Ramblings of a Mad Instructional Designer

This is something I've pondered about lately. With the PSU Learning Design Summer Camp 2008 over, I reflected back on the backchannel communication that took place there via Twitter, and how it's helped build another binding tie in the PSU Learning Design area.

Here's my thought. Everything is changing. The pace of change is accelerating. It's impossible to keep up. GO HIDE YOUR HEAD IN THE SAND NOW!!!! Yet wait. All that is true, but there is a way out. It lies in the communities we engage in. Have you heard of distributed cognition? Right from Wikipedia:

Distributed cognition is a branch of cognitive science that proposes that human knowledge and cognition are not confined to the individual. Instead, it is distributed by placing memories, facts, or knowledge on the objects, individuals, and tools in our environment.

Therein lies the answer. YOU can't keep up, but WE can. By using the Web 2 tools we have to connect to individuals, you can keep up, even if you don't realize it. Have a question that goes beyond a simple fact for an answer? YOU might not be able to answer it, but I'll bet someone in the community can! See/hear/learn something neat you feel the community should have at? It's your duty to share it!

So perhaps communities are our way of coping with it all. I referred to Twitter earlier because I'm starting to see some of those tough questions on it - just a few to be sure, but it is happening. I for one am happy there's people out there that know different from me that I'm connected to.

The LDSC08 is great because of the conversations that lead to sparking my brain.One topic that keeps coming up is how to engage faculty. It's a chicken and egg thing. How to you help faculty use something when they don't see the relevance of it, when they need to use that thing to see the relevance of it? Here's some things I know work:

1. Find the faculty innovators. Work with them to achieve success. Promote the he## out of them as your evangelists to their department and college, and to the entire university. Why? Faculty listen to other faculty. Administrators listen to their faculty. I hate to write this, but instructional designers/learning designers are at best appreciated by faculty and administration, but our ideas on changing the way things work are not universally respected by them.
2. Encourage student use of tools. Why? Faculty listen to students, especially when they say, "Professor X is using it, why aren't you?"
3. Take baby steps. Don't try to change the entire course or the way the faculty member teaches. Take a small part of that course or teaching philosophy and modify it. Ensure success at this stage.
4. Find ways to tie the faculty's efforts back to promotion and tenure. I know this is challenging, but you have to try. It adds relevance for the faculty member.
5. Make the technologies dead simple to use.
   
6. Make sure you have Just-In-Time Learning opportunities using multiple media (text, audio, video) so the faculty member can get what they need, when they need it.
7. Make sure you have local live support for faculty - sometimes they need a face-to-face meeting. Having a local instructional designer that understands their college, their needs, and their culture is invaluable.
8. Have a community for the local support folks - they need to talk to each other! It's tough to do it all by yourself.

Anyway, this is the core of the structures I believe you need to succeed when engaging faculty to work with new and innovative technologies. What am I missing? Lots, I'm sure!

In a recent conversation with a colleague, we discussed the death of the traditional ISD model. Now I'm a designer with a 1980's background, so this is a bit of a hard thing for me to swallow. Yet there are models, such as Continuous Rapid Prototyping, that set the traditional ISD model on it's head.

But this post isn't about the design side of ISD, it's about the learner's experience of instruction that was developed using a traditional ISD model. I recently read a paper titled "Dying to Learn" by Dr. Rodney P. Riegle of Illinois State University and Wesley A. Matejka, also from Illinois State U. In this paper, they talk about traditional ISD and relate it to Madeline Hunter's eight elements of Lesson Design:

1) Anticipatory Set (AS) – Anticipatory Set is a short activity or prompt that focuses the students' attention before the actual lesson begins. It is typically used when students enter the room or in a transition. A hand-out given to students at the door, review question written on the board, a problem displayed on an overhead are examples of AS.
2) Purpose – Purpose refers to the purpose of the lesson, why the students need to learn it, what they will be able to "do", and how they will demonstrate what they have learned.
3) Input – Input includes the vocabulary, skills, and concepts the teacher wishes to impart to the students - the "stuff" the kids need to know in order to be successful.
4) Modeling – By Modeling, the teacher shows students in graphic form or demonstrates what the finished product of the lesson should look like.
5) Guided Practice – In Guided Practice, the teacher leads the students through the steps necessary to perform the skill using the trimodal approach of hear/see/do.
6) Checking For Understanding (CFU) – To Check for Understanding, the teacher uses a variety of questioning strategies to determine whether the students "got it" and to determine the pace of the lesson.
7) Independent Practice – Independent practice means that the teacher releases students to practice on their own based on steps 3 through 6.
8) Closure – Closure is a review or wrap-up of the lesson and includes having the student tell or show what they have learned.

