Artefact #4 - Instructional Design Model

Artefact #4 - Instructional Design Model

This artefact is a representation of the instructional design model that the organization I work at is using today to develop new courses. After working in the distance education field for over 9 years and taking the M. Ed program for the past 4 years, I have put together this flowchart to guide my organization’s course development process. There are four phases to it, each one involving one or more person and various tasks that need to be performed in order to develop a course from start to finish. The length of each task, phase, and amount of time each person spends on the project will vary based on each project. Additionally, this is not a project plan; rather it is to guide the development of a project plan, as each task from this model can be used as a task in a project plan. For the most part, this is a generic model, and can be altered based on the project, it is to be used as a framework for new courses development.

Reflection

The experience of learning new concepts and applying this knowledge in real-life work situations was very valuable to me. This artefact is an example of how knowledge I derived from several of my M.Ed courses was translated into my personal and professional practice and made real and meaningful: a flowchart to assist in the roles and responsibilities, and procedures, for an instructional design project team.

In my view, having the ability to apply knowledge to develop something new is a very powerful tool to have and seems to epitomize, for me, what instructional design is all about – the ability for a designer to work with the greatly diverse material from all manner of disciplines to design content knowledge that can be useful to students’ learning (2.1).

It took me several years after I started my career in the field of course development to understand what instructional design is and how it functions in the process of course development. Several learning theories and instructional design models were presented in the M.Ed courses of influence (601, 603, 604 and 650). After studying them, I realized that each was trying to achieve the same objective: to provide a framework for the development of the best possible course (in spite of unavoidable organizational/institutional constraints such as mode of course delivery, budget, and SME expertise).

After learning about the various theories, I had a much better picture of the instructional design development process, not just from a particular model, but from the point of view of the actual concept of Instructional Design. The theories of instructional design helped me to see how to better design courses that deliver educational value to their audience. I also learned that information is meaningless unless it is actually converted into knowledge. One can have a lot of information at their disposal; however, due to the large volumes of information out there, it is difficult to take advantage of it without actually converting into knowledge. This is how the instructional design theories helped me to see their real value and how to help better deliver the content to the audience so that the content can be transformed for them into knowledge. As a result of this, I was able to put together a flowchart of the entire process for course development, which presently we are using in my organization. The flowchart essentially represents the key tasks that must be completed for course development from start to finish, whether it is in class, eLearning, or hybrid model. It best reflects the ADDIE model and can be customized based off of your own organization’s processes where it complements those processes. There is a lot of communication back and forth between the 3 key roles of a course development project. The Analysis, Design, and Development phases are the same as that of ADDIE, while Implementation and Evaluation have been taken out and replaced with Publishing (2.2, 2.4, 2.6).

At this point, we haven’t gone through the entire cycle fully and a final course has not been released using this model, so adjustments will be made as we make progress with the development of the courses using this model. The biggest take away for me through the development of this process is that adjustments are critical. Instructional development requires input from a number of parties and in order to ensure that the highest quality of work is being completed, we absolutely must be open minded and be able to make adjustments to the process that is being followed. Additionally, another lesson that I would say I learned from this experience has been to be open to changes to the process we follow.

One of the most challenging tasks for me throughout the implementation of this process was to get buy-in from the SMEs, as on-line courses in our organization are not a very common or a popular concept. In my experience working in the educational development sector, I have found that SMEs often resist change when it comes to on-line education. As with my historical experiences, this was not a significantly different one and the concerns were very similar. Some of the points of resistance were that it is new, it is different, it is not going to be popular amongst our students, students cannot learn this content via distance, etc. These points may or may not be valid; however, to invalidate them, it is a very difficult and time consuming process, which requires analysis of the students’ demographics, preferences, carrying out surveys to gauge their learning styles, etc. Also, some of our SMEs are trainers as well and even though they don’t like to admit this, they feel threatened by the on-line courses and so they look at the concept in a negative light. The reason I say that is because I had asked one of the SME/Trainer to do a video recording by standing in front of the board and teach for 10-15 minutes about a concept, similar to their delivery of the course face to face. He said flat out no and when I asked for a reason, he said because that is my intellectual property and I do not want it to be reused. Another reason I believe that the unpopularity with online courses occurs is because our on-line courses are asynchronous, and there is no discussion forums or instructor facilitation and so the SMEs/Trainers feel that the on-line courses are directly replacing their role as teachers (2.4, 2.5).

There were a lot of different opinions in our team regarding how to proceed with the development of new courses. Most of the time the reason was because the content our organization delivered is very technical in nature; hence, it would be hard to deliver it effectively using eLearning. Other arguments were about the student demographics, where students may not have access to computers, may not know how to use computers, may lack access to internet due to their remote locations, etc.

The notion that on-line courses delivery cannot be successful and as a result, our business of education delivery will suffer because students will not be satisfied after completing an on-line course through our organization is quite inaccurate. This is unfortunately the reality in many not for profit organizations, including the higher education sector, the resistance towards adopting change. For me, in regards to this adversity from the SMEs in my organization, I was able to use my knowledge from MDDE602 course to find research on the importance and popularity of on-line education, as well as use our current on-line courses’ statistics and why they are so popular. Additionally, all our present on-line courses have evaluations, where majority of the students want to continue to take on-line courses over face to face. I was able to create a fact sheet in the end to convince my team members to at least see on-line courses as a more viable option than they ever had before. My ability to make the fact sheet was supported by the research that I carried out on topics of why distance education exists in the first place, what are the pros and cons of it, who the key audience are for distance education with respect to their demographics, etc. One key point I specifically focused on were the cons, because even though they are negative, they show that my research is comprehensive and that is non-biased. So in essence, I used the limitations of distance education to my advantage. I have thought about the issue of resistance to change and the fact that I have continuously experienced this throughout my career and I feel that I am much better equipped in debating the value of distance education now than I was before I began the M.Ed program (2.6). 

