Week Five in Advanced ISD

In our class on February 11, Jennie Johnson gave a presentation on the 4 Component Instructional Design (4C/ID) model that was developed by Jeroen van Merrienboer. I think this model is a good example of what we’ve been discussing all semester so far, an Advanced Instructional Design model. I see it as an advanced ISD model for two reasons. The first is that it applies instructional design principles in the context of complex skills, rather than general learning. It is also advanced because the designer will focus on tasks and knowledge rather than objectives, which is typical for standard instructional design, when designing and developing the instruction.

Generally, I like the 4C/ID approach to designing instruction. In my own work as an instructional designer I have often designed training for complex tasks where a hierarchy of component and constituent knowledge and skills had to be defined in order to understand how those things related to the tasks to be trained. Merrienboer’s model works well in the context of technical training where pre-requisite skills and knowledge are also considered in order to build the required task and sub-task relationships.

One thing that I have always felt was a weakness of the model, though, is the emphasis on real-time practice to determine success or failure. While practice of the task to be trained is instructive for determining whether a student can successfully complete the task, it is difficult to determine, in the context of complex tasks, whether the fundamental constituent knowledge and skills were adequately learned. The emphasis is on the outcome, and so part-task success may not be fully considered. Further, in some cases real-time, real-world practice is also impractical for student assessment, particularly where equipment and personnel may be required to perform the task.

During this class we also divided into our project groups to work on our instructional design problem. Our activity this week seemed to be more successful in that we had a more productive dialog and, in the end, we were able to show some progress in the design and presentation of our work. I think this improvement was resulted in our team’s establishment of “ground rules” for discussion (normalization) and because of our effort to remain focused on specific tasks at hand.