Do we still care about instructional design? This graph from Google Trends compares searches for “elearning” with searches for “instructional design.”
At first, “elearning” followed “instructional design” in a sad slope downward. But in the last couple of years, “elearning” has perked up again, while its friend “instructional design” continues its descent into obscurity.
Maybe fewer people are searching for “instructional design” because it’s no longer a new concept (“usability” suffered a similar decline). Or, possibly, fewer people are searching for “instructional design” because fewer people care about it.
Did “rapid” kill ADDIE?
Here’s what can happen to the ADDIE approach when we care more about speed than anything else.
1. Analysis: “The client wants a course, therefore the client needs a course.”
2. Design: “Let’s use the template we used for the widget course, but with a blue background.”
3. Development: “Clean up the client’s PowerPoint slides and add a Jeopardy quiz.”
4. Implementation: “Put it on the LMS.”
5. Evaluation: “Did everyone look at every screen?”
I’m not saying rapid tools are evil. You can use them to create powerful elearning. It’s rapid design that’s the culprit, because it’s not really instructional design. It’s just content presentation. We end up putting lipstick on a pig.
But ADDIE takes too long!
When we treat ADDIE as a step-by-step process, it’s inefficient. By the time we’ve created our 39-page cross-referenced design document, we could have delivered a prototype of the course and gotten feedback from the client and learners, as Sumeet Moghe points out in his description of an agile approach to elearning design.
It would also help if we let go of our obsession with looks. Unfortunately, a text-only branching scenario that profoundly changes your employees’ approach to complex sales won’t get an award—it won’t even be submitted. The award submission will be a glitzy “course”/slideshow with redundant narration, flying pie charts, and a game-show quiz that has little effect on people’s performance.
But what about the lemurs?
I’m not saying that the Google Trends chart proves that instructional design is getting short shrift in elearning. I posted the chart because it happens to be a visual expression of my concern. There could be just as much correlation between the two searches as there is between “elearning design” and “lemurs” (which, happily, shows no worrying trends):
I would be curious to see if the “Action Mapping ” term has seen an INCREASE in Google searches. In my mind that is a new and improved process over the ole ADDIE model. I am not surprised the “instructional design” search term has slowly decreased. It looks like it never had much notoriety anyway. In my experience I have seen little interest from clients on the subject.
Usually I have had to do my craft somewhat behind the scenes without a lot of explanation. BUT when I start talking about business goals and “need to know” information to meet those goals almost ALL clients have perked up and want to discuss it.
ADDIE is oldskool. Action Mapping is relevant. Instructional design is one of those mysterious vocations that is discovered under the big umbrella of elearning.
Hi Cathy,
You make a good point and I’d agree it’s a trend. The same conversation is going on in graphic design, film making, multimedia design and so on.
But I don’t see IDs making those decisions as much as I do the project managers and business sponsors. In most cases the line of business places the emphasis on speed over quality, not the IDs.
As someone who values both learning and visual design, it’s unfortunate they’re seen as mutually exclusive.
A List Apart published an interesting article defending aesthetics. Part of the article dealt with trust:
“According to a 2002 study, the “appeal of the overall visual design of a site, including layout, typography, font size, and color schemes,” is the number one factor we use to evaluate a website’s credibility.”
If this is true for information-based channels like web sites, do you think users bring that bias to our courses?
I always enjoy your posts!
David
A List Apart: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/indefenseofeyecandy/
Love your take on the modern day ADDIE. I’m not a great one for models, but I’d rather see a model properly implemented that this kind of lip service (which, sadly, is all too common!). There seems to be so little value added these days at the hands of ID..
Who’s asking the awkward questions? Who’s pushing back a bit to say why some things aren’t practicable? Who’s bringing their hard-won expertise to bear in terms of usable learning resources?
Apart from me, that is! ;o)
Hey, I don’t think its fair to lay the blame for the death of ‘A’ at the feet of ‘rapid’ – salesroachs have been making it lowercase or erasing it altogether for years…
Cate, I agree that clients are less interested in instructional design than in concrete results like increased profits, which is one of the reasons I developed the action mapping approach–it’s instructional design phrased in business terms. It’s part of my not-so-secret plot to get instructional design back into our jobs.
David, I agree that a lot of the emphasis on speed is coming from outside the training department. But I think we’re partly to blame because we’ve caved in too often. I think if we ask challenging questions about the things stakeholders care about (sales, turnover, whatever) and make clear how we can help, we’ll get more respect and more time to develop something that really works.
