David Holcombe opened this morning’s session of The eLearning Guild’s Annual Gathering by asking us for our key ah-ha’s from yesterday. As the first volunteer to share with the audience, I said mine came from Michael Allen’s comments to Lance Dublin at the Learning Colloquium.
Mike was once as doctrinaire an instructional designer as you could find. After all, he invented Authorware so people could keep their stuff together. Yesterday he told us ADDIE was dead. (”We didn’t know it was wrong at the time.”) Dismayed by eLearning that doesn’t deliver the goods, his quest for ways to change behaviour led him to the literature of psycholherapy. Changing for Good. You want new behavior, you’ve got to work with heart and mind, emotion and thinking, feelings and logic.
When Allen Interactions develops a program these days, they begin by soaking up the learners’ context. They then create a few rapid prototypes. They sleep on it. And that’s the usual starting point for a kick-add program. My ah-ha is that abandoning raw logic is becoming trendy.
Mark Oehlert offered the second ah-ha. In the morning Henry Jenkins had shown us dozens of examples of learning. He never mentioned the word design.
I’m not ready to nail the lid on the coffin of ISD but I recognize it’s not the only way to go. To paraphrase Kevin Kelly, what design can’t do, evolution can. In other words, trust what works.
Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things (1988) is a wonderfully liberating book because it explains that many of life’s little screw-ups aren’t your fault; a bad designer is often the problem. Let’s worship at the church of design and engineering. The book changed my life.
The title of Don’s Emotional Design: Why We Love (Or Hate) Everyday Things (2003) pretty much says it all. We humans can’t help but filter things with our emotions. It’s built-in.
Don’s first book fits perfectly with the principles of instructional design; his more recent book describes where we are headed: emotional learning. Of course I don’t mean learning about emotions or choking up while learning Six Sigma. We need a name for the recognition that you can never do just one thing. I am going to call this amygdala learning.
”When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” John Muir
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I call it eMotional eLearning (warning, PDF). Wrote about it for the eLearning Guild. It can be a process, but it takes inspiration as well as iteration. When you’re doing the formal side, which isn’t always what needs doing…
For me, it’s not that ADDIE’s dead but that it’s irrelevant. At its best, it was a one-size-fits-all approach to complex problems and issues. Although it was a useful framework for beginners, it was never very good for experts - at least the ones I know never followed it particularly well!
In the old days, using ADDIE to analyse, design, develop, implement, and evaluate a program for the U.S. government was a contractual procedure. Different companies could win different pieces of the process. You finished one step before going to another. This meant you didn’t make mid-course corrections even when you knew a previous step was wrong. Now we know better. Our processes are more flexible; our viewpoint, more mature. We have gained to the self-confidence to do what we feel is right.
I agree with Janet that ADDIE is not dead. I also think its still relevant. If you approach ADDIE from a fluid perspective and recognize that each phase has its purpose, you can then take that process and apply it to most other models (rapid, spiral, waterfall) and still use the overall framework as a way to ensure accountability.
Margaret Martinez also presented and the eLearning Guild Annual Gathering and I had the pleasure of attending the pre-conference workshop on Moodle and the Creating Passionate Learning Experiences. Some of her introductory material was about the advances in neuro-science and the amygdala as the center of emotion. Designing learning so that the learner is captured emotionally is one of the ways to create engagement. The learner is placed in situations where they must take an action.
When we are placed in a stressful situation our emotions take over and the rational mind recedes. Albert Ip, in his Engaging Learning Experience Using Role Play Simulations session, called this a kick-start.
[...] Then Donald Clark, in a lengthy entry, drew attention to the habits that improve learning. The blog entry was provoked by a conversation with Jay Cross, who was in London last month. [...]
I agree with Mark, ADDIE must adapt, but I believe it is relevant and far from dead. Designers today must still use tasks from ADDIE, or they are not practicing ‘design’. But now we have tools allowing designers to follow a non-linear process with a lot of prototyping.
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