Existing instructional design and curriculum design strategy components were synthesized to provide a comprehensive set of design models for the development of learning systems. The term instructional logistics was coined to define the management of student progress through a series of customized learning experiences. Strategies were developed for the design of student-centered learning systems by partitioning a curriculum into meaningful and manageable pieces (called chunques) and by manipulating those pieces to create personalized and individualized paths through a series of self-contained learning experiences. Strategies were developed to organize a collection of chunques into a path based on initial simplified mental models designed specifically to make the subject matter more appropriate for novice learners. Two types of paths were proposed: paths created prior to instruction based on the best guess at what is optimal for the particular circumstances (anticipatory paths) and paths modified on the fly based on diagnostic information gathered during the learning process (adaptive paths).
Curriculum design decisions were based on two propositions: that curriculum decisions can be categorized as value-laden decisions, based on some conception of worth, or as technical decisions, based on instructional needs. The three souls proposition was developed, which proposes that educational goals can be categorized as education-to-be, sagacity-to-know, or training-to-do