I’m not sure I agree that good visual design and good learning are considered mutually exclusive. I think that given limited time, we might choose one over the other. We could spend our time designing an intriguing branched scenario that really changes learners’ views, or we could spend the same amount of time choosing theme colors, finding good-quality stock photos of people who actually look human, and adding slick transitions. We often don’t have time to do both.
I think your point about credibility and visual design is an important one. It’s one reason why clip art should be vaporized from every elearning developer’s hard drive. It’s more credible to have plain text on a stark white screen than a jumble of clip art and twinkling bullets–though, obviously, it’s best to have a professional and appealing visual design that uses graphics, color, and other design elements skillfully.
One of the challenges we face is that a lot of us are expected to wear at least four hats simultaneously: instructional designer, writer, graphic designer, and software jockey. Something’s got to give, and often several things give.
Karyn, keep asking those awkward questions!
Bravo, Cathy! Seeing another minority trend emerge in some circles of the industry.
We are challenging EVERYTHING that came before and have, with every project, torn apart the foundations of each effort. We look at the objectives in our curriculum outlines and take a hard line. We looked at our typical expectation for courses and piled them onto a virtual bonfire. When I say everything has changed… I mean everything.
We built a few simple process tools to help the customer and SME put things into perspective. With six simple questions, the sponsor and SME hit epiphany on day one… It’s pretty powerful stuff.
Why do we need to change the way we view what we do? Because it’s necessary at this point for us not to be wet noodles and bend to every whim of the customer and SME. It’s necessary for us to challenge our own assumptions and stop going through the motions.
And how do the SME’s respond? How are most of the customers responding? ‘Wow, this really IS going to be lightyears better than what we had before’
How do ISD’s and production teams respond? ‘Wow, this is liberating!’
I do believe we are starting to see many like minded folks in the industry. Those that ask ‘why’ with conviction. We should band together to help change the other 99.9% of the industry.
Oh… and for the record, I don’t believe ADDIE is (or should be) dead. If you distill all of the cognitive activities that take place in practically any model with a good outcome and follow through — you are DOING all of those things. Not in that order necessarily (it’s not a computer program) but you ARE (1) figuring out what the problem is, (2) coming up with a way, or multiple ways, to solve that problem, (3) constructing that solution, (4) putting the solution into action, (5) watching it to see if your solution worked, or even better — constantly running formative evaluation to make sure you are on the right course from the start. ADDIE… if we are good at what we do it’s what we are doing.
It doesn’t have to be an over formalized process with a waterfall cascade… The best learning is focused on relevance and meaning, respects the learner’s time, and is part of something bigger. How can a 200 page design document possibly meet these conditions?
Please please please post those 6 questions!! We need them Steve.
I get so tired of tarted up PowerPoint presentations – particularly when I have to plod through them as a learner.
When I have done high quality instructional design and demonstrated the eLearning package it’s quite noticeable – at one point the person who was ‘just looking’ got so engaged in the course she couldn’t talk to me at all. But the next thing I hear is “but we don’t have time for that…” or “we could never get approval for that” or “legal would have a problem with that wording…”
Just makes you want to scream.
On a side issue, I loved the graph with the lemurs. I teach folks in a PowerPoint class that if you put two lines on a graph people will automatically assume there’s a correlation. I once graphed Wayne Gretzky’s scoring record in the NHL with the population curve and suggested that if we didn’t stop this guy we’d be in big trouble!
j
I’ve actually heard this from a client: “I didn’t know instructional design was an actual profession, I thought it was one of those made up titles to make sales people who write the content feel important”.
On the other hand, local companies in my area, for example Humana Health Care constantly has 4 to 6 job openings for instrucitonal designers.. it must depend on the company & where they see the importance lie in a successful project. I feel that a power-duo is having the SMEs, in addition to the instructional designers either in-house or closely working together.. which makes for a lot less room for error of translation.
In the end, there will always be the ‘all power point all the time’ people, who I tend to categorize with the “We’re on a tight budget” people.. basically not worth the time convincing of other solutions as they won’t pay for them either way.
Maybe instructional design is one of those ‘terms’ where when it comes to saving money, companies cut them out of the loop, cause hey… my 10 year old kid can write a course on sexual harassment, why hire out?
I have had a total of ONE opportunity to apply ADDIE in elearning. In fact it wasn’t the full ADDIE, but ADDI. Clients don’t want to pay for evaluation.
The work I do now on a daily basis is probably more DDI with an emphasis on the “I”. We have templates and a presentation method that was established before I came along. We have a library of topics and clients license the rights to use it. It is a business model that seems to be working even in these economic times so for that I’m grateful.
In custom elearning development I think that Cathy is spot on regarding challenging stakeholders with questions they care about. Bottom line stuff.
Kia ora Cathy!