The Importance of Process

One of the objectives of our team is to develop over 50 courses – primarily online – within two years for welding professionals across Canada.  With these large numbers, we need to have a clear process that our team can follow in order to successfully develop and roll-out all the courses. Due to this reason and the need for mass production, I went ahead and developed the flowchart to allow us to stay on track and meet our timelines. The response from my colleagues was largely in agreement and almost nil improvements. Perhaps it is because I have had significant experience in the education development sector and that allowed me to develop a really good quality process flow. The only feedback that was provided was to re-word certain pieces, rename some stakeholders, etc. For the basic structure and sequence of events in the flowchart, there was minimal feedback. And an explanation from one of my coworkers for this response was that because the team consists of SMEs who are Engineers, they are very comfortable with processes and really appreciate when processes are in place. Their lack of suggestions could also be because they were new to the course development process and how it works for education development (3.1, 3.2, 3.5).

With issues of resistance to change and lack of processes within our organization, especially with respect to the adoption of on-line course development, I had to ensure that I did the following:

Effective communication – To ensure these ideas were adopted; I needed to convey them effectively and clearly to the group. Verbal communication has not been a big strength for me. However, in this case I did realize my lack of effective verbal communication as a potential barrier and tried to remove it by communicating early, more often by email prior to the meeting to deliver the presentation. For example, I sent out the flowchart to the attendees of the meeting a few days before the meeting and asked them to spend some time reviewing and come up with questions on the day of the meeting. Come the meeting, we were able to have an engaging conversation as attendees were familiar with the basic layout of the process and were able to move discussions forward with focused questions, etc. Typically, these meetings would tend to be about a one way delivery by the presenter; however, I find that those are not the ideal ways of getting the message across effectively. A more effective communication technique in my opinion would be to have a meeting agenda and have focused discussions that revolve around the topic at hand. Avoid going on tangents and shifting off topics. Additionally, we need to allow for all meeting attendees to have input during the meeting so that their opinion is valued and they feel that they are an important member of the team. I learned that this technique is effective from working at ADP as an Instructional Designer, where our meetings always had an agenda and whenever we went off course, the meeting chair (project manager) would get us back on course. And the project manager always asked for everyone’s input throughout the meeting. Also, this was a new tactic that I applied at our meetings and I feel our team was very satisfied with the outcome. The outcome being more effective and results oriented meeting where work was assigned to the appropriate team member and results were reported which coincided with the agenda of the meeting. Another experience that taught me to do this was from MDDE610 group project, I worked with very experienced education development professionals in my group and the group leader would send us the talking points and any items to review a few days before our weekly meeting (2.7, 3.1, 3.2, 3.5).

Diplomacy/Patience – My experience working as part of a group—being part of a team—showed me the importance of diplomacy and patience. To collaborate successfully with others meant I needed to acknowledge individual differences in personality, practice, strength, and weakness and allow these differences, and the richness of people’s diversity, to assist me in learning from others and enjoying positive outcomes from the experience of group work. I have had to work on being more diplomatic with team members when trying to convince them of my point of view and ideas. And when my ideas are not accepted or received well, I have had to learn to take the feedback and learn from it. In order to do this, I have had to work on understanding that at the end of the day, our goal is to produce the best quality of results with our projects. This means that everyone in the team has a say and some people may have better ideas and suggestions than others. With regards to this particular artefact, I tried to be very patient and negotiable (2.7).

Group work in MDDE602 provided me with an opportunity to acknowledge my own strengths and weaknesses as part of a team. I learned to exercise more patience with group members who lacked technical skills I possessed and to work with them so our project could develop collaboratively. Using web-conferencing tools and Skype, I was able to communicate with them regularly to help them identify and overcome their technical challenges. What I learned from this experience was how to deal with people with differing skill sets and experiences than me, and how to be more diplomatic while working with them. The importance of effective communication, and computer-mediated-communication in particular was also once again made very clear to me.

Better Listening – I realized that I needed to be a better listener from my experience in the MDDE610 course group project. One reason listening became an important aspect while working in this project was because we had 6 people in the group, and in order to ensure that everyone feels valued and is able to get their points across, each one of us had to be patient and listen to everyone’s input equally and consider it fairly. Previously I had worked in group projects, for work and for school, however, this experience made me realize that each member of the group has something valuable to offer (2.7).

Buy-In from Leadership first – I was asked by my manager to develop some documentation and processes to help our team be more efficient with courses development. As a result, I developed this process map. Once the process map was developed, prior to presenting to our team I got it approved from my manager to ensure that she is on the same page. Additionally, it helped in getting our team to agree on some of the aspects and knowing that the leadership is on board as well, we could be certain that there wouldn't be any turning back after, which often happens when there is no support from the leadership.

In MDDE660, I attended a lecture by Tony Bates, which was on the topic of inefficient implementation and failure of technologies in the higher education sector. One of the causes that he had identified for these inefficiencies was the lack of support for the technology implementation strategy in the organization. To ensure that our Instructional Design Model didn't fall into that trap and was successfully implemented, I had to get as much support as possible. I even had one on one informal meeting with some of the SMEs to listen to their ideas and try to convince them of this approach and how it can be of help to our organization’s objective of delivering more than 50 courses (2.7).

This model was developed using Microsoft Visio and was shared with all stakeholders for suggestions/feedback prior to having a formal discussion around it. For the development of eLearning, we use Adobe Captivate, Illustration tools like Adobe Illustrator, and Microsoft Power Point and Word for the documentation that would be needed for in Class (2.7, 3.1, 3.2, 3.5).