What are the Practical Implications of Instructional Design at a Wesleyan University?

I've been doing a bit of thinking over the past several days about my job here at Southern Nazarene University. I work as an instructional designer. Honestly, I had no idea what that job should look like when I first started working. I was a practitioner, not really a theorist. Now that I have been working for a while, I have come to understand that as a designer, I fall somewhere in the middle. According to Wikipedia, instructional design is the "practice of creating instructional experiences which make the acquisition of knowledge and skill more efficient, effective, and appealing." This definition originates with Merrill et. al (1996). I probably should have spent some time looking at that before taking this job. I need to be familiar with all of the learning theorists. That group includes the "old" ones: Bloom, Gagné, Papert, Piaget, Skinner, and Vygotsky. I also need to be current in new ideas in learning theory, including the later models from Clark, Marzano, and Sweller. Some of the current models include technology and some do not.

Today at lunch I was visiting with some colleagues and my dean. We were discussing academics at our university. We usually use this opportunity to talk about ways we can innovate but today the conversation took an interesting turn: "What are the practical implications of being an instructional designer (somewhat of a predeterministic mindset) in a Wesleyan-tradition educational setting.

SNU is a private, Christian, liberal arts university-a service of the Church of the Nazarene. If you do not know anything about Nazarenes, we are a Christian (followers of Christ) denomination that rose out of a branch of the Methodists and Pentecostals. We are not quite as liturgical as the Methodists and not quite as "radical" as the Pentecostals (we don't believe you have to have the gift of tongues as evidence of the Holy Spirit). We follow the Wesleyan tradition in that we believe in a life of holiness: an in-filling of the Holy Spirit, also called sanctification.

Contrast Nazarenes with those of the Calvinist tradition. The major difference between Nazarenes and Baptists is that we are Wesleyans and they are Calvinists. We believe that you have "free will" - your fate is in your hands. However, Calvinists believe in the idea of predestination or predeterminism - the idea that events of your life are already determined.

So what's the point? As an instructional designer, one who uses a rubric to evaluate courses, am I giving my faculty free-will in what their course should look like? Or is the outcome of their course predestined to "look a particular way"? Rather, does it even matter? Maybe we are more like the Catholic Church in that we hold the traditions and scriptures in the highest esteem? "My course has always been this way, so there's no way I could change it to put it online! That's educational blasphemy!" As the instructional designer, is there a sense of determinism? Is the course going to turn out such that the free-will of the course designer is lost?

I wonder if my very being here contributes to this problem, raised by Nicholas C. Burbles at the University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign:

"The search for one best way of teaching has preoccupied philosophers in the West since Socrates. Today this search is more typically couched in the language of scientific efficacy and efficiency. In the process, teaching in many schools is becoming less and less creative, personal, and rewarding. The scope of options for teachers is becoming more constrained; their subject matter and purposes more determined by the decisions of others; their outcomes measured more mechanically and impersonally."

Maybe. Probably. Yes. I feel like I do. However, how do we ensure top quality programs and courses without some kind of oversight and evaluation?

So where do I go from here? How does this question guide my practice? I'm not sure. I would really like to re-design our course evaluation rubric so that it is scored and there would be a minimum score a course would need to "pass" and we would recognize courses with an exemplary score. Would that create a situation in which course designers would not be able to have their "fingerprint" on the course?

Here's a better question: how can I as a teacher (sometimes) not act in a manner that fits with the Wesleyan doctrine? Doctrine states that we are to focus on personal faith and holiness. As a teacher, should I not strive to be my best in my teaching practice (personal faith) and work toward perfection for my in that practice for my students (holiness)? As a christian, I recognize that I am forgiven, not perfect. However, Christlikeness is my goal. I strive to better tomorrow than I was today. I fall short, but that does not mean I should quit striving for the goal.

