This post is a continuation from a post about the impact of lots of freely available content on learners. My argument is that systematic instructional design can be used to help students navigate the tremendous amount of content that is available to them.

ADDIE is our friend

I know everyone hates on ADDIE, but using ADDIE as a true design process can help to create a Learning GPS for our learners.

A: The first part of ADDIE is A – Analysis.

If we are designing instruction, one thing we should be analyzing is our audience:

ADDIE

• Are they experienced?
• Do they know the vocabulary of the discipline?
• Are they newbies?
• (If you design corporate education) What is their job role?
• How much time will they have to come up to speed on this topic?

D: Once you know this information, the Design process can start.

Maybe part of our jobs as learning professionals is providing a GPS, based on the experience level and job role of the student. For total noobs, we’ll have to design a way for the students to learn the vocabulary. For experienced folks, we can show them the most relevant places to search for information and let them build a CoP or PLE (whatever we’re calling it this decade).

E: Notice how the E in ADDIE is not at the end, but connected to each step of the process?

If you design something that you think will work as an information navigation device for your audience, pilot it! Evaluate it!

Just because the navigation system works for you does not mean it will work for your audience. Not only do learners need to understand how to find and filter information online, they need to have an affinity with the source of that information. They need to be able to trust that source if they are going to add the source to their PLN. The content needs to resonate with the learners for them to take action on what they are learning.

D: If your pilot went well, go ahead and Develop this new system.

I don’t know what it will be – you are going to design it for YOUR learners and THEIR needs. Once you have built the system, go back to E (evaluate!).

I: If everything still looks good, Implement the new design.

Once again go back to E (evaluate!).

Help learners learn to find content

We can use ADDIE (and other instructional design models) to design new systems of instructions, taking advantage of the user-generated content that is building the enormous digital universe. We can help newbies learn the vocabularies they will need to perform effective searches. We can create a learning GPS that will help experts and novices navigate to the content they need to get their jobs done.

This is just the starting point though. How do you get learners to connect with each other? How do you get them to trust you to provide content relative to their needs, and to stay connected to you? More on that in a few days.

By now you’ve all heard it. Heck by now you have experienced it. I’m talking about the explosion of the digital universe. IDC and EMC have been measuring the size of the Digital Universe for a few years now. This year’s study confirms our digital universe – or all the information that is available to us in a digital format – is growing even faster than we thought. In fact they expect it to grow 44 times what it is now in the next ten years.

This means we have more content available at our fingertips (literally!) than at any other time in history. For learning professionals, this should be a great thing right? We can just connect people to the Internet, where they will be able to find all the content they need.

Right?

The amount of content available is the solution and the problem

Time: Think about the last time you had to search for something you knew nothing about. For instance, right now I am very interested in learning about SOAP and REST because these technologies enable cloud applications. Problem with me: I have zero free time. At some point my itch to figure this out is going to overwhelm me, and I’ll sacrifice a few nights of sleep to learn the basics.

Where should I start looking for content? A google search for “soap rest cloud” looks promising, but returns 1,620,000 results. Just eyeballing the top results makes me think the articles will be too advanced for what I know now.  I don’t have time to sift through all of that, I just want to know the basics from a source I can trust to give solid technical content.

And are there really 1.620,000 pieces of content available? Probably not. From experience, I know many of the results will be reposts of one good blog post or web page, with some spam and non-relevant links mixed in. I have enough experience to be able to filter through most of the muck, but what if I was a complete novice?

Vocabulary: Every discipline has its own vocabulary. When you study a discipline its one of the first things you learn. Ohm’s law. The Negroponte switch. ADDIE. When you learn these terms, you have a reference for researching more about the terms, learning new things related to the discipline. If you are a total newbie, you may not know the vocabulary of the discipline. This limits how you search for information, and it may be a barrier to finding the digital content you need.

Search Engines: Many times search engines provide results in a chronological order. For example, I couldn’t find a good reference link for the Negroponte Switch, so I gave a Wikipedia link. The Wikipedia article is an orphan, which makes me question its relevance. But even thought I know what this term means, I couldn’t find an article that succinctly describes it. I learned about it in college 10 years ago, so my thought is maybe all of the articles I need are just to old to come up in the first 30 pages of Google results. My experience with the term helped me sift through the content provided, but if I was a total newbie would I have been able to do that?

So we have tons of content, we’ve all agreed on that. But can learners find content when they need it, especially can they find it at the time of a performance need? I’ll touch on that in my next post.

This is my response to last week’s #lrnchat. I was inspired to write it after watching an internal (EMC) discussion about training.

Anyone can perform the ID function

You heard me correctly. ANYONE.

I have to say I was so disappointed in last week’s #lrnchat when everyone kept dissing SMEs.

For my readers who are not education folks, ID means Instructional Designer. In pure Instructional Design, the ID would follow the Instructional Design process to Analyze needs, Design the learning strategy to meet those needs,  Develop the proposed learning strategy, Implement this strategy, and then Evaluate the effect of the learning that was delivered.

That’s right, I said ADDIE.

An SME is a Subject Matter expert who is interviewed (usually in the “develop” stage) in order to get the technical details needed for the instruction.