I agree with much of what you say here, and ADDIE or effective derivatives of it (including needs analysis) have been pushed aside, probably for a raft of different reasons, among which is the ‘rapid’.
My gut feeling, having lived through part of the 80s and 90s as a computer trainer, is that too many people/organisations were creaming it using a long drawn out analysis approach and it gave the whole thing a bad name. A significant portion of that practice continued into the 21st century. When it comes to budget, the finance managers have a say about the $ spent, not on the needed analysis. Then the pedagogues often don’t even get a look in. So analysis gets the chop.
Catchya later
from Middle-earth
Having lived life on both sides of the wall (as a client and a designer), I understand the value of the word rapid and the value of good design. I love how you’ve articulated the misrepresentation of ADDIE in the “rapid” world.
This said ADDIE as an approach is very misleading in the e-learning world. I realised this while sitting on the customer side of the fence for a few months. A lot of the needs I articulated at the time could easily be put into a YAGNI bucket – (You Aint Gonna Need It). This included flashy graphics, training on peripheral activities and what not.
The reason I love starting off with an Action Map, is that it allows me to discuss with the customers, which learning goals are of a higher priority over others. A discussion oriented, prototype driven approach of Design-Develop-Deploy, ensures that a customer sees us approaching the goal long before all the analyzed goals actually make it to elearning. In a recent project, the customer actually realized that out of say 15 actions we brainstormed during the inception/ action mapping phase, actually just 10 were necessary to reach the business goal. This was because he saw continuous deployment of elearning and because users could continuously offer feedback. Evaluation didn’t happen 7 months after the inception — it happened continuously!
What was the result? The client could channel their budget towards other, more useful elearning! I think the key failing of ADDIE is how designers have used it to set everything in stone and protect themselves from risk. On the contrary — embracing risk and evolving your design as you go, is so much more productive!
I like the description Sumeet provides above. I think this is the right way to think about it. We tend to think of Analysis and Evaluation in extremes and in isolation. Like there’s only one flavor of each.
I’ve seen lots of folks say ‘we only practice DDI’. I’ve thought this myself on occasion. But if we don’t think so much in extremes, we really do have to do ‘some’ level of analysis to get the answers we need to proceed in design.
We MUST do some level of evaluation inline. We ask ourselves, our team, and our customer (and if we’re on the ball a sampling of our users) how well it works for them (not what they think of how it looks…)
I have a nasty new habit of challenging everything with ‘what’s that really worth?’ And I mean everything. I have inner conversations that challenge my own ideas, and then conversations that challenge the counters to those ideas. I’ve taken critical thinking to the extreme and it’s probably not healthy but I think that this type of thinking is necessary for us to break the industry out of these cycles.
A couple of months ago I presented a new concept for a template. It was a simple one pixel border box defining a space with undecorated text underneith for a title and plain text links. It was as minimalist as I could go. The idea was to STOP creating a box for people to dump stuff in and provide a canvas, that could manifest at whatever size the design called for, for ACTIVITIES and NOT screens. Folks responded with ‘hey… where’s my branded header?’ and ‘No next and back buttons? What are we going to do?’ I responded with this… Give me a good reason to put those back in and we’ll think about it, otherwise do the work and use dem design skills homie. Lazy days are over.
I love the acronym YAGNI, I’m gonna throw that into my irreverant phrases bucket. Along with ICDM (I can do it myself) – which defines much of the rapid eLearning sales push.
And if we’re smart, we don’t stop those activities once we start into ‘DDI’. And if we’re smart we don’t wait until the end to run evaluations. How can we synthesize designs if we’re never in discovery or validation mode?
Thanks for the great comments, everyone! I especially agree that isolation is a major problem.
Like everyone here, I’ve seen projects in which the instructional designer talked with the client briefly, then retreated with a pile of content to write the entire design document in total isolation. The next thing the client saw was a fat document detailing practically every minute of the course (and showing none of it).
It seems like instructional design has been positioned as an orderly science that must be performed by experts working alone, not as a messy, collaborative process that should include learners as well as client stakeholders. Some of the backlash against ADDIE could be an understandable backlash against this “expert” stance, but unfortunately the effect can be to throw out all useful ID practices entirely.
Steve, what are those 6 magic questions? We all want to ask them now!
This is a great discussion and something I think about a lot. My take is that there is so much pressure from others–clients, management, project managers–to deliver fast and cheap that quality, the third leg of the stool, drops. I have found that when I take a stand for instructional design, people who don’t get it want to take the easy way out. I have been labelled “difficult” for pushing to follow a process, it doesn’t have to be ADDIE, per se, but it does need to be focused on the learner and the objectives.
