Someone once said that “You can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve come from.” I believe that this no less applies to our field of Instructional Systems Technology. For this blog post, I want to specifically focus on the history of our field and how our current ways of viewing instruction and learning came to be.
As a member of the US military, I was very surprised to learn from this week’s readings how much influence and impact the US military had on our field as we know it today. The more that I read the articles and thought about the history the more it truly did make sense and I started to connect some of my own experiences and observations from my time in the military to what I was reading in the articles. Before I get into the part of our history where the military comes in, let me first begin with a general overview of the history of technology in education and training.
The history of the integration of technology is very much based on the rise of various forms of media and other technologies within society at large. From Molenda’s article (2008), we can see that there was the advent of radio and other forms of media and as the use of the technologies became more prevalent within society, the educational community desired to enrich learning with these new media forms. In the 1960s, a high interest in Behaviorism came along with a new interest in teaching machines. The 1980s, the computer became more widely available and the focus shifted to the incorporation of computers into learning. With the turn of the century and the boom of the Information Age, the integration of both computers and the World Wide Web have created an unparalleled wealth of technologies that can be used for educational purposes.
Now I want to focus on where the military came into this story line. According to both Molenda (2008) and Reiser (2007), the push for training using new technologies, such as film, were heavily reinforced by the strong demand for both fast and effective training for allied forces during WWII. The US Navy and Air Force both commissioned research projects to study instructional films and their effectiveness. I did not realize until reading this article that Hollywood even became involved in making millions of training films. Additionally, “During the war, a large number of psychologists and educators who had training and experience in conducting experimental research were called on to conduct research and develop training materials for the military services” (Reiser, 2007, p. 24). Throughout the war, they continued to develop scientific research on how to achieve training that was not only efficient and effective but also standardized. They also applied their research skills to assess the training that had taken place. After the war was over, they continued their work in applying scientific workability to instruction (Reiser, 2007). This led to the field of Instructional Systems Technology as we know it today.
As is standard with the military, the military wanted the educational psychologists to develop standard procedures for developing training. The resulting procedure, or shall we say “model”, was along the lines of “analyze, design, develop, implement, and control” (Molenda, 2008, p. 13) and eventually, this became the ADDIE model: Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, Evaluate. The military was the first to demand a “systems” method of developing training and “from the entry of the systems approach into the field of educational technology, it was recognized by its advocates as a loose set of guidelines that were applicable to the complex problems of human learning only by analogy and not the completely deterministic and completely controlled methodology described by some of its detractors” (Molenda, 2008, p. 13). The procedures were not meant to be a rigid set of restrictions to develop good training but rather be a way to standardize the process for developing training in order to create a more effective and efficient process that could be applied over and over again.
At the start of this semester as I began my journey of learning about Instructional Systems Technology and the models that oversee our work, I remember thinking that these processes reminded me very much of the models that the military uses for planning purposes. My last job in the Navy was as a Planner for military operations. The military uses planning processes (or what we would call “models”) for planning everything from joint operations to crisis action responses to intelligence. These models are all more alike than different and serve as a standard guide to address situations as they come up. They are a way to ensure that planners do due diligence to the matter at hand but are also broad enough to apply to almost any planning need and yet flexible enough to be able to accommodate time constraints or complexity differences in planning situations. Now I see why the instructional design models struck me as so familiar. They had their roots in military planning processes that were developed to plan military training.
At the end of the day, the instructional design models that we use truly are simply tools for planning the instruction that we believe will fulfil the learning need that has been identified and these models and the research that they are founded in are “rooted in a primordial human drive to find ways of teaching that are efficient” (Molenda, 2008, p. 4). According to Molenda (2008), our field found inspiration for developing new forms of instruction from the learning theories as they emerged and had their impact on the educational community. I do not believe that the various theories necessarily changed the existing models at their foundations but rather they have given rise to more diverse end-of-process products as a result of the influence of whichever theories were used with the model. To me, the models pretty much stay the same but the learning theories act as a lens through which we see and use the model.
Molenda, M. (2008). Historical foundations. In J. M. Spector, M. D. Merrill, J. V. Merriënboer, & M.P. Dirscoll (Eds.), Handbook of research on educational communications and technology (3rd ed.) (pp. 3-20). New York: Taylor & Francis Group.
Reiser, R. A. (2007). A history of instructional design and technology. In R. A. Reiser, & J. V. Dempsey (Eds.), Trends and issues in instructional design and technology (pp. 17- 34). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.
The Learning World Is My Oyster 