What I've Learned about the field of Instructional Design & Technology

This semester, while teaching for the first time and taking a course about the epistemological, psychological, and educational foundations of the field of instructional design and technology, along with a course in instructional design and a course in cognitive psychology, I did a lot of generative processing (i.e. integrating and organizing of information from multiple sources about multiple things) about design of learning experiences.

In my initial post at the beginning of the semester about what constitutes good instructional design, I wrote that good instructional design is strategic design of learning experiences—based on good, internally coherent theory and unambiguous evidence—that can help develop learners develop knowledge and skills. I also wrote that good design of learning experiences is appropriate for learning objectives, entails a blend of learner analysis and evidence-based practices, and is conducive to stimulation of active learning and motivation. Most importantly, I wrote that quality design of learning experiences is not essentially technology-centric, but can leverage what technologies offer to enhance learning experiences in learner-centric and objective-centric ways.

I still agree with everything I originally wrote at the beginning of the semester—about both quality instructional design and the field of instructional design—and I think that my own learning experiences have only built on top of my personal knowledge and beliefs as well as my own instructional design skills. I think that the changes I have experienced in my knowledge and in my own instructional design skills can be classified according to following kinds of changes:

1. Changes in my perspective of the field of instructional design
2. Changes in my views on the importance of both multimedia and learner preferences to learning
3. Changes in my views about motivation

The field of Learning Technologies a.k.a. IDT

I still stand by the idea that our field—which has been called many different names, such as the more recent names, Learning Technologies or Instructional Design & Technology—could have the most “justice done” to its name if it were called Learning Experience Design or LX design for short. The essence of the topic of every practice (research or instructional) of our field is learning. We are a learning-centric field—learning is built into what we do in our field in the sense that we must continue to learn to be good at what we do. More importantly, learning is the object of our obsessions and practices; it’s what we aim to facilitate and the benefits to others that we strive to offer in the ways in which we try to offer it.

I have learned this semester—particularly from the course about the foundations of our field—that research is incredibly important to our field, more so than I originally thought. Initially, I thought that there were only three ways in which research is relevant to what we do: (1) quality design of learning experiences requires “research” in the sense that it involves learner analysis and evaluation of learners’ demonstrations of their learning; (2) our field is built on the foundations that research and evidence-based theories in cognitive psychology and educational psychology have handed to us, and we add to that body of research-based knowledge through our own research about using instructional design and technology together to enhance learning; and (3) the instructional practices of our field are to accord with what research in our field and educational psychology have yielded. I think this is already a very research-centric conception of our field, but I have learned that there are at least two more ways that research is relevant to our field: (4) the research we conduct in academic departments about the use of instructional design techniques and technologies informs the academic research communities en masse about topics specific to our field (i.e. use instructional design and use of technology), but it also, in many cases, has the potential to inform many specialized bodies of interdisciplinary research about topics that are beyond mere use of technology or design (e.g. about science education, cognitive science, and foreign language education); and (5) research methods and models can be and often are applied to the design of learning experiences in workplaces to better understand and improve the effectiveness of instruction, not simply to evaluate or assess what learners have learned. For example, even in Kirkpatrick’s model of the four levels of evaluation of instruction-facilitated learning, research methods are vital to collection of data about learners and instructional methods.

In a nutshell, I think that our field has moved from its technology-centric origins at the beginning of the 20^th century towards a more variegated scene of research-centric, learner-centric, and objective-centric activities that aim to improve learners. IDT activities, through the historical evolution of our field, have been influenced by epistemological theories about knowledge, cognitive science views on how people learn, socio-cultural views on the relevance of social and cultural factors to how people learn and to what learning objectives should be set, and models of intelligence that implicitly marry socio-cultural and cognitive science constructs in order to help guide how we analyze learners and the mechanics of learning. I think that our field now has the potential to contribute new kinds of evidence to academic disciplines that try to understand the mechanics of improvement of cognitive abilities (I kind of hope our field does do this), and I believe that it is the unique nature of our field that we uniquely attempt to translate these kinds of evidence into improvements in the ways that we design learning experiences and facilitate both acquisition of knowledge and skills. To clarify: This semester I wrote a mid-term and final paper about the relevance of cognitive (working memory) training interventions to how we prepare learners to be better novel problem solvers. I think our field is perhaps the best at emphasis on quality task analysis, and I think that is what is needed to best handle past and present research about cognitive training, brain training, and the use of interactive multimedia (e.g. action video games or serious games designed to target cognitive benefits) to improve human cognitive abilities. 

Multimedia and Learner Preferences

For my instructional design class, I had to write 2 reviews of recent research articles on an emerging instructional design topic. I chose adaptivity of hypermedia learning as my topic for which I would find two relevant articles. I chose this topic because I know from past experience and coursework that adaptive hypermedia would essentially involve the demand for using multimedia learning principles to design learning materials, and I was intrigued by the idea of changes in the multimedia design itself—not just changes in the way multimedia content is sequenced—as part of responding to learner performance.

Prior to this semester, I thought that accordance of the design of learning content to multimedia learning principles is essential to good instructional design, and I liked the idea of adaptive hypermedia systems that respond adaptively to a learner based on his or her performances, but not necessarily in ways that change the multimedia design itself. I had also thought about the potential importance of learner interests and preferences to learning, and I had done some of my own digging around in research databases to figure out that a learning style or cognitive style can be disambiguated to mean either (i) a preference or (ii) a tendency. However, I had not really thought much about the prospects of offering learners a choice between one kind of hypermedia design over another based on their preferences about how they like to learn. I think I has assumed that learner preferences can stray from what will actually be more conducive to helping them learn, and that this attitude towards learner preferences was built into the science of multimedia learning principles.

