the framework for asking first — Gilbert's behaviour engineering model and the analysis tradition that follows from it — and it is why the next course in the sequence is training needs assessment rather than course design.
Two Florida public institutions carry this number, and ⚠⚠ one of them appears to teach something substantially different under it. See Special Information — it is the most important thing on this page.
This is the most consequential thing on this page and it is flagged rather than resolved, for reasons given below.
| Source | Title | Subject |
|---|---|---|
| Statewide | Introduction to Instructional and Performance Technology | the two disciplines, their history, models and distinction |
| UWF | Introduction to Instructional and Performance Technology | ⚠ matches the statewide description verbatim |
| ⚠⚠ UNF | Adult Learning Theory and Curriculum Development | ⚠ apparently a different subject |
These are related but they are not the same course. Adult learning theory — andragogy, self-directed learning, motivation and transfer — is foundational material that an instructional design programme certainly covers somewhere. But it is not the instructional-technology-versus-performance-technology distinction that the statewide description makes the subject of this number, and curriculum development is a different activity again.
⚠ Why this is flagged rather than settled: UNF's course descriptions could not be retrieved. UNF's online catalogue is client-rendered and its archived catalogue PDFs are blocked to automated retrieval, so only the title is available. A title is weaker evidence than a description, and this project's own experience is that a divergent title sometimes sits on a course whose description matches perfectly well.
What to do about it.
| Institution | Its title | Credits | Contact hours |
|---|---|---|---|
| University of West Florida (SUS) | Introduction to Instructional and Performance Technology | 3 | not published |
| University of North Florida (SUS) | ⚠ Adult Learning Theory and Curriculum Development | 3 | not published |
Both carriers award three credits. The 45 contact hours recorded here is Florida's convention for a three-credit lecture course. UWF places the course in the School of Education, Department of Instructional Design and Technology — ⚠ a department name worth noticing, since it confirms this is a design profession programme housed in a school of education rather than teacher preparation.
⚠ UNF's catalogue was not reachable when this guide was written, so its description could not be read. UNF students should treat their syllabus as governing.
The foundations course of the sequence. No prerequisite is recorded statewide or by UWF, so it is accessible early — and it should be taken early, because everything downstream assumes its vocabulary and its central distinction.
It leads into EME3624 (Training Needs Assessment), which operationalises the "is this a training problem?" question, then EME4674 (Development of Instructional Materials), EME4083 (Program Evaluation), EME4043 (Instructional Technology Leadership) and the capstone EME4684.
⚠ Notice the order the programme is built in. Needs assessment comes before development, and evaluation is a separate course — which is the ADDIE sequence made into a curriculum, and is itself a lesson about how the field thinks.
⚠ A 3000-level course carrying upper-division credit, which a bachelor's degree requires and a lower-division course cannot supply.
Florida's statewide record classifies it as transferable to an institution offering the same course, with no Gordon Rule designation and no general-education category — programme coursework. It is marked available for dual enrolment with elective high-school credit, though ⚠ that marking is near-universal across the EME prefix (401 of 409 records) and so says nothing distinctive.
⚠⚠ Given the UNF title divergence, this is the course in the sequence whose transfer most needs a written evaluation. Keep your syllabus.
⚠⚠⚠ Instructional design is among the professions most directly affected by generative AI, and this course — which is about what the profession is for — is the right place to think about it clearly rather than anxiously.
The honest position is that a substantial part of what junior instructional designers have historically been paid to do is now cheap. Drafting content from a subject-matter expert's notes, writing assessment items, producing scripts, generating scenario variations, and building a first version of a module are all things these tools do quickly and increasingly well. Pretending otherwise would not serve a student choosing this career.
⚠⚠ But this course teaches precisely the thing that is not automated, and the coincidence is exact enough to be worth stating carefully.
The field's central insight is that the request is not the problem. When a manager asks for training, the professional's first job is to find out whether training will fix anything — whether the cause is knowledge, or whether it is unclear expectations, missing tools, bad incentives, a broken process, or absent feedback. ⚠ Gilbert's whole argument is that environmental causes usually dominate, and that instruction aimed at a non-instructional problem is waste.
A generative tool asked to build training will build training. It has no access to the workplace, cannot observe the process, cannot interview the people doing the work, and will not come back and say the course should not be built. ⚠⚠ It is, structurally, an extremely efficient way to produce the thing this discipline exists to warn you against producing.
The practical implication for a career: the parts of this work that are getting cheaper are development and production. The parts that are not are analysis, cause determination, stakeholder negotiation, evaluation design, and the judgement to recommend a non-instructional intervention — which are the human performance technology half of this course. ⚠ A student who treats this course as the theoretical preamble and the software courses as the real content has the value inverted.
Where these tools genuinely help in your own study: explaining a model in a different way until it lands, generating comparison tables between design models, producing practice scenarios for cause analysis, and drafting material you then critique. ⚠ Critiquing generated instructional material against the models in this course is an unusually good exercise — it is fluent, plausible, structurally reasonable, and it will systematically omit the analysis that should have preceded it. Noticing exactly what is missing is the skill.
Generated September 15, 2026 · Updated September 15, 2026