Monthly Archives: September 2012

Designing Timeless Tales, Instructional Design, Technology in the Classroom

The Development Phase: ADDIE Serves Up Humble Pie

If the ultimate goal of any instructional designer is to create a course that imparts knowledge and changes behavior, then the development phase of ADDIE is the ultimate test for the instructional designer.

Depending on how things go, it might be a plateful of Humble Pie.

Does the Visible Work Match the Invisible Work?

See, when you get past all the thinking that goes into the analysis and design phases of ADDIE, in the development phase, it’s time to actually create the course. It’s sort of like the midterm exam for the instructional designer, because this is the part in the process where the designer gets to test whether he or she conducted adequate analysis up front and/or whether he or she thought of EVERYTHING in the design plan.

See, if all the nearly invisible work of instructional design wasn’t done thoroughly, with careful consideration of the audience, the organization, the goals, the learning objectives, the desired outcomes, the environment, the technology and materials available, the mode of delivery, and the facilitation of the learning experience, then the development phase is going to reveal any and all critical mistakes or omissions.

Not only that, but the development phase presents new opportunities to make decisions, and each must be carefully weighed against the goals and objectives of the instructional design project.

If you’ve analyzed thoroughly and designed instruction well, then development should be smooth and satisfying, like a cold drink on a hot day. If you haven’t, it’s going to get bumpy. The materials won’t match your objectives. The questions you ask of learners won’t actually assess their mastery of the content. The materials will be patchy, or confusing, or worse – ugly!

So what happens if you get to the development phase and you realize that it’s time to backtrack a little, time to reassess whether what you’re actually creating is what you intended to create?

The eLearning Coach (fast becoming a professional hero of mine) shares some tips:

But wait! There’s more!

Team – Work or Play?

The development phase also offers opportunities for collaboration. At this stage of the game, most instructional designers have to play nice with all the others involved with the project. They’ve got to be excellent communicators (and we’re back to the efficacy of the design plan here), so that everyone involved understands what deliverables are needed and envisioned for the project.

Instructional designers get to be financial planners and project managers, too. Are the materials within budget? Does everyone have a clear idea of their roles and responsibilities in the development phase?

Do the art, graphics, engineering, authoring, and management teams agree on the look, feel, and outcome of the instruction? What about technology? Will the designer build the course himself, like Pa Ingalls built houses in the Little House series? Or will the designer need to rely on an army of others to see his instructional vision come to life?

Testing, Testing…

And of course, the development phase offers opportunities for testing. Depending on the scope of the project and the budget allowed, the designer may simply present prototype materials to a single decision maker for review. Or, the materials may be subject to committee review. Or, formal pilot testing may be implemented.

Even the best laid instructional plans with the most savvy and talented development teams behind them are going to reveal room for improvement. It may be as simple as adding more graphics or changing a font. The testing may reveal that some of the learner activities which the designer envisioned as absolutely captivating may be as boring as watching hair grow, or that they don’t match the evaluation or assessment of content mastery, or that the interface isn’t user-friendly, or that learner evaluations don’t really measure what they’re supposed to measure.

Because analysis and design are both incredibly detailed, but relatively high-level phases in the process by comparison, the development phase takes instructional design down to the nitty gritty. The good news is that it also allows opportunities to make adjustments, to be creative with solutions, to nudge or tuck or bend just enough so that the final product matches the designer’s vision. This is a good thing.

It’s ALIVE!

Of course, for many instructional designers, not to mention the management teams who anxiously await the product of all those dollars they’ve pumped into a project, the development phase is the best part of the whole process. It’s the part where they get to see all the analysis, all the planning, all the design considerations and vision and goals and objectives take shape. Everything they’ve thought and discussed and measured and considered over the course of the process so far starts to happen. When the process of instructional design is working, development is the incredibly gratifying “AHA!” moment. It’s the birth of a vision. And that’s pretty cool.