If you had been a fly on the wall at #lrnchat last week, you may have been surprised to know that typical IDs really do not respect SMEs. They think that SMEs could never understand the complicated science of designing learning.

I have a problem with that attitude. First of all, I am a technical SME, and I am an ID. Second of all, do IDs really think that people who build, implement and manage things like email servers, data center management applications, san management applications, storage arrays, etc are not intelligent enough to learn the science of designing instruction?

Give me a break!!

You can teach people how to design instruction way faster than you can teach them to get around a UNIX operating system or how to get around the insides of a CLARiiON! I have news for you, at least in the technical arena, we don’t need dedicated IDs. Technology moves too fast to be burdened with that extra process. Teach the techies basic principles of instructional design, have some folks with ID background running inteference to get learning assets into the LMS, and then get the heck out of the way!

Should just anyone perform the ID function?

OK, all you geeks who think writing training is easy, now its your turn.

You don’t want to wait for the official training to come out. Heck, you have these cool open source tools that let you create slidecasts that you can post to youtube or slideshare. Maybe you are THE authority at your company on a certain technology and you honestly believe that you will be helping the company by producing your own training.

ID is not that easy. ID should be aligned to the business, so that training reflects that key messages that the marketing, product management, and support teams want to convey. ID should create a learnscape that is easy to navigate, and easy to repeat for each individual learner. That takes time. My degree – Instructional Systems – is an MS (Master of Science) degree for a reason.

There is more to corporate education than recording a knowledge dump and sticking it on YouTube. You have to take all your technical skills to know the product intimately, and then think about how people will use the technology. How “should” people use the tech? Does this change if you are talking to people in different job roles? What is supported and what is not supported? How will this training alignvto their job and more importantly to the overall business?

Do you really have time for that? Aren’t you supposed to be selling, or coding, or something else?

Do you really want to deal with people when they argue with an acronym you used? Or with your spelling and grammar?

No, you don’t. Leave that to us, the folks who think about all these things as we design a course. Let us navigate the instructional design process, but for goodness sake pick up the phone when we need a set of eyes to review what we have created!

Moral of the story

We cannot move to Learning 2.0 (or whatever you want to call it) if there is such disdain for SMEs. Maybe we don’t need the ID function. Maybe we need to teach SMEs to be the IDs. That is what we’ve done at EMC.

A few days ago Clive Shepard wrote a post entitled What’s the Problem with Kirkpatrick?

Who is Kirkpatrick?

For those of you who aren’t all geeky about instructional design, Donald Kirkpatrick came up with the four levels of instruction back in the late 1950s.  The four levels (according to Kirkpatrick) are:

1. Level 1: Reactions – measures how participants in a training program react to it.
2. Level 2: Learning – assesses the extent to which students have advanced in skills, knowledge, or attitude after a training event
3. Level 3: Transfer – evaluates if the newly acquired skills, knowledge, or attitudes are being used in the everyday environment of the learner
4. Level 4: Results – measures the success of the program in business terms by evaluating increased production, improved quality, decreased costs, reduced frequency of accidents, increased sales, and even higher profits or return on investment.

Are Kirkpatrick’s levels still relevant?

Clive thinks that there is still a place for these levels of evaluation in training in today’s learner-centric environments because learners should be able to answer the following questions:

• Did I enjoy it?
• Did I learn what I wanted?
• Was I able to put it into practice?
• Has it made any difference to my performance?
• And, as a form of ROI measure, do these improvements in performance justify the effort I put in?

Jane Bozarth posted back in January about some of the shortcomings of the Kirkpatrick taxonomy. She discusses alternatives to Kirkpatrick:

• Daniel Stufflebeam’s CIPP model
• Brinkerhoff’s Success Case evaluation model

Who influenced Kirkpatrick?

Over the weekend I watched The Story of Stuff. I find it interesting that back in the 1950s, our economy was designed to benefit big business. The ideas of “planned obsolescence” and “perceived obsolesce” were crafted to drive America’s economy. According to The Story of Stuff:

Retailing analyst Victor Lebow articulated the solution that has become the norm for the whole system. He said: “Our enormously productive economy . . . demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption . . . we need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.”

Now, 60 years later, we are paying for succumbing to the idea that we should be a nation of consumers. The idea behind The Story of Stuff is that we can change the direction of the economy and the nation by redesigning the way we deal with stuff. This snippit really caught my attention:

All this work is critically important but things are really gonna start moving when we see the connections, when we see the big picture. When people along this system get united, we can reclaim and transform this linear system into something new, a system that doesn’t waste resources or people (emphasis mine).

This got me thinking. Back in the 50s, a system was designed that made business grow stronger than people and governments. We are now paying the dues for living that system. Kirkpatrick came up with his four levels of instruction back in the 50s. Was he influenced by the folks who came up with these men who engineered the ideas of “planned obsolescence”? Do his levels support business needs over the needs of learners?

What do you think? Is it possible these systems are related?

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:

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.

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.

