Monthly Archives: June 2015

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Building an Airplane While You’re Flying It: Why You Shouldn’t Build Your Online Class on the Fly

Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

In Faculty Instructional Technology Services, we’ve established a recommended timeline of two academic quarters to develop an online or hybrid course, assuming the instructor has a normal course load over that time frame. That’s twenty weeks, give or take. In this time frame, we can help instructors in planning, development, and quality assurance in creating a professional online or hybrid course.

With less time, we can do less.

This quarter, most of our consultants are working on at least a couple build-as-you-go courses, where instructors are still developing course materials while the course is running. I understand why this happens, particularly in the Spring quarter. Instructors are busy people, and it’s hard to find the time to prep for the upcoming quarter, particularly when there are so few breaks in the academic calendar. It also might be a shock to be asked to spend so much time preparing a course they’ve been teaching face-to-face for years and are not accustomed to needing to do a lot of preparation for each offering.

I’ve never seen a course simply not run because the online materials weren’t ready. The course always gets done in the end, because it has to. But that’s not to say that building a course while it’s running isn’t without consequences. Continue reading →

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Why Do We Educate?

June 8, 2015 is a special day for high school graduates in China. It is the day to witness 10 million students enter college exam sites to try and earn themselves admission into colleges. Students are told that every point they earn on this exam will significantly impact the rest of their lives because whether or not they can make it to a college and what college they get into will define who they will become.

While I still get butterflies in my stomach when I think about my college exam day, I couldn’t find a word to describe how I felt when I saw the picture of the book-tearing event that occurred a day prior to this year’s national college exam day. The picture below is a scene at a Henan Province high school prior to the exam day. Students tore their textbooks, study notes, learning materials into pieces and tossed them in the air like party confetti!

book tearing event

I have heard about students burning their books to mark the end of a painful era of studying, but never as massive and violent as this! In a country where education is seen as the means for everything, what causes this hostile attitude towards the carrier of knowledge and symbol for learning?

If every rebellion has its roots in oppression, maybe the following images can offer us some explanation of the cause.

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ADDIE vs. AGILE Model: An Instructional Designer’s Perspective

As an instructional designer over the last decade, I’ve come across a number of methods that have been introduced to enhance the design process. From understanding by design (UBD) to rapid prototyping, each approach brings about a fresh perspective that designers are charged with considering as techniques to utilize as he or she hits the “refresh” button.

I, like most designers that have been doing this work for a while, have a foundation in the ADDIE model – a methodology that was first developed in the 1970s for the U.S. Army by Florida State University.  Its focus is based upon a 5-phase approach to design: Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation. For more information on the ADDIE model, check out an ADDIE infographic detailing the nuances of each phase.

A methodology that’s gaining traction with instructional designers across industries – and for good reason – is the AGILE instructional design process. The AGILE method is a project-oriented approach introduced by Conrad Gottfredson, a performance-support practitioner. It encompasses the five stages involved when designing eLearning experiences: Align, Get set, Iterate and implement, Leverage and Evaluate (Pappas, C. “The Power Of AGILE Instructional Design Approach…”).

In the table below, note the similarities and distinctions of the ADDIE and AGILE approaches to design.

Continue reading →