Archives for education

Systems approach of designing instruction

Posted by  on Wednesday, April 8th 2009     

I’ve posted before about the Dick & Carey method of instructional design – while I was taking a class based on the Dick & Carey method. This method of instructional design is very popular because it represents a systems method of designing instruction. Click on the image below to see a diagram of how this method works:

Dick and Carey Instructional Model

But what does a systems method of designing instruction actually mean?

The definition of system is:

A group of interacting, interrelated, or interdependent elements forming a complex whole.

from thefreedictionary.com

What are these “interacting, interdependent elements” that may affect the development of instruction? Here’s a list from The Systematic Design of Instruction (Dick, Carey & Carey) along with my comments based on my experience in the world of designing technical instruction:

Individual Components of the System

  • The instructor: What sort of training do they have? How much experience do they have with the product? How about the protocols, or the environment in which the product will be used?
  • The learners: What sort of training do they have? What sort of information do they need about the product – will they be selling it? Will they be installing and configuring it? Will they be answering support calls from customers about it? Are they the customer? Or will the learners be a combination of all of these groups? Are they being forced to come to training, even if they think they don’t need it? Will they still have to answer customer calls and emails even if they are slated for training?
  • Materials: What materials will be created for instruction? I develop training for software products that have some sort of revision every three months. Do we update our materials for each update of each product? What if a critical update is sent out for a product two weeks after we finish the materials?
  • Instructional Activities: What instructional activities are needed? With software training, most of these activities are hands-on practice in labs built with the product being taught. But what should the activities be? How detailed should the lab instructions be?
  • Delivery System: How should the instruction be delivered? Instructor led? Asynchronous eLearning? Synchronous eLearning? M-Learning?
  • Learning Environment: In what kind of environment will the students be consuming the training?
  • Performance Environment: In what kind of environment will the students be performing the activities that are taught during the training event?
  • What have I forgotten?

Changing one component will impact the whole system

Each of these individual components work together with the other components. This means that if you change one thing midstream (lets say you make the decision to move from Instructor-led to eLearning, changing the delivery system), this will mostly impact other components of the overall system (the instructors, the learning environment, the materials, the learners all will most likely be impacted by the move from an Instructor-led to an eLearning delivery system).

And what happens if there is a component of the system that you haven’t even identified?

The systems way of thinking and performance

The systems way of thinking about instruction has been attributed to Larry Israelite (see Elliot Masie‘s Learning Rants, Raves, and Reflections 2004, review here). This way of designing instruction helps find performance problems so that the appropriate instruction can be designed. It provides a framework for systematically looking at a performance problem, and designing instruction so that the performance gap can be closed.

One reason it is important to apply a systems approach to instructional design is that one of the goals of instructional design is to  close human performance gaps. According to another one of my books, Mastering the Instructional Design Process (Rothwell & Kazanas) some of the things to consider when trying to lose those gaps are:

  • Individual Performance: Does an individual worker have the right skills? Do they want to perform well? Do they have the tools to perform well? Do they have the ability to perform well?
  • Work Group Performance: Can people work as a group? Is there a clear leader (that people are willing to follow?) Do individuals understand their roles? How do group members feel about the methods prescribed by the leaders to achieve group goals?
  • Organizational Performance: Does the organization anticipate change? Does the org react well to change? Is there a culture of sharing in the organization? Is work being done in the most up-to-date fashion for the organization’s field?

If the real goal of “training” is to close performance gaps and enable a state of readiness in an organization, then it becomes pretty clear you have to think about a little bit more than creating power points, designing a lab, scheduling a classroom and sending invitations to students. A systems approach of designing instruction must be applied so that the effect on each individual component as well as factors affecting human performance are considered.

category: instructional design, work
tags: , , , ,

Another view on the Informal vs. Formal learning

Posted by  on Monday, March 16th 2009     

I really like the posts on the blog Corporate eLearning Strategies & Development. This post gets right to the point of what Corporate Learning departments really need to focus on – enabling the performance of our audiences.