In my last post I talked about the learning environments (LEs) we as developers create for students, and the Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) students create to situate themselves so that they can master the course objectives. In this post I want to explore the instructor’s role in helping students get over barriers they have to meeting course objectives, and if this role is still critical to eLearning.

Instructional designers provide course prerequisites and course objectives. They they create course LEs based on this information.

Learners come into a course with barriers to learning. Some examples of barriers to learning are:

• Not meeting the course prerequisites
• Not wanting to be in the course (attitude)
• Thinking the course was going to cover something it won’t cover
• Not devoting their full attention to the course (we get this alot — field  personnel who get customer calls during class. Guess what takes precedence..)
• A disability
• A language barrier
• Personality conflicts (don’t like the instructor, don’t like the other students in the class…)

Good instructors try to identify these barriers right away, and compensate for them during the course. They may slow the course pace if the students don’t have the prerequisite knowledge, they may try to provide the information the learner thought they would learn, they may try to make accommodations for any disabilities. I think a good instructor tries to knock down any barriers a student has as low as they can go so the student can construct their own PLE and master the learning objectives.

Most of the instructors (and course developers) at EMC have their Certified Technical Trainer (CTT+) certification. To get this certification you must prove your ability to put students first so they are able to master course objectives.

My new question is: what happens if you move a course that was formally 100% instructor-led to eLearning? This is actually an important question, since travel is being restricted. People can’t travel to training, more requests are coming in for eLearning. Here are some questions I have:

• If you make the courses completely asynchronous, who does the work of helping lower the students’ barriers to learning?
• If you do synchronous eLearning, are the LEs designed differently? Do instructors need to do things differently to help students navigate their learning barriers?
• Can you simply port courses designed for instructor-led learning to an eLearning environment? Are there best practices for converting these courses for eLearning, or do the courses need to be redesigned from scratch?

I would love to hear from other people who are facing this same situation. I’d also like to hear from anyone who has taken the CTT for the Virtual Classroom Trainer exam.

From this BoingBoing post, which was written by Clay Shirky, introduced me to a new term. Tesla, or “time elapsed since labs attended” refers to testing software applications. Clay gives this definition for tesla:

a measure of how long it’s been since a company’s decision-makers (not help desk) last saw a real user dealing with their product or service

The goal behind having a low tesla number is getting near real-time data on what users are having problems with, with the goal of real-time continual improvement of the product.

So can this be applied to education? Going back to this semester’s study of the Dick and Carey Instructional method, we’re supposed to be collecting this sort of learner feedback at different points of development. One of the biggest criticisms is the time that it takes to collect this feedback, and actually lack of time is why some of the feedback is not collected.

As instructional designers, if we have a course that is out of the design process and into a state of “production”, should we be concerned with that Tesla number? Or is this too much of a reach?

This semester I am taking a class called “Introduction to Instructional Design”. We are stepping through Dick, Carey & Carey’s textbook The Systematic Design of Instruction. The book examines the Dick and Carey model of instruction in detail. Here’s a diagram of that model (click the picture to see a larger version):

As with all models of instruction, the diagram shouldn’t be interpreted as a lock-step process. It is pretty fluid, you can go back and forth between steps as needed. The main points I take from the model is that you do constant analysis to ensure the instruction you develop is going to satisfy the instructional goal.

My degree program teaches instructional systems to people working in every sector: K-12 professionals, higher ed professionals, military folks and corporate professionals. Most of the corporate professionals develop training usually associated with HR, there aren’t many of us who do technical training. So while it’s good to have a map to ensure the effort and expense put develop training isn’t wasted, I have to wonder if this model is agile enough for a fast-moving technical education organization.

There are other instructional models that were developed specifically for technical instruction. Maybe I’ll write a post on that another day, it would be interesting to see if one has been developed to specifically fit in with Agile sprints and scrums.

We actually follow many of the steps in this model. One thing I (as a courseware developer) think we are missing is the learner and context evaluation. We use program managers to get that information to us from the managers of the students. Those managers deliver what they think the students should be able to do after consuming training, which is very important. It helps us set the correct performance objectives. But I have never been seen any learner or context analysis.

I can write courseware all day long, but if the students are starting from a different place than I thought they were, or if they can never get to training because they are too busy, does it matter how well the instruction is missing?

The biggest concern I have about the Dick & Carey model in a fast-moving technical area is that it takes alot of time to do the Analysis. The way we are learning this model, you have to be in the same room with learners to do the analysis and formative or summative evaluations. That would never fly with us, people at our company are just too busy. Not only that, but traveling all over the place do the analysis is too expensive. Besides, by the time we got back and compiled all the data, there would be a new version of software and we’d have to start all over again.

Why couldn’t I form a small community to pull all these steps together? The analysis would be there for all the stakeholders. The students could pop in and participate in guided discussions so that I have a real analysis of what it will take to get them to where their managers want them to be. We could pilot the materials in the community and get real-time feedback.

I think I know the drawbacks: people are still too busy to participate. People don’t trust online communities. Do we really need this extra step.

What do you all think? Does the Dick & Carey model move to slowly to be relevant for a fast-moving technical organization? Could it be modified and modeled in an online community? Do we really need to do so much analysis?