EME4674 is the development course — where a design becomes an actual set of instructional materials that someone can use.
Florida's statewide description frames it around a concept that is less obvious than it first appears: "the pedagogical, technical, and logistical aspects of instructional messages will provide the foundation for students to learn the fundamentals of instructional development in this course. Message design principles and individual preferences are considered as they relate to the development of instructional materials. Media and technology aspects relating to effective message delivery will be addressed and related to the logistical constraints of time and cost."
⚠ "Instructional message" is the field's term for the thing being communicated, considered separately from the medium carrying it — and it is a useful abstraction because the same message may need to work as a job aid, a video, a slide deck, an e-learning module or a one-page checklist, and the design decisions differ in each.
Message design is the empirical part of this course, and it is genuinely research-based rather than a matter of taste. There is a substantial body of evidence about how people process instructional material — that narration plus a diagram works better than narration plus on-screen text duplicating it, that decorative additions which seem engaging can reduce learning, that working memory is limited and that most instructional material overloads it. ⚠ These findings are frequently counter-intuitive and frequently contradict what a client asks for.
The three words in the statewide description — pedagogical, technical, logistical — also describe the course's honesty about practice. Time and cost are named explicitly, because instructional development in the real world is always constrained, and knowing what to build when you cannot build the ideal thing is a professional skill rather than a compromise.
Two Florida public institutions carry this number — the University of North Florida and the University of West Florida — at three credits, with identical titles.
| Institution | Its title | Credits | Contact hours |
|---|---|---|---|
| University of West Florida (SUS) | Development of Instructional Materials | 3 | not published |
| University of North Florida (SUS) | Development of Instructional Materials | 3 | not published |
✅ Both carriers use the statewide title unchanged and award three credits, and UWF's description matches the statewide description almost word for word. 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.
⚠ UNF's catalogue was not reachable when this guide was written — its online catalogue is client-rendered and its archived catalogue PDFs are blocked to automated retrieval — so UNF's own description could not be read. The matching titles make substantial divergence unlikely, but UNF students should treat their syllabus as governing.
⚠⚠ The question worth asking before you register, because it varies and the statewide description does not settle it: which authoring tools does this section use? A course built around Articulate Storyline produces different portfolio artefacts and different marketable skills than one built around documents and presentations. Neither is wrong — the principles are the transferable part — but the tool experience is what job listings name, so it is worth knowing and worth supplementing on your own if the course does not cover it.
Worth flagging because students frequently arrive expecting a design-taste course and meet an evidence-based one.
The multimedia learning research produces findings that contradict ordinary intuition about what makes material engaging:
⚠⚠⚠ The professional consequence is that clients will ask for things the evidence says will not work — more animation, more narration over text, a longer video, something flashier. Being able to explain why, from evidence rather than preference, is what makes this a profession rather than a production service. That argument is also much easier to make with a portfolio that demonstrates the alternative.
Worth stating plainly because students often treat it as an optional polish step.
Instructional materials produced by public institutions and by most employers must be accessible to people with disabilities, under federal requirements and institutional policy. In practice this means captions on video, alternative text on meaningful images, sufficient colour contrast, keyboard operability and documents structured so a screen reader can navigate them.
⚠⚠ Retrofitting accessibility is far more expensive than building it in, which is the practical argument, and it is the one employers respond to. ⚠ It is also a genuine differentiator for a new graduate — a designer who produces accessible material by default saves an organisation remediation work it has usually been putting off.
The development stage of the sequence — the D in ADDIE — taken after EME3351 (foundations) and EME3624 (needs assessment), because ⚠ the programme is deliberately built so that you cannot reach development without having been taught to ask whether anything should be developed.
It precedes or accompanies EME4083 (Program Evaluation) and feeds the capstone EME4684, which requires an electronic portfolio that this course largely supplies. No prerequisite is recorded statewide or by UWF.
⚠ A 4000-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; ⚠ that marking is near-universal across the EME prefix, so it carries no information about this course.
✅ Matching titles and credits make this a straightforward transfer. ⚠ Keep the materials you produced, not just the syllabus — in this field the artefacts are the evidence.
⚠⚠⚠ This is the course in the instructional design sequence where generative AI has changed the actual work most, and a guide that soft-pedalled that would be misleading a student about their career.
Content generation is what these tools do. Drafting instructional text, writing narration scripts, producing assessment items, generating scenario variations, creating images and synthesising voiceover are all now fast and cheap. ⚠ A substantial portion of what entry-level instructional developers were paid for five years ago can be produced in minutes. That is the reality of the market a graduate is entering.
⚠⚠ Three things follow, and they are more useful than reassurance.
First, the principles become more valuable, not less. A tool will generate a module that includes narration over identical on-screen text, decorative imagery, and a great deal of content presented at once — because that is what most instructional material in its training data looks like, and most instructional material is poorly designed. A generated artefact is fluent, professional-looking and frequently violates the redundancy, coherence and segmenting principles simultaneously. ⚠ The person who can look at it and say precisely what is wrong and why is doing something the tool cannot.
Second, the work shifts toward judgement and evaluation. Generating a first draft is now trivial; deciding whether it should exist, whether it addresses the analysed need, whether it will actually produce the performance change, and whether it is accessible and accurate — that remains the professional contribution, and it is what the rest of this sequence teaches.
⚠⚠⚠ Third, and most practically: accuracy is your responsibility and it does not transfer. Instructional materials teach people to do things. A generated module about a safety procedure, a clinical protocol or a regulatory requirement may be confidently wrong, and the organisation that published it — not the tool — carries the consequence. Subject-matter expert review was always part of development; it is now non-negotiable.
Used well, in this course: drafting text you then edit against the message design principles, generating alternative phrasings and examples, producing placeholder content for prototypes, drafting alternative text and captions for accessibility, and — ⚠ an unusually good exercise — generating a module deliberately and then critiquing it against Mayer's principles. It will fail several of them reliably, and identifying which is exactly the skill the course exists to build.
⚠ One portfolio caution, since portfolio is how this field hires. Be clear with yourself and with employers about what you designed and what you generated. The thing being assessed in a portfolio is your judgement — the analysis behind the artefact, the design decisions and the evidence for them. A portfolio of generated modules demonstrates nothing an employer cannot do themselves in an afternoon.
Generated September 15, 2026 · Updated September 15, 2026