(This description was copied from the paper, BTW).

You have to read the article for more information - a fascinating discourse and comparison of these elements as applied to MMORPGs, in particular EverQuest II.

The article points out how learners are changing, and how traditional ISD may no longer be the most effective approach for those learners. Some of Hunter's Elements are covered well in MMORPGs, while others are not. The ones not covered well are NOT covered well because of the design of MMORPGs, and the changing needs of the learner. Again, read the article.

This was a new thought for me, in a way. As designers, we need to consider the needs of the learner. We can do this via traditional methods - interviews, surveys, extant data analysis, etc. Somewhat new to my thoughts is that we can also examine MMORPGs to reverse engineer the design processes, discover gaps in our approaches, and eventually come up with novel approaches that incorporate the best of ISD and game elements.

This is a rich area to research, and a great time to be an instructional designer. We just have to stretch ourselves in new ways.

I love my garden. I enjoy the feel of wind on my cheeks as I run my fingers through the rich loam, anticipating the joy of seeding the soil and eventually reaping a rich harvest, grown with my own two hands...

Anyway, I'm struck by how I rely on informal learning to improve my gardening skills. When I have a bad crop, do I look things up on the net? Do I reference a gardening book? Heavens, no! Instead, I rely on chewing the fat with my neighbors. Here's a typical conversation:

Neighbor: "So, gardening again, Brett?"
Me: "Yup."
Neighbor: "I figured after that disaster last year...."
Me: "Nope."
N: "So how's it going this year?"
Me: "My pumpkins are small and too few. Alas, no pie for this Thanksgiving!"
N: (Surveying my garden). "Nope."
Me: "Any suggestions?"
N: "Yup."

And at this point I'm subject to a diatribe of information and suggestions that I swear I'll follow up on in time for next season, but oddly enough never seem to....

So, what have I learned from this self analysis? I seem to want to rely on informal, social learning when it comes to gardening, except in extreme cases. For example, last year, after three years of tomato wilt, I finally went to the net, looked it up, found a picture that matched the symptoms, read what to do, and next season implemented it. Took me five minutes to do so.

There is a wealth of information on just about everything at our fingertips, and the trend (stampede?) towards social learning is not a replacement for good old facts. It's a compliment, a supplement, another tool in the toolbox. Designers need to keep this in mind. You can't just throw a group of novices together with no references to good information and expect them to succeed.

Second, we need to teach people to be seekers of knowledge. We don't live in a world where the neighbor's advice is adequate, or even accurate. You can't expect the world of information to come to you. You have to seek it out.

I had the pleasure this past summer and fall working with Jane Charlton, Chris Palma, Nahks Tr'Ehnl, Anand Narayanan, and Kimberly Hermann on a rethink of Astro I at PSU. Jane is the lead faculty, Chris is an outreach fellow, Nahks is the web page/mulitmedia developer, and Anand and Kimberly are grad students. Also, Denise Wager of ETS provided some excellent 3D humanoid figures for the course, John Wagner of Emerging Technologies and Jin Sung An, a grad student serving an apprenticeship with ET, sat in on meetings and offered advice.

Astro I is a gen ed course taken by many students at University Park. Jane wanted to redesign it for web delivery in a game-like format. I volunteered my time as an instructional designer to assist with the conceptualization.

I won't bore you with the details, but over the summer and fall, we basically changed from a total game format to more of a story, interspersed with activities - some games as well.

This course was totally on the web, with the exception of the tests. Tests were proctored and the same as previous, traditional offerings of the course.

The course is just wrapping up its first run. Jane had around 430 students - a whopping amount! The average test scores were around +10, or I'm guessing about one standard deviation up from traditional offerings of the course. Wow! How did this happen?

