Flexknowlogy – Jared Stein's ARCHIVED blog – update to jaredstein.org

(Originally posted on our Distance Ed unit’s IDS ‘blog.)

Today I met with the UVSC IP Office to go over our proposed process to allow for the open licensing of UVSC-owned, faculty authored materials. This is necessary because UVSC has ownership over most faculty-authored materials as provided in UVSC Policy 136: Intellectual Property.

So the process I proposed sets up an “open licensing request form” that a faculty or department submits to IP, IP passes to a review committee, and the review committee makes a recommendation to IP. Signatures happen, and the materials are released under a Creative Commons license.

The IP Office seemed very receptive and supportive of opencourseware, and we concurred that opencourseware is a suitable activity for a university. Now we just have to wait for legal counsel to weigh in, and we hope for a complete implementation by March 2008!

(Originally posted on our Distance Ed unit’s IDS ‘blog.)

I and several folks on our team are currently in what our sister-in-arms Janel would rightly call “crisis mode” for a certain online course we’re producing. We have been for the past 10 weeks. It’s not a comfortable place to be, and much of the additional stress is my responsibility–in part through miscalculating the length of the project’s development cycles, and in part by acquiescing to the instructors’ wishes for an “on-time” delivery. However, now I’m beginning to reflect on the course of this project, and in fielding a number of complaints throughout the process I have returned to an article I read some years ago on rapid prototyping in instructional design:

Tripp, S. D., & Bichelmeyer, B. (1990). Rapid protoyping: An alternative instructional design strategy. Educational Technology, Research and Development, 38(1), 31-44.
(You can read a summary of the Tripp Bichelmeyer article here.)

The number-one complaint I’ve heard from folks on the team (myself included!) is that the scope of the project is not clear, and both the instructor and the instructional designer (me) are asking for changes to the tools and the learning media “mid-stream”–that is, as the students progress. But when I analyze those complaints, they lose a lot of their legitimacy.

Unlike other types of design, instructional design has as its highest priority the effectiveness and usability of the learning media for the outcome of learning. What instructional designers deliver to learners is not a product, but an experience. Unlike other media, effective learning media does not entertain, it engages. Technology-facilitated learning media has the potential of providing maximum return for minimal effort. And yet it is still a fairly a new “art”. Though there are principles and best practices, and though instructional designers likely know more about learning and cognition than ever before, there are no easy formulas for designing instruction, and no instructional design will “fit” all instructors, let alone all learners.

Instructional designers design and produce learning media with the assistance of skilled human resources, such as programmers, graphic designers, videographers, etc. In order to provide the optimum learning experience, instructional designers must evaluate the learning media for usability and effectiveness continually, and as early as possible, with the option of immediately revising, rewriting, recreating, or adding to the learning media in a cyclic pattern. As one cycle proves effective and usable, the next cycle begins, based upon the best-practices of the previous, and so on.

Even as the learning media goes into production, instructors should receive formative feedback from learners in each lesson. Formative feedback provides instructors with information as to whether or the not the students are learning, how efficient that learning is, and whether or not the tools that facilitate the learning are frustrating and over-encumbering. When a learner is over-encumbered by extraneous tasks, such as manipulating the technology, learning is inhibited, if not impossible. Such encumbrances must be eliminated as they are discovered.

Scope, therefore, is something that is only recognizably accurate in hindsight for an instructional designer. Scope is a forecast, not a definition.

This idea of instructional design through rapid prototyping may be most necessary when the learning outcomes are skills-based. If you remove the severe time constraints that we’ve been on, this online course is a perfect example of effective instructional design through rapid prototyping. It is also a perfect example of how it is nearly impossible to define scope all at once; the learners have four skills that they must develop, and each skill is dramatically different in how it’s learned and how it’s practiced. Not only that, but as the learners progress through the course, the learning outcomes change, their needs change, and the tools that will best facilitate their skills must also change.

Is there a point at which an instructional design is complete? Not necessarily. Sometimes we finish a project when we’ve shown that we’ve met our learning objectives, sometimes the conclusion is based on more arbitrary factors. Budget, time, personality conflicts—all of these are capable of providing sufficient justification for the conclusion of any given project. But the point is that we are open, we are zen in the way we accept change, we are focused on the learners their experiences, and we base our success on effectiveness more than efficiency.

