Someone on our internal social media site is asking us to post our worldes, so I thought I’d post them here for the world to see.
This one is from this blog:
And this one is from my delicious account:
Someone on our internal social media site is asking us to post our worldes, so I thought I’d post them here for the world to see.
This one is from this blog:
And this one is from my delicious account:
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.
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:
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 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:
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.
Natalie Corridan-Gregg works with me at EMC. Well, not exactly with me because she’s not in Education and I don’t support the products she works with with the training I develop. But you know what I mean.
Natalie spear-headed the idea of pulling together stories from mothers all over the company into a book. Today there was a book launch party at EMC, and I got a copy of the book. I’ve only read a couple of the stories (from women I’ve never met), and I can totatly relate to the stories.
Natalie has started blogging, and it looks like she’s going to extend the intent of the book onto her blog. This is so great, and so important. We work in a global company, and we work very, very hard. The thing I like about this book project (and now the blog!) is that it helps me take a break, and see people for who they are. Not a resource, not the contact I need to complete my next project, but a mom who might be waiting for that 3:00 call from their teenager just like I used to do.
Who knows? Maybe knowing these are the what help us make those permanent connections to networks that help us learn and work faster…
The latest Training and Development magazine (from ASTD) has a very relevant article to some of the work I am doing this quarter for my organization. The article is titled It’s [Not] the Technology, Stupid. The article is about the pitfalls of thinking just because you have the technology to do it it that you’ll be able to create a kickass blended learning curriculum.
This quarter a partner and I are doing an inventory of the tools we have available to create blended learning, as well as identify efforts in other groups to create this sort of learning. One thing it’s hard to get across is that you cannot simply take what we have designed for Instructer-Led learning and port it to some form of blended learning. This article makes that point too – you must redesign the learning. The learning objectives must be matched to the appropriate delivery medium.
There is an entire section in the article devoted to the helping people “overcome the idea that online learning cannot be as effective as classroom training”.
So quick! Go read this article! Read the entire Feb T&D it is very good!
I have been getting very geeky about education theory, because that is what I am learning in grad school. But sometimes I look at the posts of some of the other EMC bloggers and I feel a little left out of the techie side of things.
So this post is about how I’m using VMware to develop the lab environments for the courses I’m working on now. That way it’s techie, and edu tech at the same time.
The product for which I’ve been developing training for the past year is VoyenceControl. This product automates the compliance, configuration and change management of network devices. Creating a hands-on learning environment is important for people to practice what the courses teach them.
Instead of purchasing servers and desktops for this lab environment, all of the hosts are housed on a single VMware ESX server. If you didn’t know, VMware virtualizes hosts. So I create 12 Windows desktops that each student uses as a client, and 8 RedHat servers for the students to use as the VoyenceControl Servers, and they all are physically located on one server. The VoyenceControl servers access a physical network of routers and switches that we have set up.
VMware is the best thing to use for a software learning lab environment. Since the machines are virtual, you can take “snapshots” of them. A snapshot is a point in time image of what the vm image looked like. Each vm server in my lab has 3 main snapshots:
These are the main snapshots, but each of the images has several other snapshots. If a patch is released, or if I need to update a license, I don’t have to create a new image. I just make a new snapshot!
Snapshots are amazing during class as well. If you have ever taught technology, you know sometimes there are some very adventurous students who experiment a little too much and wreak havoc on the lab equipment. Hey, its how some people learn right? With snapshots, no matter how much a student messes up a lab machine it doesn’t matter. You just roll back to a snapshot, and the machine is ready for more abuse.
The instructors even thought of other ways to use snapshots. If students are curious about a feature that wasn’t explicitly covered in the class, the instructors just take a snapshot of where the students are during the course, let the students experiment, take a snapshot when they are done experimenting, and then roll back to the first snapshot to carry on with the course.
I know my posts will never be as technical as other EMC bloggers, but then again they can’t geek out on learning theory now can they?