The ISD Team

This week I pivoted from my original selection for an instructional design model. Initially I selected the 5E model because someone had mentioned it in our first class and I had never heard of it. I was looking forward to learning about something new! Later I found that it is primarily used in K-12 classrooms. While that isn’t a bad thing, I was a little put out because I don’t think it would move me very far along in my own area of interest, which is centered on adult learning.

After discussing our instructional design models in class this week I concluded that I needed to learn about a model that is more in line with adult learning. More to the point, I needed to learn about a model that gets me closer to my area of research interest. So, after some investigation I have chosen my first class presentation to be on the topic of “Work Model Synthesis.” This isn’t really an instructional design model, per se. It is more of an instructional design theory. It was developed by Andy Gibbons, one of my professors at USU, back in 1985. I think it will be useful as it discusses how to group tasks into work models, rather than objectives, in order to emphasize the relevance of each activity. There isn’t a lot of research on this theory, but it is referenced a fair amount in the work of other academics who are interested in learning objects. I’m looking forward to learning more about work models. It has been a long time since I’ve thought much about them!

I wasn’t just inspired to change my presentation topic in class this week. We also had an interesting activity. We separated into two groups and worked as a team to design a solution based on a case we were given and using the ADDIE model to guide our activities. The case was a little light on detail. However, we determined that the best course of action was to design a lesson plan for a middle-school history teacher. There were some design criteria, such as the need to incorporate technology and the nature of the target audience (sixth graders).

The activity itself was kind of unorganized. I think I’m so used to structure when working as a team on these types of issues (this is what I do all the time in my regular job at L3) that I was surprised and put off by the lack of focus on the task. We didn’t all seem to agree very well on what needed to be accomplished, but several people were jumping in and offering solutions before we had defined the problem. We didn’t do a very good job of documenting our analysis efforts and the design steps were kind of jumbled.

It was frustrating for me. Probably because the direction the group was taking didn’t really follow my way of organization. LOL I think the main issue I had was that we didn’t seem to make any progress. We were churning on the same issues.

One positive outcome was that we have some very creative people and I think when we come down to determining the instructional strategy, we’ll knock it out of the ballpark!