From the post:

Here is a good example of a battle you should stop fighting:  Training Departments taking responsibility for Learning within Corporations.  Give it up folks.  Making employees learn, without their full and complete cooperation, is NOT possible.  So give up the dream that you are all about “creating learning”.  Try it!  You’ll find it quite liberating.

After letting go of the lie of learning creation, you are now freed to actually DO something productive for your organization.  Yes, in fact, there is still work to be done even if you don’t “create learning”.  Remember your instructional systems design certificate course, or masters program that taught you about ADDIE.  The “A” is probably the most important and least used in that system.  Analysis of your People, the Context of their work, and the Content they seek/create, is the most important job to be done.

I love it! Further on the post points out it really the delivery method doesn’t really matter, what matters is we do that Analysis and choose the best method for the needs of our audience.

category: instructional design
tags: 

ASTD Big Question: What will workplace learning be like in 10 years?

Posted by  on Friday, March 6th 2009     

This month’s Big Question from ASTD is “what will workplace learning be like in 10 years?”. If you go to their post, there are already some really interesting thoughts and comments about this topic.

Byron said “The best prophet of the future is the past”. I’m a firm believer in that notion, so I’d like to answer the Big Question with a question of my own: what happened 10 years ago to workplace learning?

I’ve been doing some sort of training since I came into the professional workplace in 2001. I just started studying education for my graduate degree in 2007. I have some very experienced, patient folks in my department who kindly talk with me when I ask them about something I am studying or something I have read on a blog that pertains to eLearning. They seem to appreciate my enthusiasm, but they always have this weary look on their face when I tell them about all these “new” ideas. They tell me they were trying to implement some of these very things 10 years ago!

Besides having these discussions with co-workers, there is literature that goes back 10 years or so that talks about CSCL, communities of practice, and all of these things that are the underpinnings of what people are talking about doing today. So I have to wonder, are some of the ideas being bandied about today really that new? Or are they rehashed from 10 years ago? If these are old ideas given new life by improved technology, what happened 10 years ago that got these ideas pushed to the back burner? What can we learn about our past so that we can execute these ideas in the present, so that in our future we’re not going through this exercise yet again?

I also want to say that I do not agree with the idea that the training department should go away completely. For one thing, work is social. Work gets done based on the relationships we have with others, and based on the social capital that we have. This means that there will always be “others” in the workplace. This otherness will be categorized just like it is in general society: by race, gender, nationality, disability, religion, etc.

Knowledge is a form of social capital. I believe very strongly if there is no guidance, “others” in the workplace will not have access to knowledge that they need to have to do their work. This will happen either because they don’t have access to the correct network, or because they are purposefully excluded from access to that information based on their position in the social ladder.

I believe this because of my status of other (a woman in a predominately male field), and my daughter’s status of other (Asperger’s Syndrome). Training departments can be the mechanism that provides each worker with access to the information required to perform his/her job duties successfully.

If we as training groups are aligning to the business and the true competitive advantage of knowledge workers is how fast they are able learn, we owe it to the business to ensure that every worker, no matter their access to social hierarchies in the workplace,  has access to all the tools they need to help them learn.

Maybe in the future learning organizations won’t be the “givers of knowledge”, maybe we become more like librarians that help people find resources (and learn to do their own searches) as they are needed.

category: big question
tags: , , , , ,

Unpacking the Informal Learning definition

Posted by  on Friday, February 20th 2009     

This is a quick post coming from comments on my last post about Informal Learning. Just to recap, I used this this definition as a starting point for trying to define Informal learning:

a type of education or training program in which learners define what they want to learn and learning is considered successful when learners feel that they are able to master their intended objectives (whether or not the course designers believe that the learners have or have not demonstrated mastery) [Carliner, 2004] (all emphasis mine).

