Week Six – How Instructional Design is Used

When I was first hired as a brand-new instructional designer, fresh out of graduate school, I worked for a company that developed training for management processes. Things like, proactive planning, rational decision making, root cause analysis, and so forth. I was part of a team that spent a lot of time working through a process intended to guide our efforts from an initial statement of training need to a final, customer approved course. That process is what I called the instructional design process, and it took time. Time was spent gathering data and developing artifacts as outputs that became inputs for subsequent design processes. Those designs became inputs for a development process which produced outputs that, in turn, became inputs for the implementation process, and so forth. That approach was time consuming and expensive, but it yielded consistent and effective results.

In a way, both videos shown this week made me feel nostalgic for those days, almost 20 years ago. It seems like companies are looking for instructional designers who are experienced in rapid development approaches and technologies. Less important are solid analysis and design skills, more important are Camtasia and Captivate skills. Both videos emphasized, in different ways, the importance of design in the instructional design process.

The video of the discussion between Robert Gagne and David Merrill was very interesting to watch. Seeing Bob Gagne elaborate on his own theory, using examples to illustrate complex concepts, was very instructive. Watching Dave Merrill’s passionate explanation of his own, related, theory was inspiring. Despite the fact that I’ve never been a proponent of Component Display Theory, or the derivative Component Design Theory, I found their conversation very enlightening. One thing I found that they have in common, beyond a similar meta-structure in their theories, is that they both rely so much on human cognition as a fundamental principle, that they all but ignore the role of the individual learner in the learning process.

This is definitely reflective of a previous generation in instructional theorists. While the work of Gagne and Merrill is foundational in the way we think about designing the instructional message, most practitioners of instructional design understand that learners are not passive recipients of instruction, but are actively involved in learning by focusing on and interpreting the message. In fact, at one point Dave Merrill mentioned that if, according to cognitive psychology, learning is a process of elaboration and organization, then designers needn’t “leave it up to the students” and should design the message so that instruction will occur. Both Gagne and Merrill seem to be of the opinion that if an instructional message, presentation, event, or whatever is properly designed, according to theories based on the science of cognition, then learning will occur.

Richard Sites and Angel Green both agree with Gagne and Merrill in that instruction needs to be properly designed to be successful. Their video prompted me to think about how I apply actual design in my own work. Because of their conversation I realized that having the time and resources to actually engage in thoughtful design, rather than duplicating what’s already been done, is a goal and a luxury in my work environment. It seems like my company, and others I’m aware of, treat instructional design almost like an afterthought in the process of developing instruction. People often have an expectation for training and approach each training challenge with a pre-conceived solution that often is related to the employment of a specific technology. The additional time and effort required for intelligent design is burdensome when all they want is a SCORM course to be plugged into the LMS. Design isn’t really expected of the designer, just rapid development.

I suppose this is a result of increased corporate pressures, such as maximizing profitability and competing with other companies. Cost is a huge driver in how processes are employed. I suppose the information age has also put pressure on the process by setting up the expectation that everything can be done quicker and deployed faster. It is ironic, then, that because of the need to maximize resources and achieve more with less time available, the need for solid instructional design has actually increased. Good design can leverage resources and find ways to improve instruction across diverse platforms and in less time.

Good instructional design… Merrill said in the second session that a good instructional design theory needs to describe how to get from a knowledge representation to the course organization and then to get to appropriate interactions. I thought that was a great, concise way to describe what an instructional design theory does. Richard Sites mentioned in his video that he believes instructional design is the “art of Why Not?” The implication is that instructional designers shouldn’t always follow a fixed formula when designing instruction, but they should be looking at ways to present the message in the right way, not just the familiar or most cost-effective way.

Something that all four individuals in these videos agreed on, at least implicitly, is that their particular approach, whether the events of learning, or component design, or the Allen Interaction approach of Context, Challenge, Activity, Feedback, is how good instruction is designed. By seeing these presentations, I found myself questioning my own reliance on tried and true methods of designing and developing training. Is the discipline of instructional design really a cookbook approach where specific activities, applied in the right sequence at the right time, will turn out the perfectly baked course? Maybe that is the tradeoff we have to make in a highly pressurized environment where more is expected of less in terms of time and resources. Reliance on a particular theory or model can be hugely beneficial because it focuses time and effort. However, I still believe that the best instruction will be tailored to the needs of the student, and not the needs of the organization. But, since the organization pays the salary, it’s not a bad way to go, either.