Recently in Smith & Ragan Category

I've got to tip my hat to the level of candor used by Smith & Ragan when they discuss the controversy over what weight stakeholders should attach to a designer's Summative Evaluation.

Many educators believe that the instructional designer has a strong investment and consequent bias [emphasis added] to find the instruction effective. ... Others feel that no one knows the instructional program and its potential strengths and weaknesses better than the designer, and therefore the designer is in the best position to most efficiently design an evaluation ...

In this controversy, my argument would be to avoid rigid binaries. I think an organization (e.g., the client) would be better off to include the designer's perspective since, as Smith & Ragan note, she is very familiar with its many facets and details. Accounting for biases happens all the time in research journals and conferences and it seems reasonable that project decision-makers could borrow from this practice and modify it as needed so that potential points of bias are highlighted. Although there would be the additional cost of the designer writing the summative evaluation, it seems logical that the vast extensive knowledge the designer has of the project would be more than worth it.

In Smith & Ragan's section on analyzing learners, they write that a common error among instructional designers is to assume that the learners are like the designers. This has an interesting parallel to those who work in the Usability/User Experience (UX) profession. As you might guess, one of the driving, if not central, motivations of UX professionals is foregrounding the needs of the user. For example, in the world of software development, this came about in part because there was an unfortunate history of developers making software that was difficult for ordinary users to easily understand and use. This was okay back when software was only used by specialists (e.g., the days of mainframes), but when desktop computing became more common in workplaces across the U.S., usability quickly became an issue.

But how does this happen exactly? How do the developers lose sight of their end-users? One reason is that creating software is an immensely complex and involved process, and usability, strictly speaking, is not a part of the programming code that helps make it run. Essentially, usability is considered more of an affective luxury, than a technical necessity. Also, because software developers have created the tool, they often have very specific and firm beliefs of how it should be used and what sequence of steps should be followed to complete discrete tasks. Yet, ordinary end-users don't think in the same way that the developers do and this is where the problem emerges. Users have their own mental models (e.g., Donald Norman) of how the software works and how to use it to complete the tasks they need to complete. In order to help developers see this difference in mindsets, time can be set aside to observe users in a usability lab.

Smith & Ragan provide a valuable tool towards better understanding the target learning audience by way of their four-part matrix. In this same vein, though, I'm curious about how often instructional designers have the opportunity to observe the learners they're designing for? Particularly with regard to the "Changing" elements of learning contexts (e.g., "Developmental Processes"), it seems like this would be an important dynamic to observe within the actual context of the classroom of whatever learning context is being designed for.