So, I chose one article that researched the effectiveness of giving learners a particular design of video content that aligned with their learning styles (preference of learning material type). I also chose another article about the fit between a learner’s choice between variations of learning materials (static, not dynamic like videos) that could satisfy their preferred style of learning and conduciveness to learning. After reviewing both articles, I interpreted their findings as support for my personal view: accordance of a design of multimedia learning materials to multimedia learning principles is more important and conducive to learning than is what a learner prefers or thinks will be the best kind of material.

Furthermore, the change I experienced in my personal views pertained to my views of the importance of metacognition and self-regulated learning to learning in hypermedia environments. I think that there are some important adaptive functions (e.g. adapting to learners’ prior knowledge and in-course achievements) that adaptive hypermedia can and should perform. However, I think that neither allowing learners to choose materials based on their self-concepts and preferences, nor designing multiple designs of learning materials to accord with differences in preferences is an effective instructional method; adaptive hypermedia should abandon this function, which is really a job that should be satisfied by appropriate application of multimedia learning principles to the facilitation of the learning task. Where the affordances of well-designed multimedia leave off, metacognition and self-regulated learning should take over to help better facilitate success in the learning task. Yes, each learner has individual differences in learning abilities, prior knowledge, and even in the very experience they have when “consuming” multimedia learning materials. Yes, sometimes these learner experiences, no matter how well a particular multimedia design is streamlined to facilitate learning and minimize cognitive load, can still include cognitive overload. However, the only thing that can best understand and overcome cognitive overload is the learner experiencing it, and they will overcome cognitive overload via self-regulated learning processes that inherently involve a metacognitive task. Metacognitive monitoring and metacognitive tasks cannot be offloaded onto a technology or tool outside of the particular learner, but we instructors can try to design experiences that promote development of metacognitive skills for overcoming the cognitive overload one experiences.  

Motivation

I know that learner motivation is crucially important to learning. I have known from readings and assignments from past courses (e.g. Learning to Learn & The Psychology of Learning) as well as from personal experiences that self-regulation and motivation are important to learning and, generally speaking, human performance.

Unfortunately I have also had to learn this in a more distinct way from another kind of personal experience. I have worked in some workplaces that are not always conducive to professional development or motivation of its employees. For example, when I took the Learning to Learn course and Computer Literacy Skills course together one summer, I was working at a Blackberry retail store where I experienced some corruption in store management. For example, store managers were giving my commission for phones I sold, to other employees who had not sold those phones, yet were friends with the store manager. Even worse, store managers and select employees were looking through people’s private data (pictures, videos, texts, browsing histories) on these phones that they were supposed to be merely charging for people. At this point I should clarify that this store was not tied directly to Blackberry (RIM); it was a retail store run by a retail management company. The main store manager was the husband of the daughter of the owner of the retail management company that ran the store…I quit after a month! It was really hard to be motivated to work in that kind of environment, and, the problem—the store manager—likely would not have been fixed. Plus, let’s be honest, sales in Blackberry smart phones were declining around that time anyway.

Another experience at the Blackberry store was just as unpleasant: their online trainings about the features of the different kinds of Blackberry phones. I had already decided to go into this field prior to working at the Blackberry retail store and was trying to gain entry to a master’s program in IDT, but this experience with the trainings there made me want to study and practice instructional design even more. The online trainings weren’t videos. They should be characterized as a form of hypermedia that featured hyperlinks for navigation, text, and images. This kind of hypermedia can be just as effective as an online video, if not more effective in some cases; the lack of video content was not the issue. The issue was that the text and images occupied the same positions. That’s right, the text was on top of the images such that only half of the text was readable. How can someone learn about a phone if the image of the phone and over half of the text about it are layered on top of each other? Basic multimedia learning principle here: they can’t. 

You know, our field is essentially about improving learners, and I identify with this professional identity, but I am having to learn that others may be in this field for others reasons, and that they may not always care about what really matters for quality instructional design or professional development. This realization is probably a good one to have for people in this field who do identify with the goals of quality instructional design, but the realization in itself can be a motivation “squasher.” I think that individuals who share the same professional identities—in terms of identifying with the goals of quality instructional design—should gravitate towards each other and stick together. They are probably more likely to get along with one another, motivate each other, and professionally develop together.

Whereas I used to think that, from the learner point of view, supporting motivation was primarily the job of self-regulation (when worse comes to worst, one should always try to be the kind of person who can count on him or herself for motivation), I now recognize that there are factors that really can make a difference in a learner’s experiences and enhance learning and human performance in ways that self-regulation alone cannot. These factors include self-efficacy, self-confidence, self-concept (e.g. professional identity), and things external to oneself (e.g. recognition of achievements, immediate feedback about one’s performance, or constructive feedback in general) that can help facilitate the presence of the aforementioned factors that are internal to oneself. I was learning this much from the learning theories I have encountered, but I think some of the workplace experiences I have had have helped me understand the importance of these motivational factors in ways that concrete experiences uniquely can. I can only imagine that there are some people who have had much worse experiences in workplaces, but have not been able to learn about motivational factors in the same ways that I have (i.e. from courses). When one knows about motivational factors, one has a larger, sharper knowledge base in long-term memory that can be used in moments of self-regulation.

Lastly, I am intrigued by the concept of flow—in game-based learning, in learning and human performance in general, and in workplaces. While I have only scratched the surface of this concept by light reading of brief articulations of the concept and theory behind it, I look forward to looking into some applications and operationalizations of the construct in research about the relationships between flow and learning.