Driscoll, M., & Carliner, S. (2005). Advanced Web-Based Training Strategies: Unlocking Instructionally Sound Online Learning (p. 118). San Francisco, CA: Pfeiffer.

So is this saying that informal learning is something intentional on the part of the learner? It sounds like it, because the definition says informal learning happens when “learners feel they have mastered their intended objectives”.

I agree with this in part – especially if it is learning for something project based. But is all informal learning intentional? Can’t you learn something because you are in the right place at the right time and something just clicks? What would you call that?

Let’s say for right now that informal learning requires some intentional search for information on the part of the learner. Does it matter if the learner was told to learn the objective? What if your boss says “go learn how to write in some new programming language. But I can’t afford to send you to a formal class. You have to learn it for an upcoming project, or you can find a new job.” Does the learning objective the boss has for the learner automatically transfer to the learner?

Finally, what happens if the learner’s objectives are met by a formal learning course. Is what happens still informal learning?

I’m not sure what I think yet. I have some ideas, but I’d love to hear from you experts out there!

Does this mean my learning objective is finding a good way to define informal learning? :)

category: informal learning
tags: ,

What is Informal Learning

Posted by  on Thursday, February 19th 2009     

This question “what IS informal learning?” came up in a meeting the other day. The answer that was given was interesting – but it focused on educational technology. Today’s post will attempt to define informal, and in another post I’ll tackle some technologies that can be used to enhance informal learning.

First, a textbook definition:

a type of education or training program in which learners define what they want to learn and learning is considered successful when learners feel that they are able to master their intended objectives (whether or not the course designers believe that the learners have or have not demonstrated mastery) [Carliner, 2004] (all emphasis mine).

Driscoll, M., & Carliner, S. (2005). Advanced Web-Based Training Strategies: Unlocking Instructionally Sound Online Learning (p. 118). San Francisco, CA: Pfeiffer.

If I think about how I learn, I use a mix of formal and informal learning methods. I am in grad school, so obviously that is formal learning. There is a curriculum, there are classes with learning objectives that have been set by the instructor, there are activities I must complete successfully in order to get credit for the class. It has been decided for me what I will learn, how I will learn it, and how I will prove that I have mastered that topic.

But here’s the problem: I don’t always learn in the way the instructors have decided I should learn. I have to set up my own personal learning environment to augment what the course designer created. My PLE includes talking to other experts, reading blogs, googling, tweeting for help, and blogging.

Additionally, I don’t stop learning about that topic once the semester is over. I continue to use my informal methods to expand what I learned during class.

And that is just my graduate work. I’m a techie, and I write technical training for other techies. There is so much informal learning that goes on in the technical world, mostly because our field changes so rapidly! For instance, I am working on sharing a VMware virtual machine with some students, and I’m having a hard time figuring out how to get the job done. I googled. I asked for help on Twitter. I consulted with other experts in my department. I just try different options. (I’m leaving out lots of detail here, there are some underlying issues making this a very complex problem).

I can tell you, it has taken me all week to get to the point where I have one or two solid options to solve my vm problem. This is partially due to the way I learn – I am easily distracted with shiny, interesting, technical things. Sometimes I don’t realize my search for answers has gone off topic until I have been playing with the shiny new idea for an hour or so.

I can also tell you that I wouldn’t have the means to do an intelligent search for information to solve my problem if I didn’t have the base technical knowledge I’ve received from formal learning. That formal learning came from my undergraduate education and technical classes I’ve attended. The designed, focused attention to specific learning objectives have helped me build a strong technical foundation. That foundation is what enables me to understand how to informally search for information to solve my complex technical problem.

I’m left with more questions than answers:

  • Can informal learning be loosely designed to augment formal learning?
    Jay Cross believes that it can – he says informal does not mean unintentional
  • Can formal learning be designed to facilitate learner creation of PLEs which in turn will enhance informal learning?
  • Isn’t it important to help facilitate informal learning so learners continue to learn even after they have attended a class?
category: informal learning
tags: , , ,
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