I am excited to really get some fundamental instructional design (ID) background and practice as I am one of many faculty in higher education who did not receive any formal design training. I’ve curated good teaching skills from teaching disasters over the last seven years. My toolkit basics are now great communication skills, using visuals in lectures, bridging each concept using problem-based learning to marketable skills. These tools are still static, one-time deliverables. I hope to develop tools for designing for human, authentic engagement with models like ADDIE in dynamic environments like AR and VR. The first example of ID I can critique is my own. I was asked to design and share an Academic Integrity and Plagiarism module with our campus faculty at our Spring Faculty Forum last week.
As the system of A&M is migrating to Canvas by Fall 2021, I decided to proactively build in the system we would all be in soon. The disadvantages to this plan include not having any formal training or experience in the LMS, targeting a wide-spread audience of 150 faculty across disciplines and student classifications, and basing the sharing of the module on their technophilic attitudes (which is hopeful thinking at best). Let me note that there was no specific outcome expected only that I deliver “something helpful”. So my approach to this instructional design project, with a full project scope of January 4 to January 15th, was to choose two of three values: fast, cheap, good (Piskurich, 2015). Time is not what I had or have, so I chose fast and cheap. Instead of offering in-class one-shot instruction as the only Librarian on campus, I took a try at asynchronous instruction across 5 modules including a quiz. I don’t know how it went over with faculty yet (zoom zombies didn’t respond during the forum) but here’s what I tried to incorporate:
The bigger picture (why) tethered to the University's values and therefore their student identity
Common vocabulary for equity in language
Highlights of major problems with diverse examples and explanation of the example
Solutions to each problem
Services and resources for extending the learning or connecting the understanding
Consequences for not showing mastery of the topic
The second example I’ll keep short: I attended a webinar with 100 faculty from The Center for Teaching and Learning last week for Managing Challenging Situations and Teaching. The facilitators waited 45 minutes into the webinar to engage the audience in any way and when they tried to put us in breakout rooms of 7-8 people per room, they found only 30 people remained, reducing these rooms to 2 people per room. The session was cost effective but not learning effective. They admitted they should have had the breakout rooms in the beginning, which I see as evidence for the iterative process of the Instructional Systems Design Spiderweb Model from (Piskurich, 2015).
So lessons learned from participating and leading lectures:
Engage your audience early to get the jitters out and so you can get real feedback
Know your audience expectations and capabilities (if possible)
Share ways learners can use the knowledge or apply to a bigger idea
References Piskurich, G. M. (2015). Rapid instructional design learning ID fast and right (Third ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
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