First:

Blog Spottings and Other News
In preparing for today’s post as well as for an upcoming presentation I will be doing on Learning 2.0, I came across an interesting posting and comments on Christy Tucker’s blog titled Facebook as LMS?  My knee-jerk reaction was "No way!", but it is an interesting question and merits some thought.

Now:

Does Instructional Design Matter?
I’ve been involved in the production and delivery of online learning for more than a decade now and there was certainly a point in the past when I would never have thought to pose the question that serves as the title of this post. Indeed, I have often offered the opinion to clients, prospective clients, or audiences to which I have spoken that “good design precedes effective learning.” I still hold that opinion in most cases.

Over the past few years, however, I have observed a handful of developments that I now feel require the question to be asked. One is that there has been continuing downward price pressure on e-learning course production costs; the second has been the rise of rapid e-learning; and the third; and the most recent has been the appearance of social media technologies and their adaptation as learning tools. These developments, I have noticed, give rise to the following corresponding perceptions:

1. Instructional design is a luxury
2. Instructional design is a commodity
3. Instructional design is questionable

A caveat before continuing: The following observations are directed at organizational online learning or independent individual online learning. Some of them may apply to e-learning in K-12 or higher education, but I don’t feel qualified to comment in those areas with any confidence.

Instructional Design is a Luxury
More and more I see online learning initiatives where formal instructional design approaches have been tossed aside—assuming there is even an awareness of them in the first place. No doubt my perspective has been significantly influenced by the fact that I have worked with many nonprofit organizations over the past few years. A formal design process costs money that many of these organizations simply don’t have. So, many forego it and many nonetheless manage to offer e-learning initiatives that are quite successful in terms of adoption rates, learning outcomes (to the extent there is a viable measure for these), and learner satisfaction.

While my perspective has been influenced by work with nonprofits, I have enough interaction with other types of organizations to know that this phenomenon is not confined to nonprofits. To a certain extent, it occurs because it can occur. The introduction of a range of low-cost or no cost tools associated with rapid e-learning and social networking has resulted in a dramatic transfer of production control to people who have traditionally had to purchase production services from external firms or hire experts internally. While theoretically these phenomena due not predicate abandonment of instructional design—indeed rapid e-learning can open the door to effective rapid prototyping—in practice they often do.

In the association world, in particular, but certainly in other sectors as well, presentation-based forms of e-learning—whether through live or canned Webinars or the use of tools like Articulate Presenter—have become ubiquitous. I doubt there are any hard figures available on this phenomenon, but I suspect the vast majority of presenters have had little if any pedagogical training, much less formal instructional design training (or, for that matter, training on effective use of PowerPoint). The fact that the presenters are often highly educated people offers little consolation. I know from my own experiences in teaching while working on a doctoral degree at a major university, for instance, that basic pedagogy, much less formal instructional design practices, is not necessarily part of an advanced degree experience.

Instructional Design is a Commodity
In the situations above, instructional design is something of a luxury—one that many organizations feel, consciously or unconsciously, they can manage without. But I have witnessed other instances in which ID seems to suffer from a perception (again, conscious or unconscious) that it is a commodity. In this line of thinking, as the title of this post suggests, I am somewhat under the influence of Nicholas Carr’s Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage.

Carr’s argument with respect to information technology is not—as a good bit of the commentary on it would seem to suggest—that information technology is unimportant, but rather that its strategic importance has diminished dramatically as it has matured and become a commodity. In other words, it is increasingly difficult for the average organization to develop a competitive advantage based upon the technology it uses simply because its competitors are using technology that is essentially the same.  To the extent that they need one, all firms in a given industry will, at this point, have CRM system, or an ERP system, or—yes—a LMS.  (Note this argument does not cover firms that engage in the creation of information technology as a core business and who must  therefore continue to innovate to gain or maintain competitive advantage.)

It may seem odd to imply that instructional design could be viewed as a commodity, but even processes, frameworks, and theories, once widely accepted and implemented, can achieve a quasi-commodity status. Readers who have engaged in the outsourcing—or more and more common, offshoring—of course production and have heard familiar ID terms like ISD, ADDIE, and Bloom’s taxonomy tossed about like the latest widgets know what I mean. Arguably, there is a certain baseline perception and corresponding practice of instructional design that gets applied in pretty much any situation where a formal process is used. Drawing on Carr’s line of thinking, my suspicion is that investment beyond this baseline level for the average organization is perceived as not producing significant gains in learning outcomes, rates of adoptions, sales (where applicable) or other variables by which the success of an initiative may be measured. To put it in crass business terms, it is not worth the additional costs it inevitably involves.

