Archives for instructional design

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: 

PLE construction, instructors, & converting Instructor led learning to eLearning

Posted by  on Sunday, February 1st 2009     

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…)

What gets designed for a student

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.

Instructors lower barriers to learning and help students develop a PLE

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.

category: instructional design
tags: , , , , ,

New term for me: Tesla

Posted by  on Sunday, December 14th 2008     

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?

category: instructional design
tags: , , ,

Fun with Dick & Carey in the real world

Posted by  on Monday, November 17th 2008     

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):

Dick and Carey Instructional Model

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?

category: instructional design
tags: , , ,
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