 

References

Ashland University. (n.d.). Instructional Design. Retrieved from Operations > Information Technology: http://www.ashland.edu/faculty-staff/operations/information-technology/training/instructional-design

Clark, D. (2011, September 26). ADDIE. Retrieved from Big Dog and Little Dog’s Performance Juxtaposition: http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/history_isd/addie.html

Gordon, A. (2012). ID Roles and Responsibilities. Retrieved from Gordon Computer: http://instructionaldesign.gordoncomputer.com/IDRoles.html#USE

Hodell, C. (2011). ISD From the Ground Up: A No-Nonsense Approach to Instructional Design. Chelsea, MI: Sheridan Books, Inc.

ISU College of Education. (2012). ADDIE: Develop. Retrieved from Idaho State University College of Education, College of Science, Math, and Technology Education: http://ed.isu.edu/addie/develop/develop.html

Malamed, C. (2012). When Your Content Resembles Spaghetti. Retrieved from The eLearning Coach: http://theelearningcoach.com/elearning_design/instructional-analysis-for-procedure/

Instructional Design

ADDIE Plans a Party

ADDIE and Party Planning

My daughter is turning 7 next week. Since the day after her birthday party last year, she’s been talking about what her party would be like THIS year. Over the past 350 days or so, we’ve considered all sorts of ideas, from bounce houses to pizza places to laser tag or bowling.

As the date has neared, the conversation has really stepped up a few notches. And finally, it was time to decide. We thought about our goals for the party. We analyzed, if you will. (Yes, I’m drawing a metaphor here.) We discussed the pros and cons of different types of parties. If we decided on one of those invite-all-your-friends-from-class-birthday-party-venue parties, the down side would be that lots of our friends and family who aren’t in second grade wouldn’t be all that into it. If we decided on a birthday dinner followed by cake at grandma’s house, the down side would be that her school friends wouldn’t come. Clearly, the goal was to come up with something that would be interesting and fun and attended by old friends, school friends, mom’s friends, and our big, wonderful family.

We considered finances, too. How much should the party cost? We thought about the work involved. What party theme wouldn’t be too difficult to create at home, and what would work with some of the party stuff we already have on hand? What kinds of food would people like? What games and activities might be fun for a variety of guests? What kind of cleanup would be involved? We also thought about who we could contact and how, and who would probably come and who might not make it, especially our out-of-town friends and family.

If my daughter’s birthday party were an instructional design project, the questions we asked as we mulled over our options would fall into the analysis phase of the instructional design process fondly known as ADDIE.

Analysis

Allow me to flesh out the metaphor:

What is the need? (Well, it’s my daughter’s birthday. The need for a party is clear. Tradition calls for a birthday celebration. This is also an important birthday for my daughter, in that it’s our first as a mother-daughter duo. We both want it to be especially awesome, and my personal, “mommy goal” is for her to feel as loved and supported as possible.)

What are the goals of the party? (We want all the people she likes and loves most in the world to come and have a great time. We want to stay in budget and keep the preparation to a reasonable level. We want everyone to enjoy themselves, and we want to stick to a theme a variety of people can relate to, with activities a variety of people can enjoy.)

What information is needed, and how is it gathered? (We’ll need to have a clear plan so we can be sure to get everything we need and set up appropriately. We’ll need to know how much everything will cost, and we’ll need to select decorations, menu items, and activities accordingly. We’ll need to know how to get in touch with all the people we want to invite. They’ll need to know where we live and how to get here. We’ll need to know whether they’re coming and if they’re bringing smaller children or grandparents and whether they’re eating dinner here and how long they plan to stay. They’ll want to know what presents my daughter might want for her birthday. We’ll research as much as we can, and we’ll use our address book, Facebook, word of mouth, and the telephone, along with traditional paper invitations, to provide and then in turn, gather, this information.)

How will the [party] be structured and organized? How will it play out? (After much analysis and deliberation, we decided on a camping-themed party at our house, including a camp cookout and camp-style games, a singalong, a sleepover with several girls, and a family-friendly brunch in the morning.)

When should the [party] be revised or adjusted? (Well, once it’s over, we can’t redo a birthday party, but we can use what we learn to help us plan another bash next year. In the meantime, we’ll know we need to bend a little mid-fiesta if we pay attention to our guests and adjust the party plans as we go to make sure they all have a good time.)

According to Don Clark, one of the best ways to think of ADDIE is as a “guide for gaining direct intuitive insight into a problem“. ADDIE as a generic process comes in pretty handy for solving a variety of problems. In this case, the problem is what to do for the birthday party. Of course, ADDIE’s more technical implications relate to the actual process of instructional design. We’ll get there.