I'd like to state it was my sound instructional design advice that did it, but the truth is it was the effort and dedication of Jane, Chris, Nahks, Anand, and Kinberly that made this course a success. Sure, I helped, but not that much.

In fact, I was sweating bullets come November 2006. The course was set to run Jan 2007, content wasn't done, media wasn't done, and I saw headlights. Now I have a confession to make. You IDs out there aren't going to like me giving away our shameful little secret, but here it is: IDs are control freaks. We want to control the entire process, from analyzing needs to assessing outcomes. There's not one piece of the design and development pie we can resist sticking our grubby fingers into in a desperate attempt to wrest control from a cold, chaotic universe.

Well, I feel better! Have to watch over my shoulder, though - with over 100 IDs at PSU, I'm now bound to be a target.

Because I was just an adviser on this project, I had little control. Didn't realize it at the time, but that bothered me. When I started thinking about it, I realized it was a control issue. Jane and company were never going to fail - they are too good, too professional, and have too much at stake to let that happen. For example, Jane did her best when the course opened to respond to any student's query within an hour during normal hours. I should have been calmer. Maybe next time. Yeah, right.

Is being a control freak such a bad thing? No, as long as you admit it, and know when you are over-obsessing. Most of the time, you need to be a control freak to be a good ID. If you're not scanning that development horizon for icebergs of constraints, the ship will wreck. Just remember to put some trust (not TOO much, mind you! ;) ) in your team.

What's next? Jane & Chris wrote an NSF grant to take the course further into the games realm and redeploy it for high school and returning adults. Keep your fingers crossed!

Might as well start at the beginning. Instructional Design, or ISD, grew out of the WWII need to quickly and efficiently train soldiers, although others may argue the roots of IDS go back much further. Here's a great ISD History site to examine. Take Wikipedia's Instructional Design page with a grain of salt. I totally disagree with the first sentence. Maybe it's better to define what we DO, not what we ARE. So what do ISDs do? Here's a list - hold on!

 

Instructional Designer Required Competencies and Prerequisite Skills

Copyright 2007, Brett Bixler
 

A. Design Programs

A-1 Incorporate communication and design theories, including

• Domains and Levels of Learning Analysis using Bloom’s Taxonomy and Gagné Hierarchy
• Hierarchical Learning Analysis of Intellectual Skills
• Procedural Analysis of Psychomotor Skills
• Functional Job Analysis
• Path Analysis
• Cognitive Mapping
• Gagné’s and Brigg’s Learning Hierarchy
• Merrill’s Component Display Theory and ID2
• Jonassen and Tessmer’s Outcome-based Taxonomy

A-2 Use communication/learning/instructional design theories, including:

• Behavioral Approach to Instruction
• Nine Events of Instruction
• Motivational Strategies (ARCS Model)
• Instruction Transaction Theory
• Cognitive Flexibility Theory
• Anchored Instruction
• Cognitive Apprenticeship
• Goal-Based Scenarios
• Problem-Based Learning
• Computer Supported Intentional Learning
• Case-Based Reasoning

A-3 Identify target audience.

• Determine Audience Profile
• Determine Site Content Prerequisites
• Determine Specific Delivery Locations
• Determine Specific Performance Req.

A-4 Interact with content specialists and team members to determine instructional objectives and content via:

• Brainstorming
• Case Studies
• Customer Studies
• Extant Data Review
• Job Requirements
• Nominal Focus Groups
• Observation
• Personal Interviews
• Survey Questionnaire
• Telephone Interviews
• Work Samples

A-5 Determine how to achieve instructional and production goals and objectives.

• Research subject area
• Assist in developing a curriculum outline
• Team develop a course
• Develop course syllabus
• Develop course objectives/goals
• Develop lesson plan
• Develop lesson objectives

A-6 Adapt program design to intended audience via:

