James Wanless

Instructional design now and in the future: part two

February 10th, 2009 :: education :: comment below

This is the second of two parts. Here I talk about factors driving the future of the field. As someone doing this as part of an MA program, what I’m looking for is thoughts on approach from those who may be practicing instructional designers or whose experience is grounded in more than literature review or discussions. Mine are definitely lay opinions in this area, despite my experience in other areas of web development.

Factors driving the evolution of the field

So far, I have identified key issues at play right now in the instructional design field; primarily theoretical and technological. However, these are only springboards for bigger and broader changes to come. What will an instructional designer need as a practitioner and how will that play out for things like F2F or distance learning as technology marches forward? How will learner needs and preferences change as a result? Will open technologies, open access and the evolution of constructivist underpinnings effectively turn instructional design on its head?

What Will Practitioners Need to Do?

While the questions in the introduction to this section might suggest everything will change, this is not so. The skills and attributes an instructional designer brings to the table will have to accommodate external changes out of necessity, “Instructional design is an area in which we should be able to anticipate particularly rapid and significant change (Smith & Ragan, 2005).” However, some things will change and some not so much:

Instructional design issues: “The same instructional design issues are valid for both traditional and eLearning: structure, content, motivation and feedback, interaction and activities (Siragusa, 2000, p.4; as cited by Herridge Group, 2004, p.15).”
ISD process: there is no reason to think the principles of ADDIE or standard ISD will not still apply, with some aspect(s) of Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation and Evaluation always present.
Standards and skills: competencies, standards and skills will continue to change. Emerging international standards for program evaluation and online learning (IPSTIPI, 2006) will become increasingly important. Practitioners will need to develop analytical, project management, technology-oriented media and evaluation / research competencies for business and industry settings (Larson & Lockee, 2007, pp.3, 11-12).

While ID practitioners will have to maintain the skills in sequencing, pacing, content selection and the like, and will still have to choose and use contextually appropriate ID models, business and industry settings may demand more rigour and higher standards in their qualifications, while learners will demand better experiences and expect to use the technology of their choice.

External Factors

While learners, learning theory and technology will largely drive the process of instructional design, trends in society will also play an important role in the kinds of training and instruction required, and delivery method. The explosive growth of purely distance-based graduate-level programs aimed at employed mid-career adults, indicates the need for flexible education. As learning objects and media become increasingly sophisticated, and things like smart objects and expert systems continue to gain prominence in business training, classroom and F2F settings, technology literacy will likely become increasingly important for instructional designers.

Learners and Technology

It is well beyond the scope of this paper to do a detailed analysis of learners and their needs. They will differ significantly based on learning context, demographics, socio-economic and cultural factors. Plus, little detailed knowledge about individual learner needs actually exists. However, based upon the continuing evolution and application of a predominantly constructivist approach to instructional design, learners:

will continue to be more central to the instruction and will require more active, authentic, collaborative learning imbued with multiple perspectives (Karagiorgi & Symeou, 2005);
will need learning experiences more adapted to their individual learning styles, despite the fact that we still require far more systematic knowledge of how different kinds of learners use various media (Miller, 2007), and;
in work-sponsored training, support and professional development – may require more performance technology solutions such as job aids, counselling and on-the-job training (Smith & Ragan, 2005).

While learners ultimately come in all sorts of flavours, those which fit into the broad category of millennials (14-27) make up a large chunk of today’s aggregate learner persona. According to a recent study (Accenture, 2008) of more than 400 U.S. students and employees from this demographic, they show “an increasing demand for high-tech devices to connect with colleagues, peers, friends and family, rather than face-to-face contact,” and that, “they expect to use their own technology and mobile devices for work, increasingly choosing their place of employment based on how accommodating companies are to their personal technology preferences.”

When coupling millennial preferences for high-tech (as opposed to F2F) social interaction, and the desire to use their own technology in the way they best see fit, there is no reason to assume this only holds true for employment. Instructional delivery in all contexts will likely have to progressively and continually accommodate this trend.

Learning and Educational Technology

I have just demonstrated how end-user technology preferences will likely cause significant issues for the planning and delivery of learning, regardless of context. Before discussing the rapidly changing landscape with regard to building and delivering learning online, I feel it is important to highlight broader changes in technology, particularly wireless. As handheld devices and mobile computing continue to gain prominence for learners it is important to have at least a cursory knowledge of the landscape, as it provides important context for how our instruction is being accessed and some of the possibilities for delivering that instruction.

Gartner (2009) has identified eight mobile technologies that will evolve significantly through 2010, impacting short-term mobile strategies and policies. As these take hold, they will undoubtedly affect longer-term technology trends as well, and they are effectively not new issues, regardless. Key trends include improved mobile interfaces, Bluetooth improvements, location awareness, wireless broadband, 802.11n adoption and the mobile web. What is important to note is that these are not new and show that wireless access and mobile computing will continue to improve and become increasingly important to learners, thus making it something instructional designers cannot ignore.