“D” is for DESIGN.

With that in mind, and continuing the metaphor, it’s clear that with our party date just two weeks away, we’ve entered the all-important design phase.

Now it’s time to get serious. No more brainstorming. Analysis is complete. It’s time to think through every detail. Now we know what our goals are, and we’ve come up with some broad ideas that will help us meet those goals. But now we have to get down to the design of the thing. What do the answers to the questions we asked ourselves in the analysis phase actually look like? How will the guests experience what we want them to experience?

The metaphor of ADDIE as party planner really starts to align here. Planning a party isn’t technical in the same way that instructional design is technical, but design is design is design, and at the end of the day, what we’re talking about here when we talk about design is an incredibly well-thought-out plan for impacting the experience of others in a particular context.

Connie Malamed, “The eLearning Coach,” says that a good instructional designer must be able to imagine him or herself as the the learner or the audience. Just as an instructional designer thinks of the way in which each choice made in the design phase is going to impact the end user or learner, and whether those choices are going to help achieve the real goals of the project, a party planner has to think about the guests’ experience at the party, and whether the choices made in planning are going to pan out and say, “Welcome! Have a great time here!”

So, I start gathering information. First, I take inventory. What camping-related gear do we have in the shed? Okay. Good. What can we use for the party? As I find it, I put it on the list. We’ll use the big yellow tent. We’ll use the sleeping bags. The lantern. The small barbecue pit will serve as a mini fire pit. We can use the long skewers to roast marshmallows. We’ve got a karaoke machine. We can use that for our singalong. We have friends with instruments. They can bring those, too.

Then, I research. I look up recipes. I choose the ones we’ll use. What kinds of camp-themed party decorations and games are out there? How much do they cost? Where can I get them? How long will they take to ship? I start making lists. I bookmark websites. I decide on a color theme. I decide on a cake design. I choose crafts and activities. I order stuff. (Wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. That’s the “D” for “Development.” We’ll save that “D” for next time.)

Finally, I walk around, looking at the space available. Just as an instructional designer should walk through the user’s experience with a course, as a party planner, I’ve got to walk through the logistics. How will people enter? How will they be greeted? Where will they put their things? Where will the children sleep? Where will we set up the games? As I map out everything from entry to food and refreshment placement to traffic flow, I’m creating a design intended to meet the goals we determined way up front in the analysis phase.

However, and this is an important distinction to make, the beauty of the design phase is that it allows for modification. Design itself answers questions. If a high-level idea or intention considered in the analysis phase doesn’t pan out once the designer starts designing, the agreed-upon parameters of the design itself can help to shape the decisions made. We’ve still got to answer the questions and meet the goals, but design allows us to figure out exactly how to fit what we need to fit into the space/time/budget we’ve got to work with.

In instructional design, that might mean that the designer is working with a certain audience, or technological restrictions, or budget restrictions, or a timeline. For our party, it might mean that we can only fit six little girls and their sleeping bags comfortably inside our tent, or that the punch bowl will fit on the big table but not the small one.

The considerations made and attended to in the all-important design phase will inevitably drive the end-user experience. And that’s what DESIGN is all about.

Once the design plan is in place, and every consideration has been made, the designer can develop and implement the plan. But we’ll save that for another day. Right now, I’ve got a sleepy, very excited almost-seven-year-old to put to bed.

 

References

Austin, I. (2011). Instructional Design Basics – ADDIE Analysis. Retrieved from digitizedi.com: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_l7Y2jVGoIc&list=UUcIEy4X4RvXJu92QIuGto7A&index=6&feature=plcp

Clark, D. (2011, September 26). ADDIE. Retrieved from Big Dog and Little Dog’s Performance Juxtaposition: http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/history_isd/addie.html

Hodell, C. (2011). ISD From the Ground Up: A No-Nonsense Approach to Instructional Design. Chelsea, MI: Sheridan Books, Inc.

Malamed, C. (2012). 10 Qualities of the Ideal Instructional Designer. Retrieved from The eLearning Coach: http://theelearningcoach.com/elearning_design/10-qualities-of-the-ideal-instructional-designer/