So what do I understand about Instructional Design? Some of the basics I feel I understand fairly well. I teach a course on ADDIE, so I get to see a lot about that. Especially about this time of the semester when I get to dig through 16 ADDIE PowerPoint presentations. Well, a bit less since I don’t waste time grading the ones plagiarized from Wikipedia. I am starting to see how the specific ID process that you choose to design with can influence the outcomes of your lesson. ADDIE lends itself to standardized testing more so that others such as LTCA. I know some people will point out that you can come up with any type of lesson in any ID process, but I tend to disagree… just because you never really see that happening. I think that is an interesting topic to research in the very near future – have there been any studies that attempt to see if certain ID models produce certain lesson types?

I will be teaching Socio-Cultural Theory for the class. Why did I choose that? Well, time for a confession. I have been struck in ADDIE mode for so long at my job that I don’t really remember much else outside of that. I was kind of hoping for a list of “Advanced” ID models to choose from, but when the time to post our ID choices, the few advanced models I knew were snapped up before I could jump in there. So I did a search for ID models based on constructivism, read through the results, and socio-cultural theory grabbed my attention. I think what interested me the most is that it expanded upon Vygotsky by focusing on the implications of culture on the construction of knowledge. There is really a find line of difference between the socio-cultural theory and constructivist theory, but that difference will be interesting to study. In many ways, what we are doing for our assignments this month could fall into socio-cultural theory, as long as the student presenters are interactive. Our class counts as a specific culture, and our presentations are a way that we help each other learn something we don’t already know. Zone of Proximal Development inside of a certain culture.

Reading Notes:

Click here to read my notes for this week on Evernote

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Reflections on Instructional Design:

My experience with instructional design as an instructor has been mostly, well… non-existent. When I was an 8^th 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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