What about delivery frameworks? A Learning Management System (LMS) is a special type of Content Management System (CMS), optimized to deliver instruction online. Examples include Moodle, Desire2Learn and Blackboard. A CMS application is most often a web-based Graphical User Interface (GUI) for managing the content of a web site, as it has become increasingly important to provide access over the Internet. A CMS for updating a web site allows distributed authoring of content by Subject Matter Experts (SME), while centralizing publishing control and design standards through a web management department. LMS software takes the same approach to managing a web-based learning environment, but the end-user features are more tailored to content sequencing, asynchronous/synchronous communication tools, assignment submission and other social learning activities, as opposed to more passive information distribution. Making sense of, and choosing, a particular CMS or LMS is a very contextually specific and technical endeavour, typically well beyond the scope of an individual instructional designer. As I will demonstrate next, though, understanding how these systems work and the features and limitations of the environment for which one is designing, will likely become increasingly important.

The move to open is here to stay. A discussion of LMS software is beyond the scope of this paper and not terribly germane to the specifics of instructional design. However, understanding terms like open source, open standards and open access is very important to the instructional design process. In particular, there has been a very clear development on the web in general, which is now having a significant impact on teaching and learning. Web 2.0 generally describes the move to information democratization, user generated content, socialization, sharing and community-built applications, and is a social change enabled by technology, as opposed being technology-driven. Web 2.0 has also drastically influenced general expectations with regard to functionality and experience and, interestingly, resembles constructivism in many important ways.

Web 2.0 was eloquently described by Stephen Downes (2005) as:

a vision of the Web in which information is broken up into “microcontent” units that can be distributed over dozens of domains. The Web of documents has morphed into a Web of data. We are no longer just looking to the same old sources for information. Now we’re looking to a new set of tools to aggregate and remix microcontent in new and useful ways.” In a nutshell, what was happening was that the Web was shifting from being a medium, in which information was transmitted and consumed, into being a platform, in which content was created, shared, remixed, repurposed, and passed along. And what people were doing with the Web was not merely reading books, listening to the radio or watching TV, but having a conversation, with a vocabulary consisting not just of words but of images, video, multimedia and whatever they could get their hands on. And this became, and looked like, and behaved like, a network.

This notion has significant implications for learning. Open content access, sharing and distribution, coupled with the changing face of Millennials and their technology preferences, suggests that while technology is being used to share and communicate like never before, the experience will be very individualistic, tailored to personal preferences and expectations.

Smith & Ragan (2005) recognize some of this when they state, “the single quality that more than any other, seems to set the web apart is the more or less instant and free distribution of interactive multimedia materials.“ Further, that “information infrastructures are becoming able to serve learning in both individual and collaborative modes, making informal, self-directed learning increasingly fused with intentional or formal learning and instruction” (p.364).

Instructional designers will have to understand that learners will be accessing an ever-wider world of information via technology and at times that suits them. They will share, discuss and re-mix content to suit their preferences and they will expect it to be factored into their overall learning experience and objectives.

Beyond Constructivism

What will the continuing evolution of constructivism mean for instructional designers? For example, as I have already indicated the features of many LMS software packages are evolving to accommodate constructivist underpinnings, and learners are becoming much more particular about education suiting their preferences. As LMS applications become more open platforms for accessing content and materials from a number of external sources, and allow learners to have a more active role in creating, structuring and pacing their own learning, how will learning theory change to further affect the instructional design field?

Not everyone feels that constructivism has been that revolutionary. Wilson (2005), for example, calls it “old wine in new bottles.” Further, his four pillars of practice focus more on aspects of instruction than specific theories and include the individual, the outside connection, the value context and the aesthetic. It is difficult to jibe his approach within the broader context of constructivism, but I think it important to make note of the value he places on aesthetic design, something I have long thought was lacking in off-the-shelf user interfaces. Parrish (2005) pushes the aesthetic envelope even further when he suggests that active learning strategies and aesthetic experience share the rhythm of imbalance and balance regained (p.23). Parrish and Wilson both share the notion that the experience of learning is key, and I tend to think that it is an important concept for ID practitioners to be mindful of.

As a developmental approach connectivism is, at once, interesting and extremely hard to quantify. If it is already difficult to design authentic, situated, individual and measurable learning experiences, just try doing so while recognizing chaos, network, complexity and self-organization (Seimens, 2004):

Learning is a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements – not entirely under the control of the individual. Learning (defined as actionable knowledge) can reside outside of ourselves (within an organization or a database), is focused on connecting specialized information sets, and the connections that enable us to learn more are more important than our current state of knowing. Connectivism is driven by the understanding that decisions are based on rapidly altering foundations. New information is continually being acquired. The ability to draw distinctions between important and unimportant information is vital. The ability to recognize when new information alters the landscape based on decisions made yesterday is also critical.

