Processes

Artifact: EDTEC 544 Design Concept

My work in EDTEC 544 introduced me to a systematic way of thinking about and designing instruction to match instructional goals and objectives. My primary field of work is not education, but I still had to create and deliver short workshops and training sessions as part of my job. Doing so usually involved a little bit of panic, quite a bit of stumbling about while creating content outlines and activities, and about as many misses as hits. I didn’t know about ADDIE – or that there even were models – and of course had never heard of David Merrill or Ruth Clark.

Three Cheers for Ruth Clark

I've mentioned Ruth Clark several times in my portfolio, because she among all authors most influenced how I think about and practice instructional design. Reading Developing Technical Training was a watershed moment for me. Just as in 540, when I discovered that training wasn’t a solution for all performance problems, discovering that there was a logical process for designing training gave me more confidence and a sense of control over my work. Since then I’ve realized that some instructional designers reject the prescriptive methods Clark outlines in this and other works, but I still find value in the process and keep the Performance/Content matrix in my toolkit.

The Design Concept document I created for 544 allowed me to experiment with the process to see how it might play out in the real world. I had recently done a train-the-trainer session jointly sponsored by the CDC and the Society for Public Health Education (SOPHE) to become a CDCynergy software trainer. The 3-day training sessions were highly rated by participants, but were becoming increasingly expensive and time consuming for SOPHE to administer. Course managers wanted to explore the possibility of offering some or all of the education as Web-based training. I offered to work on some design issues in 544 and share them with my SOPHE contacts upon completion.

Scaffolding

I discovered how easy the process made it to move from one step to the next (I think the official term for this is scaffolding). Developing instructional strategies and sequencing initially seemed to require too much fine detail, but I found it an essential step in the process because it forced me to decide whether the envisioned instructional module was truly doable and whether the module would achieve the objectives I’d drafted earlier. Moving from the sequencing to a conceptual graph structure (CGS) was another easy step.  I was initially intimidated by the CGS because I am a verbal and text-oriented learner, but I loved seeing a visual representation of my instructional sequence and discovered that diagrams and graphs can communicate your ideas to others so much more quickly than text.  And with the objectives, sequencing, and CGS completed, the formative evaluation criteria almost wrote themselves.

My 544 Design Concept demonstrates my understanding of the instructional design process, and it’s a document of which I’m proud. I’ve shown it to internship sponsors and potential employers as an example of my ability to take a systematic approach to design and development.

 

Clark, R. C. (1999). Developing technical training: A structured approach for developing classroom and computer-based instructional materials (2nd ed). Silver Spring, MD: International Society for Performance Improvement.