Have you ever been using your computer and suddenly had your software start crashing or had your connection to the internet disappear? What happened next? In my experience, once it was clear that issue was not going to resolve itself then that is when the troubleshooting began. Either I prompted the computer to troubleshoot the issue or the computer automatically starting troubleshooting without any prompting. If like me, you then sat and watched the screen, you would have seen a little dialog box come up in which you could watch the computer state what part of the troubleshooting process that it was on. If it found the issue in that part of the process then it stopped there and told you what the recommendations were to fix the issue. If not, it kept going through the troubleshooting process. The computer’s ultimate goal was to diagnose the issue and give you a recommended solution. In my opinion, this is a good analogy of what we do as instructional designers. According to Morrison et al. (2007), “The instructional design process starts by identifying an instructional problem” (p. 10). Therefore, I would say that the instructional design process truly is “troubleshooting” to diagnose the problem and then to identify and develop a learning solution.
If a computer’s troubleshooting process is written into its operating system, then where could we expect to find the troubleshooting process for instructional design? That answer lies with the many in our field who have worked to identify and disseminate various representations of the process for broader use within the instructional design community. We call these “models”. Models are intended to give a general description of what the instructional design troubleshooting process usually looks like no matter what the context or content of the intended learning (Branch, 2018, p. 27). These models are not rules. Rather they are more like guidelines. They give the instructional designer a good idea of where to start and what to do next. The instructional design process is a truly fluid one and it must be remembered that ‘instructional design activities are typically not completed in a linear step-by-step manner, although they may be portrayed that way for initial understanding and convenience” (Branch, 2018, p. 24). Models are used to ensure that all aspects of the learning and learning environment are considered and appropriately planned for (Dick et al., 2009, p.2).
As “the goal of instructional design is to make learning more efficient and effective” (Morrison et al., 2007, p. 2), then models themselves bring value because they establish an organized and efficient method for accomplishing that goal. Making effective use of time and energy during the process of designing instruction could pay off in the end product. For example, I attended a military space operations course last year. The goal of this course was to train military members who were going to be deploying to do a space operations job at various Air Operations Centers across the globe. The course went through a redesign to try and identify what exactly these service members were going to be doing in those jobs and align the entire course curriculum around preparing them as best as they could in a three-week course. They brought in a professional instructional designer who followed the ADDIE model in redesigning this course. The manager of the course told us that the feedback that they had gotten from the Air Operations Centers was that the servicemembers that came to them having gone through this newly designed three-week course needed three months less of on-the-job training than those that had come to them without going through it. The heavy frontload of intentional design and effort paid off in large dividends in the end result. I was actually allowed to attend the class even though I was not going to deploy to an Air Operations Center so even though I gained a lot of valuable learning in the class it was not as effective for me as it was for those for whom the course was designed. I wrote all of that to emphasize that models can help the design process be more efficient and effective and thus hopefully lead to learning that has those characteristics as well.
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Branch, R. M. (2018). Characteristics of instructional design models. In R. A. Reiser & J. V. Dempsey (Eds.), Trends and issues in instructional design and technology (4th Ed.), (pp. 23- 30). New York, NY: Pearson Education.
Dick, W., Carey, L., & Carey, J. O. (2009). Introduction to instructional design. The systematic design of instruction (7th ed.) (pp. 1-13). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.
Morrison, G. R., Ross, S. M., & Kemp, J. E. (2007). Introduction to the instructional design process. Designing effective instruction. (5th ed.) (pp. xviii26). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
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The Learning World Is My Oyster 