Instructional Design is Questionable
The evolution of social media tools like wikis, blogs, and networking sites like FaceBook have opened up whole new possibilities for learning, but at the same time raises new questions about the role that instructional design can effectively play in experiences that are based on such tools. Certainly learning often happens in social media contexts—and in a way that may align well with some branches of learning theory—but given the spontaneous and unpredictable nature of most social media activities, the percentage of cases in which formal instructional models—even “stealth” models, as a recent commenter on Christy Tucker’s Experience E-learning blog put it—are driving the process has to be quite low. 

In making this point I should be clear that I have in mind something beyond employing social media technologies in exercises and activities within a more traditional instructional framework, i.e., “go set up a FaceBook account and do x,y, and z. Report back.”  I mean truly introducing an element of design into the tools themselves as a learning environment—a difficult proposition, since it goes against the grain of how these technologies tend to be most useful.

One of the more useful discussions I have seen of the issue to date can be found in Use of Social software for knowledge construction and management in formal online learning  from the July 2007 Turkish Online Journal of Distance Education. In this article the authors draw upon George Siemens Connectivism theory (see also Connectivisn Considered) to posit an approach to instructional design that can be applied to the use of social media software. The solution boils down to helping learners develop personal knowledge management (PKM) skills that can then be applied in social media learning situations. In other words, instructional design plays a role in preparing for the use of social media tools, but it is up to the learner to then carry ID principles forward into the actual learning experiences.

I think the need for this type of preparation is undeniable and will only grow stronger. I also think there is an accompanying component for which the learner must be prepared—ongoing management of a personal learning portfolio to help capture knowledge from and build upon these learning experiences over time. Even so, all of this amounts to a sort of meta-ID experience in which instructional design can no longer get directly at the learning event itself.

Should it matter?
I referenced Nicholas Carr’s writings about technology earlier in this post, and I do think there is something to the idea that instructional design is now perceived as a commodity in some instances. I am not, however, inclined to carry this argument through to the conclusion that Carr arrives at in the case of IT as I think design in general—not just in the case of instruction—nearly always holds within it the possibility of strategic advantage for organizations that excel at it. To say that ID does not seem to matter in a growing number of instances these days, in other words, is not say that it shouldn’t matter.

In some cases—those in which social media is involved being the main ones—instructional design is simply encountering its share of the challenges that any field faces as it grows and evolves. This is not to trivialize the phenomenon—instructional designers and the field of instructional design as a whole will have to meet this challenge to maintain relevance, and it is a significant challenge. All in all, however, I have to think the situations in which ID is perceived as either a luxury or a commodity are more pernicious, for to the extent that my observations in these areas are valid, they suggest that ID as a field is not clearly articulating its value. To the extent this is the case, ID, organizations, and learners suffer.

As always, I welcome comments.

JTC

Such was the case as I was doing some research recently on distributed cognition as it relates to online learning (more on that later). I ran across a gem on Chris Collison’s blog that, as Collison suggests, clearly demonstrates the way many Microsoft PowerPoint presentations eviscerate good stories. (Credit for the presentation itself belongs to Rowan Manahan. If the image below does not load, click to access the presentation on slideshare.)

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The suggestions highlighted in an earlier Mission to Learn posting, Life by PowerPoint, can certainly contribute to much more effective presentations for online learning purposes, but beware—Collison also quotes a great recent TimesOnline posting that reveals what business executives are really thinking about as they listen to presentations:

Prepare to be startled by the next sentence. More than 60 per cent of business executives think about sex while listening to boring presentations. Shocking, eh? Most of us would have put that figure nearer to 99.9 per cent, the other 0.1 per cent possibly being dead. But research by the Aziz Corporation finds that on average only 76 per cent of men and 35 per cent of women eye up the speaker’s bottom or scan the room for totty during a slideshow. This is a risible performance and perhaps confirms that long working hours really do sap the libido.

Take heart, though. A stonking 88 per cent of business people aged over 60 admit to thinking about sex during presentations. Or maybe it’s just that as you get older, you’re more likely to tell surveys the truth.

So there you have it. PowerPoint and sex - who’d have thought it? If PowerPoint presentations are part of your online learning or other training strategy, you may need to alter you thinking about what will really keep your audience’s attention!

JTC