And though we in Distance Education pride ourselves in outwitting the limitations of time and space, efficiency must still be a principle concern to any director and any project manager. At the same time the process of rapid prototyping and a focus on the learner’s experience will help us take learning media from bad to better to best. I don’t think the two are necessarily at odds; by practicing the process we can only learn from experience, and our results can surely become better, faster and more efficient. The pay-off is clear; it’s merely the mind-sets that are muddled.

Writing is fun. Writing is fundamental. If you don’t write, you don’t know what you think. Jeffrey Zeldman on Twitter

In the spirit of knowing what I think as Zeldman so aptly puts it, and adequately preparing myself at what is essentially the starting line of this blog: My intention for this ‘blog is to lay out, as frequently as time allows, commentary on (and hopefully arguments for or against) new and emerging theories and practices related to the field of educational technology. I am keenly interested in how humans learn best, and how technology can improve that learning by increasing efficiency and enhancing pleasure.

My intention is to challenge assumptions–both yours and mine, to force myself towards objectivity as much as is possible, and to entertain as many sides of an issue as possible. This does not mean my explorations will attend to all sides of an issue, only that, through my own thinking and our engagement in dialogue, many sides of an issue can be explored or examined. That’s the point of the Internet, no?

Having said that, though it may not enhance my reputation, it certainly can’t hurt to be above-board and describe some of the philosophical nodes from which I tend to operate. I do this more for my own benefit than for the benefit of any of my readers; following a discussion with a pair of much-respected colleagues that ended up getting close to the heat, I asked myself, “What are the beliefs that underpin your approach to analyzing and implementing teaching practices?”

I believe in scientific realism, and tend to favor arguments that are backed up by empirical evidence.

I believe in the powerful utility of logic, and have little respect for arguments that don’t at least try to adhere to the fundamentals of logic, that is, valid arguments consisting of sound premises that lead us to conclusions, though those conclusions may not always be tidy.

These are the tools which I employ (though perhaps crudely at times) to evaluate teaching theories and practices.

I am not afraid to state that I try to live my life guided by a philosophy of moral objectivism. I have no use for any sort of dogmatic relativism which allows serious dialogue to discombobulate into a failure to attach meaning to language. Which leads us to the fact that I am generally conservative in my mindset–a concept which I find frustrates or confuses some of my colleagues who may unfortunately think that conservatism = closed-minded-ness, resistance to progress, or religious fanaticism. In their true form I abhor all of these. On the contrary, while at its core conservatism means favoring gradual change over radical change, recognizing the value of “how we’ve done things” for the measurable fruits we currently enjoy, my orientation towards scientific realism provides me with ample reason to continually reassess my beliefs and correct my practices based on new evidence.

So in a nutshell, I believe that there is objective truth, and I believe we can get at it through analytical, science-based approaches. This relates to teaching because every time we teach we are practicing a skill that is guided by our theories and shaped by our philosophies, whether we know it or not. Many of us do not know what directs our teaching, but that does not make it directionless.

When I think about my students, I put myself in their shoes. I think of the time I as a student am investing. I think of the money I am investing. I critically assess the value of the teaching and the learning. To horribly mangle in paraphrase Harold Bloom I’ve concluded, “Life is Too Short for Bad Classes.” (Which must be allowed to explain, in part, my habitual absenteeism in high school and college!)

And so I scrutinize new “engaging” approaches to teaching and learning as much as I scrutinize the old “boring” approaches. I scrutinize the time wasted on technology usage as much as I scrutinize the time wasted on flat lecture. I see no point in discarding the old if the new hasn’t proven itself better.

There you have it. Now that that exposition’s off my chest I feel much more comfortable tackling some of the hot ed tech topics that make my mind swirl. Every day I walk into the office and find myself echoing Dave Bowman in 2001: A Space Odyssey who finally enters the mysterious black monolith and gasps, “…Oh my God, it’s full of stars!”