Instructors need to think like instructional designers.

In the Before Times, instructors didn’t have to think much about course design. They set up a syllabus, figured out readings, assignments, and tests, wrote their lectures, and appeared in class on the right day and time to hold forth on their subject. When the pandemic hit and instructors were confronted with the need to repurpose their courses for new online spaces, many of them became acquainted with a breed of professionals that were new to them: instructional designers.

Instructional designers, sometimes known as course designers, sometimes known as learning environment engineers, sometimes known as miracle workers, have come into their own in the past few years. Online instructors often just don’t have the skills needed to get courses up and running; they’re content providers, and it’s the job of the instructional designers to step in and provide the form to deliver that content.

But now, in the era of pandemic pedagogy, we’re all online instructors, and there just aren’t enough instructional designers to go around. So we have to provide for ourselves, which is just as well: give a man a fish, he eats for a day; teach a man to fish, he’ll be at the lake all summer.

Richard E. West’s Foundations of Learning and Instructional Design Technology is a key text in the instructional designer’s library, and one of the chapters in that book, Tonia A. Dousay’s “Instructional Design Models” gives us a quick overview of the history of instructional design. She provides us with a table listing 34 instructional design models, the earliest dating from 1968. But in her view the core of all instructional design is the ADDIE process: “when discussing the instructional design process, we often refer to ADDIE as the overarching paradigm or framework by which we can explain individual models. The prescribed steps of a model can be mapped or aligned back to the phases of the ADDIE process.” This is reassuring, but also kind of troubling - why go to all that trouble when there’s a perfectly good model that will do the job?

As formulated by Branch (2009), ADDIE works like this:

1. Analyze – identify the probable causes for a performance gap

2. Design – verify the desired performances and appropriate testing methods

3. Develop – generate and validate the learning resources

4. Implement – prepare the learning environment and engage the students

5. Evaluate – assess the quality of the instructional products and processes, both before and after implementation.

I’m not sure why this process receives such devotion in the instructional design world. It seems so straightforward, so common sensical, so natural. Even Branch’s descriptions of each part of the process detract from it; “generate and validate the learning resources” sounds like they’re trying to find a more sophisticated way of saying “develop course stuff.” What the model doesn’t make clear is that this is rarely a step-by-step process; when designing a course, instructors go back and forth and sideways before the day is done. But then instructional design models that do try to describe those intricacies end up requiring convoluted diagrams that cause headaches. Simpler is better, if for no other reason than instructors rarely have the luxury of time, especially in these heady days of pivoting pedagogy.

Anyways, in the spirit of instructional design’s never ending quest for the perfect design model, I present my version of ADDIE that focuses on the need to understand the contexts of the course, instructor and learner. I call it the SkidADDIE:

1. Analyze the contexts of the course, the instructor, and the learner

2. Design with the most important contextual considerations in mind

3. Develop stuff that address those considerations

4. Implement what you’ve come up with

5. Evaluate what happens.

So, SkidADDIE along now and get designin’.

For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.

Post 11/60.