I have included the different concepts above not to confuse, but to illuminate how instructional designers will have to think to accommodate the ever-changing landscape of learning theory.

Instructional Design Models and Their Application

With dozens of models available, both rigid and flexible in nature, each designed to address specific learning contexts, model selection will continue to be very personal for ID practitioners. New models, though, will emerge to accommodate shifts in learners, learning theory and technology. Smith & Regan (2005) state, “In the future, we can expect the models that we employ to guide instructional design to become increasingly powerful, sophisticated and efficient.” They indicate key issues in ID model development will include; front-end analysis shaped by anthropological methods, design and delivery shaped by psychology and cognitive science, implementation shaped by market research, evaluation shaped by anthropology and sociology and training programs shaped by real-world jobs (p.365). They also state that models will become more alterable, iterative, layered and graduated, to reflect the need for ‘the quick and dirty’ and the notion of rapid prototyping.

Evaluation

This issue is probably one of the most difficult to anticipate in the coming years. I do not really have a great many insights into evaluation, only that I note it does not fit well with the increasing dominance of social constructivist leanings. Behaviourist methodologies are somewhat easier to evaluate, as measurement often becomes about observing changes in learner behaviour and testing for rote recall. Constructivism and Pavlov’s Dog would seem to have little in common. It is entirely possible that, as learners become more involved in determining their own learning path and experience, instructional designers will have to find ways for them to help determine how they are evaluated.

Conclusions

Instructional designers are faced with a number of significant issues with the changes that are presently taking place. The theoretical nature of knowledge continues to undergo revisions to accommodate how learning is perceived to occur. As technology has moved into a new realm of social capability, with ubiquity of access at speeds that were only a dream a few years ago, almost everything is now a click away, with many social interactions among Millennials just as likely to happen via a laptop or hand-held, as in-person.

The preferences this social technology landscape has created for learners mean instructional design must not only include the traditional activities related to instructional model selection and use, and the steps associated with standard ISD processes, but instructional designers will need to factor in myriad other elements to their design process.

ID practitioners in the coming years will need to consider learners, technology, content and experiences outside their designed environment. The continuing evolution of constructivist theories means learner outcomes will become more individual. While learning environments will still run on specific software platforms, learners will create their own experiences through the open model pervading the web. Everything from planning learner outcomes to determining evaluation approaches will necessitate more direct involvement of the learner.

References

Accenture, (2008). “New-Generation Workers” Want Technology Their Way. Accenture News Room. Retrieved January 29, 2009 from http://newsroom.accenture.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=4767
Bates, A. W., & Poole, G. (2003). Effective teaching with technology in higher education: Foundations for success. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Downes, S., (2005). E-learning 2.0. Retrieved January, 25, 2009 from http://www.downes.ca/post/31741.
Edmonds , G., Branch, R. & Mukherjee, P. (1994). A conceptual framework for comparing instructional design models. Educational Technology Research and Development, 42 (4), 52-72.
Gartner, (2009). Gartner Reveals Eight Mobile Technologies to Watch in 2009 and 2010. Retrieved January 27, 2009 from http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=867012
Hannum, W. (2005). Instructional systems development: A 30-year perspective. Educational Technology, 45 (4), 5-21.
Herridge Group (2004). The Use of Traditional Instructional Systems Design Models for eLearning. Retrieved December, 2008 from http://www.herridgegroup.com/pdfs/The%20use%20of%20Traditional%20ISD%20for%20elearning.pdf
IBSTIPI, (2000). Competencies for instructional design. Retrieved January 17, 2009 from http://it.coe.uga.edu/itforum/paper89/ITForumpaper89.pdf
Karagiorgi, Y., & Symeou, L., (2005). Translating Constructivism into Instructional Design: Potential and Limitations. Educational Technology & Society, 8(1), 17-27.
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Parrish, P. E. (2005). Embracing the aesthetics of instructional design. Educational Technology, 45 (2), 16-25.
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2 comments

Dennis McKoy Says:
March 19th, 2009 at 11:54 pm

A excellent piece of analysis. Would you happen of have anything of this quality on Smith and Regan Model?
James Says:
March 20th, 2009 at 8:56 am

Thanks for the read Dennis. Beyond what I’d cited from Smith and Ragan, I don’t have much I can point you to. Admittedly, this was a course paper that I broke up in two parts because it was long – as such that model was just a small part of the reading I did, but the reference in the list was a chapter in a textbook they wrote. I’m probably going to put the papers I’m happy with here in a separate section at some point.