We need to rely on SMEs to provide us with what we need and SMEs need to allow us to do our jobs. Too often the instructional designer is overruled. I always say that we don’t need to teach everything related to a topic, but we need to provide enough and give the learners the resources (or follow-up courses) to deliver the rest.
@Allison – that’s such a great point about labeling IDs as “difficult”.
Another trend I’m seeing is business units going to non-training people to get projects developed. Justifications such as “She doesn’t write as well as the IDs, but she’s so much faster and isn’t as difficult”. And by “difficult” we know what they really mean.
Compound that with corporate merging and downsizing and you find people are becoming less “difficult” all the time. Fast forward a couple quarters when the next round of downsizing comes and the same IDs who stopped being difficult are now asked to explain their shoddy work:-/
@David – I like the points you’re making. I must confess that ID’s often do overcomplicate things — the best way to know if an approach is good or bad is for learners to see the training and share their reactions.
I can’t help being critical of closed door Instructional Design, where we come up with imaginary constraints and design restrictions. The key is simplicity — what’s the simplest way to get the learning across?
If nothing, we should release that simple output to a small group of pilot learners and gauge their reaction to the content. That feedback either confirms or negates our assumptions. I have a strong objection to executing projects on plain hypotheses. And with creative stuff like elearning, the best way of testing your hypothesis is to release the module — at least to a small, test audience.
Customers/ business units have no intention to be difficult or perceive someone as difficult. In a lot of cases, we as designers fail to articulate the value of one approach over another. This is an area of a designer’s skill set which is often ignored — consulting. Its important that designers know how to negotiate, influence, communicate. A lot of the work we do is around creating change, and change is never easy!
I’ve found the book “Fearless Change” by Linda Rising, an amazing resource for patterns to changing mindsets and influencing. I think its a must for every designer; internal or external.
Cathy – just discovered your stuff via Dave Ferguson. Have enjoyed what I’ve read.
Some belated thoughts arising from the post and some of the comments:
ADDIE isn’t a model or a method, it’s an acronym.
It’s a sequence of tasks involved in problem-solving approaches that resonate throughout engineering, project management, industrial design, architecture, advertising and numerous other disciplines.
Call it what you will – Action Mapping, Instructional Design, whatever – re-badging it doesn’t change it substantively.
Perhaps “Instructional Design” has become something of a damaged brand – tarnished by the less-than-happy experiences of clients and suppliers who made the mistake of embracing it as a recipe to be followed to the letter, rather than an adaptable toolbox that should be used with discretion. Or it’s been wielded by some as an expert and specialist discipline that will be applied to the client, rather than a collaborative, iterative process.
Anecdotally, I’ve noticed fewer clients understand what’s required to buy and/or build effective learning materials, and are unaware of how they could reduce the risk of investing in bad training – perhaps an increasing level of unconscious incompetence. Maybe the Google data has some relationship to this.
Clients won’t simply agree to buying A, D, D, I or E unless you can convince them of the value of whatever you’re proposing to do in those spaces. If it’s explained and applied effectively, I’ve found that clients become advocates for it. If not, they have little or no patience for it.
ADDIE can be applied in minutes, days or months. It’s ponderous if you make it so, or nimble. Depends on the requirements of the project and you and your client’s risk profiles. Less rigour in the application generally leads to an increased risk of not meeting the project requirements, but if you and the client are aware of what that means and what may be required to mitigate the risk, it’s often OK.
Regards from rainy Melbourne,
Greg Evans
Greg,
I hear what you’re saying. Unfortunately when people take up an “acronym” and make it a practice, then we eventually forget the history of the acronym and use it as a practice.
Its a bit of a chicken and egg story, but the software development world has its own ADDIE. The waterfall approach to running projects. To think that Winston Royce, who originated this model, thought it was flawed an vowed never to use it again, would amaze you when you see how many people actually follow this process.
There’s an obvious need to make lightweight instructional design methods more explicit. There’s also a need to change the ADDIE “mindset”. I agree that these steps could be iterative, small, light or heavy. That said, there’s a very strong need to explicitly recognize that.
I can understand that you may be at a level of experience where you have a model that you know, understand and practice. For others though, its important to reemphasize succesful models for Instructional Design.
Obviously I’ve come to this post and comments very late, but it’s a discussion I’m glad I found at any time!
Can’t suppress the urge to add a comment as well. Like others who have added their POVs, I’ve also been on both sides of projects — as a PM, ID, and ID manager for a Web company specializing in elearning AND as an education director for a national association who hired a vendor company to develop an asynchronous, custom course.
