ADDIE

ADDIE is the most widely used instructional design model, structuring the development of training programs into five phases: Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation. In the Analysis phase, designers identify the performance problem, the audience, and the learning needs; Design defines objectives, structure, and assessment strategy; Development produces the actual content and materials; Implementation delivers the training to learners; and Evaluation measures whether it worked — both during the process (formative) and after delivery (summative). ADDIE originated in US military training design in the 1970s and became the de facto standard framework across corporate L&D and education. Its strength is discipline: it forces teams to define the problem and success criteria before producing content, which prevents the most common training failure — building courses nobody needed. Its most cited weakness is its waterfall nature: in its classic form, each phase completes before the next begins, which fits poorly with fast-changing requirements. Modern practice treats ADDIE iteratively or replaces it with agile alternatives such as SAM (Successive Approximation Model). Even so, ADDIE remains the reference vocabulary of instructional design — most job descriptions, RFPs, and L&D processes still assume familiarity with it.