Week 6 Reflections on Chapters 7 & 8

By
Renee Dobrzelewski

EDT 5410 Week 6 Reflections

The essence of Chp. 7 is that one way to develop better instructional designers is to ensure their education addresses learners' cognitive and emotional needs while examining well-designed instructional products through reflective activities. It also helps to encourage novice designers to really examine a problem and possibly shake things up to come up with creative solutions. Fortney also suggests academic projects should be constructed in a way that design learners have to work through constraints and ambiguity.


Boling concurs with Fortney’s views but goes one step further to push the idea that ID practitioners should be helping the field evolve by documenting and sharing examples of design for others to observe. She also thinks practitioners should be interacting with academic instructional design programs through internship opportunities, and as guest speakers or visiting scholars. Fortney does challenge one of Boling’s assumptions that there are not enough design cases to study but feels it may come down to where one is looking for them – in academic research or in field publications.


In Chp. 8, Smith focuses on how new the field is to novices and when they encounter things in their design education that are unfamiliar, they show instructors and practitioners a different way to approach design, as “the old way” is not ingrained in them. They see this dialogue between student and teacher as a good thing for the field because it challenges foundational assumptions that practitioners habitually maintain. We should be looking at the students’ difficulties as a sign that some areas in instructional design theory and practice need greater review.


Hirumi’s response hints at a differing viewpoint as they see novices relying on theory when new to the field, but experts can also use experience and pattern recognition to inform their design decisions. They feel that novices utilizing traditional methods based on theory are not creating innovative design solutions because they are not being given the room to do so. Smith is concerned that there is some risk involved with novel solutions that are unproven and suggests that a classroom might be a safe environment to experiment.


One common thread that seems to weave through many of the readings in this book is that there is no such thing as “common.” Scholars and experts disagree on what constitutes instructional design, what qualities make a good designer, how designers should be educated, and even how much technology should play a role in education. I point these things out not to be trite, but because the only constant in the field sometimes seems to be inconsistency. There are instructional design theories, but not everyone agrees with them. There are models for preparing designers, but no agreement on exactly what that preparation should look like. There are also ongoing debates about how much designers should rely on theory, experience, precedent, creativity, or new technology.


At first, I found that frustrating because I tend to prefer clear expectations and defined processes. As I move further into this program, though, I am beginning to see that developing expertise may have less to do with learning one “correct” way to design and more to do with learning how to make informed decisions when the answer is not obvious. That connects with Fortney’s emphasis on giving novice designers opportunities to work through ambiguity and constraints rather than only giving them neatly defined problems.


What I still find myself wanting, though, are more examples of the actual decision-making process. We can study design models and look at finished instructional products, but I am interested in what happens in between. How does a designer decide that a video demonstration would be more effective than a slide presentation? How many knowledge checks are enough before they become repetitive? When does a discussion activity add value, and when is it simply another task for the learner to complete?


I assume some of those questions would be explored more deeply in advanced instructional design coursework, but I think they also connect to Boling’s argument for documenting and sharing examples of real design work. Seeing a completed course or learning activity is useful, but seeing the reasoning behind the choices would be even more valuable to someone developing expertise.


That may be where the idea of learning through cases and reflection becomes most useful to me. Theory can provide a foundation, but examples of how experienced designers make choices under real constraints could help bridge the gap between knowing the principles of instructional design and knowing how to apply them.