Reflections on Instructional Design:
My experience with instructional design as an instructor has been mostly, well… non-existent. When I was an 8th grade science teacher, there was honestly little design happening. The State of Texas tells you what to teach, the textbook vendors give you a ton of stuff to pick from, and you go from there. It is kind of like saying you “cooked“ a meal from pre-made frozen boxed food. Yes, there was “cooking” and eating going on, but not true cooking. So there was “design” there, but not really. Every public school teacher in Texas will tell you that they can teacher problem solving and deep thinking and all of that… but honestly, I don’t think many of us really ever knew what it would take to design instruction for that. Unless the textbook companies gave it to us.
My experience as a designer – well, that is my job title so you would think I have had a lot of experience with it, right? Not so much. Unless “fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants” counts as a method. Usually we have a long meeting with the instructor to talk about what effective design looks like online… and then they ignore us and send in 15 DVDs of their lecture capture, 15 multiple choice quizzes, a final, and call it a day. I will fight them tooth & nail to not do the 500 million hours of lecture capture until they give in, and consider it a draw for the rest. Once the students complain about the course, they come back to me with a humbler attitude. But I am not kidding – one of the DVD sets I was given was hundreds of hours of a faculty reading from PowerPoint screens that just told students where to find topics in their textbook. Over and over again, slide after slide, DVD after DVD.
Back when I used to get to do presentations at conferences, I remember my partner in crime Harriet and I getting in big trouble at TxDLA for saying “ADDIE is a slow, old method that needs to be taken out to pasture.” That turned into a lively discussion. We like it that way. But we were still shocked when we asked for a show of hands of how many other people found ADDIE inadequate. Probably 80-90% of the hands in a room of about 100 people went up. So I think the field is ready to go beyond ADDIE.
Reading Notes:
Click here to read my notes for this week on Evernote
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