I’ve been thinking about fresh approaches to instructional design.
Instructional design was invented around the time of World War II. Starting virtually from scratch, America had to train millions of men to be soldiers and millions of civilians to make ships and armaments. The training film was born, soon to be followed with the ADDIE model. ADDIE (analyze, design, develop, implement & evaluate) made it possible to manage the process of creating useful training programs systematically.
Instructional purists still revere the logic of ADDIE. (It’s hard to argue with the concept of planning your work, then working your plan.) but ADDIE is beginning to show its age:
- Training is only part of the learning equation.
- Training is generally imposed on people. Whether of not they learn is an entirely different matter. Learning requires motivation. (You can lead a boy to college but you can’t make him think.)
- ADDIE invariably points to training as the solution. Sometimes it’s more effective to imbed the knowledge in the work than to plant it in the head of the worker.
- Modern instructional design needs to focus on creating flexible environments that nurture learning rather than rigid programs that attempt to force lessons into the heads of learners.
- Old-style training enraged many managers because it was separate from work. Why isn’t Sally at work today? Because she’s in training.
It needn’t be this way, particularly since knowledge work and learning are nearly indistinguishable. Most corporate learning today can take place simultaneously with work. A major part of modern instructional design involves creating and nurturing learning ecologies..
Building a learning ecology is a different exercise than building a training program. In lieu of top-down control, it relies on continuous experimentation and evaluation. It takes coordination, flexibility, and on-going conversation. These qualities are at the heart of the discipline of agile programming. Hence, I am exploring how well the principles of agile programming might be incorporated into a new framework for instructional design.
Agile Software Development
This morning I took part in a conference call focused on now might we use the precepts of agile programming in general (non-IT) business settings.
Agile programming has come a long way from its early incarnation as extreme programming on the first wiki. It’s been influenced by lean manufacturing and spawned practices like Scrum.
Yet the agile community remains pretty insular. Only lately have people seriously explored how agile principles and practices might be used outside software development.
Agile Software Development on Wikipedia
Agile methodologies generally promote a project management process that encourages frequent inspection and adaptation, a leadership philosophy that encourages teamwork, self-organization and accountability, a set of engineering best practices that allow for rapid delivery of high-quality software, and a business approach that aligns development with customer needs and company goals.
The modern definition of agile software development evolved in the mid-1990s as part of a reaction against “heavyweight” methods, perceived to be typified by a heavily regulated, regimented, micro-managed use of the waterfall model of development. The processes originating from this use of the waterfall model were seen as bureaucratic, slow, demeaning, and inconsistent with the ways that software developers actually perform effective work. A case can be made that agile and iterative development methods are a return to development practice seen early in the history of software development.
Unlike many design disciplines, Agile’s beginning and principles are easily accessible. See the Agile Software Manifesto, which states:
We are uncovering better ways of developing
software by doing it and helping others do it.
Through this work we have come to value:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
Another great reference is Martin Fowler’s The New Methodology.
Agile practitioners Jim Benson and Bill Anderson set the stage, outlining the benefits of Agile:
Empirical: learn our capacity
Iterative: small steps get them there
Participatory: client tells what is wanted, feedback is frequent
Discussion flushed out other aspects:
- John Smith: this is a community of practice approach
- Great opportunity for people learn by eavesdropping.
- Makes cost changes conspicuous
- Introspection along the dimensions of commonly accepted metrics
- Ability to look back at what we’re capable of
- The day’s code is not entered in if it doesn’t work
- Rewards constants communication
- Daylight overcomes rigid specifications
- Aesthetics, not practices
- Teams sharing one terminal learn from one another
- Relationships among teams is important
Skeptics of agile program don’t believe you can do things one piece at a time; they think you have to eat the whole sausage. Sometimes a company itself has a waterfall style. Scrum and other methodologies call for short, standing, daily meetings; people are skeptical about daily meetings: because they are burned out on traditional meetings.
So….. Do others agree that instructional design would benefit from incorporating the principles of agile?
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Hi Jay,
It was good to see you speak at Learning Technologies 2009 in London the other week – always thought provoking.
I wondered if you managed to read my short article in the Magazine accompanying the conference – Get Real: Mission Critical E-learning. In it I reflected on exactly the same issue – AGILE should apply to learning design and I decided to try and describe the key principles at a high level. You can find the article here on my blog.
Would welcome your comments.
Lars
Hi Jay,
I fully agree that instructional design methods like ADDIE are showing their age and that more flexible approaches to instructional design are increasingly important to reflect today’s very different organizational and social contexts.
My interest in this area includes research on the use of participatory design as an alternative to more traditional ISD methods like ADDIE, for workplace learning. Like agile development, participatory design comes oroginally from IT and is now being introduced elsewhere. PD is built on the core principle that getting users involved in all steps of a design process is essential to truly understand and address real needs, identify key levers to optinize the learning experience and shorten the design process (by increasing input and shortening the design review cycle). I expect to start this research as soon as I find a research site (i.e. an organization about to start a project to provide employees with relevant learning activities – glad to receive any thoughts or suggestions on this).
Cheers,
J-M.
I wrote about this in 2007, “Software development has embraced the iterative and flexible Agile model, but not without a major re-education program. It is up to industry to educate customers so that requests for proposals don’t force vendors into using an older and outdated model. I still see educational and training RFP’s that leave little choice but a quick analysis (if any), little design time (and only at the front end) and then get into production based on a specification whose premises were never tested and cannot be questioned later.” http://is.gd/kgCm
We still have a lot of re-educating to do to instill an agile approach for training design. Giving this conversation a kick-start, as you have done, is a good 1st step.
I agree, the ADDIE approach is untenable in today’s business environment – where required learning and business outcomes change and associated content is generated and expires quickly.
In J. M. Guillemette’s comment, the use of ‘Participatory Design’ seems to imply a difference between design and development. While it seems like AGILE did away with this, and blurred the boundary between design and development, in a real world development scrum, these are concurrent and continuous.
I’m very interested in your views on this continued blurring between D and D. The use of rapid authoring tools only blurs the boundaries more.
Another line of thought perhaps is to question the need for such discrete design and development. Perhaps the future of instructional design and technology lies in being able to design, develop and deploy frameworks for individual and organizational learning. These frameworks would then evolve with user participation to further learning and organizational goals.
I am a Learning Architect at Nationwide Insurance serving 5000 IT associates. We are currently working with a large IT team performing software development using the agile methodology. The team has asked that we complete the Learning and Development Requirements for this project using an agile learning and development methodology. (instructional design). We have Learning Architecture Principles and Learning Patterns that we can apply to this approach already built. However, we need to structure a Requirements Approach, potentially incorporating “story cards,” a staple of agile software development. Interested in hearing of any experiences readers have had with this.
In my experience, it is a good idea to map the elements of agile to ID. For example, a product is a learning solution/course, a feature is a topic or could be a deliverable, a story could be a learning objective and a task could be something like design e-learning UI or design activity to learn xyz. Can anyone else suggest other ways to map the two?
Also, we can talk about a product being a framework or a solution or a specific module which can be broken down from there.