I can tell you that many client representatives — especially in the association world — couldn’t define “instructional design” for you if you asked. I can also tell you that associations are swarming to elearning in greater numbers. These two factors aren’t strong enough correlates to explain your opening question, Cathy, but I think they are factors. Like others, I didn’t discuss ID with my association volunteer SMEs (unless I suddenly had a need to fling out the term to remind them why they hired me – for an expertise they didn’t have), but I did with my vendor.
ID isn’t dead. We shouldn’t pronounce it so, either. We should just keep doing our jobs as best we can, which is to find out what our clients need, and help them understand why paying for what they want but don’t need is a waste and potentially damaging.
As for formative evaluations: why not put the onus back on the client? Are they willing to risk launching something that could fail without evaluation and testing? What risks are they willing to accept? Why are they willing to accept them?
And why would a company want to separate out any of these costs, anyway? I don’t understand the “But the client won’t pay for this” argument. why not include it in the price as a non-negotiable part of the project? Don’t you want your clients’ projects to succeed? Why not prove that to them?
Okay, I’m sure I’m missing something here… but many of the comments seem to be directed inward to the development team and the effects of client decisions on the project and development company. Many clients will always look to their vendors for guidance and expertise — after all, they hired you because they can’t do the work themselves. Why let them tell you how to do your job?
Great post! Really got me thinking about the relationship between what the client wants and what the vendor knows is most important, and bridging the gap between them.
Having taken and taught online courses for the last 7 years, I can say that very little instructional design goes into many of the e-learning courses I have taken. Many of the online courses that can easily be describe as “too easy” are really just online courses that attempt to cram a face-to-face experience into an online classes with no thought to instructional design or worse, someone that assumes that adopting the worse recommendation of reformers (like endless get-to-know-you activities) makes a class effective…
First of all, Cathy – your posts always strike a cord. It seems to come from someone who truly believes in instructional design.
Recently, I was researching on ADDIE – just wanted to know how and where it emerged. Interestingly, it seems it is just a colloquial term. That is what Michael Molenda, Professor of Instructional Technology, Indiana University says.
http://www.indiana.edu/~molpage/In%20Search%20of%20Elusive%20ADDIE.pdf
Really, really late to this discussion, but had a bit to offer to it on the subject of the history of ADDIE.
One page of Don Clark”s site on the history of “ADDIE”
(http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/history_isd/addie.html) actually shows graphics from 1975 military sources–sources at the early end of the ones Molenda cites. At least one of the articles Clark cites at the link above were provided to students at the UMBC graduate program in ISD in the 1986-87 timeframe as a quick reference to ISD history. Ms. Grafinger (now Ms. Hacker), the author of the ISD Infoline from which Molenda reproduces a graphic representation of the ADDIE model, attended the UMBC graduate ISD program (as did I). Fond memories of Dr. J. Marvin Cook, and greetings to Deb, if she happens to read this.
But Clark traces ISD back to the 1930′s and 1940′s in the many pages of the site:
http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/history_isd/isdhistory.html
Florida Staters probably have some very interesting stories about early ISD!
The military is systematic because they’re mass-training constantly, and because they have to have some model for accountability. They do a lot of contracting! Milestones such as those in a design document can be your friend!
I recall reading aticles in the ISD trade publications in the 1980s about ADDIE–”accountability” was a big buzzword in the ’80s. Clients had begun to see through flashy instructional designs that did not produce results. Some of us ISDers thus referred to ourselves as “developers” rather than “designers” to differentiate our approach. I still do, even though these days “developer” confuses clients who, because e-learning has begun to occupy people’s minds as Cathy’s graphs show, think I am a programmer.
“Internalization” was another buzzword in the 1980s–ISDers were being exhorted to “internalize” all phases of the ADDIE model. ISD models were proliferating. Romisowsky published a very detailed model. With a common uber-model that captured the essence of a systematic approach to training, writers argued, it was easier for ISD practitioners to engage in discussions. It was also easier to turn faces outward and engage with clients when ISDers referred to the same model.
Once the profession achieved internalization, the discussion gradually shifted to ADDIE versus RID (ADDIE with some flexibility–like “agile” and “scrum” techniques versus waterfall in software development).
Now, 30 years later, the discussion is about getting the SMEs to internalize ADDIE. Each SME discipline (science, health, IT, business, marketing) has its own “system” model, going back to some time around WW II. Business types, for instance, tend to respond to PMBOK models (project management). You can usually appeal to the SME’s discipline-specific model and crosswalk it to ADDIE if you have to discuss your mental model with them. ASTD’s new Sales Training model, I think, could be thought of as a kind of preemtive strike–an example of giving the SMEs a validated, topic-specific topology, if not model.
Very interesting discussion, all.