• Anchoring Information
• Articulating Cognitive Reflection
• Chaining Information
• Chunking Information
• Coaching Learner Performance
• Considering Cultural Diversity
• Employing Shaping
• Ensuring Relevance of Information
• Facilitating Inference
• Formulating Hypotheses
• Generating Analogies, Metaphors, and Similes
• Giving Feedback after Practice
• Offering Imagery
• Offering Learning Challenges
• Offering Mnemonics
• Offering Student-Centered Instruction
• Posing Problems
• Presenting Cognitive Modeling
• Presenting Logical Sequencing
• Presenting Multiple Modes
• Promoting Discovery Learning
• Promoting Learner Explorations
• Promoting Practices
• Promoting Socialization
• Providing Authentic Learning Situations
• Providing Examples and Nonexamples
• Providing for Learner Control
• Providing Learner Advisement
• Providing Opportunities for Rehearsal
• Proving Contextualized Instruction
• Reinforcing Responses
• Relating to Prior Knowledge
• Scaffolding of Learner Performance
• Stimulating Elaboration
• Stimulating Recall
• Stimulating Self-Management
• Using Advance Organizers
• Using Cueing Systems

A-7 Develop script and storyboard from content.

A-8 Develop online multimedia specifications.

A-9 Determine appropriate media.

A10 Determine/develop appropriate assessment instruments, including tests and portfolio exams.

B. Author Programs

B-1 Develop flowchart.

B-2 Select and/or use authoring software.

B-3 Integrate media elements.

B-4 Conduct user evaluation of content and design.

B-5 Prepare technical documentation.

C. Implement and Utilize Programs

C-1 Design/prepare delivery/distribution options, possibly including:

• Self-Paced Learning Materials (paper-based, Multimedia packages CD-ROM, videodisc, etc.)
• Computer-Based Tutorials
• Computer-Based Practice and Drills
• Computer Managed Instruction (CMI)
• Computer Assisted Instruction (CAI)
• Computer Simulations
• Video Broadcast
• Interactive Video
• Audio Tape with Worksheets
• Audio Conference
• Slide Tape with Worksheets
• Games
• Distance Learning
• Student Manual/Workbook
• Simple Presentation Media
• Virtual Realities
• Non-Instructional Interventions (job aid, expert system, performance support system)
• Web-Based Instruction
• Collaborative Learning Environment
• Student-Centered Discussion (SCD)

C-2 Design presentation facility.

C-3 Develop user training.

C-4 Provide user support.

C-5 Provide manager support.

D. Conduct Design Evaluation

D-1 Conduct formative evaluation.

D-2 Conduct summative evaluation.

D-3 Make revisions as necessary.

D-4 Create/write necessary reports.

E. Utilize Online Resources

E-1 Integrate multimedia into networks.

E-2 Communicate with networks.

E-3 Work cooperatively with network manager.

E-4 Integrate e-mail, listserv, Web 2.0 and other communications options as appropriate.

F. Possess Appropriate Personal Attributes

F-1 Practice good problem-solving techniques.

F-2 Give and receive constructive criticism.

F-3 Practice time management.

F-4 Demonstrate organization skills.

F-5 Display originality and creativity.

F-6 Work effectively in a team setting.

F-7 Demonstrate self-motivation.

G. Communicate Effectively

G-1 Practice good listening skills - observing, identifying, and reporting.

G-2 Communicate clearly.

G-3 Use technical writing skills.

G-4 Communicate on appropriate level.

G-5 Negotiate effectively with other team members.

G-6 Systems Thinking: seeing the entire system and considering all of the factors that interact to create the results.

G-7 Ability to effectively impart new ideas and insights that contribute to growth and change.

G-8 Counseling: helping others reach meaningful decisions of their own accord.

G-9 Intervention: Using a variety of intervention methods and the ability to determine which method is most appropriate at a given time.

G-10 Client Rapport: Diagnosing problems with a client to locate sources of help, power, and influence; to understand a client’s values and culture; and to determine readiness for change.

H. Related Knowledge

H-1 Applications software.

H-2 Educational uses of online networks.

H-3 Keep abreast of emerging technologies.

H-4 Project planning/grant writing.

H-5 Budget development/management.

I. Continuing Responsibilities

I-1 Maintain professional memberships.

I-2 Participate in professional development activities.

I-3 Share information through presentations/publications.

I-4 Develop online instructional products.

 

Whew! That's enough for today!

I'm the Lead Instructional Designer at Penn State. I'll be using this blog to talk about ID - the good, bad, and ugly. Toss in some learning theory and current project work and you have a recipe for, uh, well, we'll see!

You can view my personal web page for more "me" info.

Also, check out my Virtual Worlds blog!

Here's a sound byte to get you started.