I would posit that if I am not working to be my best in everything I do, not working to be better tomorrow than I was today, including the areas of teaching and instructional design, I come dangerously close to sin (in my opinion). Maybe my metaphor breaks down at this point. I'd gladly hear some criticism on it; but please be gentle. I'm no theologian. I'm "just a teacher."

Teaching Philosophy Distilled

The following quote is a great distillation of my teaching philosophy:

Learning is not a spectator sport. Students do not learn much just sitting in classes listening to teachers, memorizing prepackaged assignments, and spitting out answers. They must talk about what they are learning, write reflectively about it, relate it to past experiences, and apply it to their daily lives. They must make what they learn part of themselves.

It comes from an article I read on the TLT website.

Prepare, Discover, Analyze, Share

I had the opportunity to share an online pedagogy training with our faculty at SNU. We did a little discussion of ADA and how can offer equal opportunities for learning to our students with disabilities. We also talked about our online template. We use Moodle as our LMS and when I begin working with a professor to develop a course, I set up a new course for them from a template. While we hope that instructors can make a course their own, we do want to have some similarity between all of our courses. If students know exactly where to look for resources (assignment lists, etc.), we reduce their cognitive load and free them to learn content, instead of trying to learn where components of a course can be found. Our online courses are only 6 weeks long, so they have a small window in which to learn where resources within the course are located.

Our main focus of the training, however, was the PDAS model. While we do not expect every course to have each of these four components in every single week of a course, we do hope to balance these strategies throughout their courses.

Prepare is the part of a course in which students are "instructed" on the concepts or information to be learned. Usually, this would look like students reading from texts, watching videos, reading journal articles or websites, or some kind of similar activity. The key to this component is that professors tell students where to get the information. This is instructor-centered learning. As a side note, I personally think this should be minimalized in a course. I'm a constructivist and I think students learn best when they have to go find information.

Discover is the antithesis of the previous strategy. In discover, students construct their own knowledge. They are tasked with finding the information on their own. They have to go and "do" something. This particular strategy could take many forms, e.g. experiment (science), argumentative essay (english), find patterns of behavior in a culture (social studies), etc. The bottom line is that students begin to find their own knowledge and evaluate that knowledge for parts of it they find relevant.

It is hard to talk about either of the first two without bringing in the third component: Analyze. This is the part of the learning process in which students actually do something with the information they have learned in the first two steps. After all, if you learn something and do not do something with that knowledge, what's the point? In analyze, students might compare and contrast two stories they have read. They could read a piece of literature and create a modern version of the work (video?). They might analyze a piece of literature through the cultural lens through which it was written (literature and social studies connection). I have always enjoyed looking at the historical context of science and thinking about why advances where made. There might even be a fine arts connection to be had here in this step (pointillism and atomic theory?)

Finally, students need to Share. How can you have any kind of class without some kind of buy-in to a social theory of learning? Students need to interact with others. This becomes even more important when you consider that by simply taking an online class, they area at a disadvantage in the social aspect of learning. This means that we, as designers/instructors, must be purposeful in creating opportunities for students to share their knowledge with others. This accomplishes two things: the "sharer" learns more by being forced to communicate their learning, either in writing or in the spoken word. The "sharee" learns more by being exposed to other's worldview, perspective, and ideas of what is important within a particular knowledge domain.

This model of learning is not new to most of you, I would imagine. You probably have components of this in your classes, whether online or face-to-face. I'm learning this as I begin to deepen my understanding of classroom models and learning theories: In education, as in Physics, there is not yet a Grand Unified Theory. No single learning theory works for every single learner. We must use components from many different theories to enable students to be successful in our domain.

As teachers, we must be able to offer students opportunities to learn, based on their particular learning style. There may be learning theories that work better for differently structured domains or even from one "class" in a school to another, i.e. this year's sophomores, juniors, seniors, etc. This idea is why every teacher should be a learner (yes, SNU School of ED, I also think we need to be lifelong-learners). I didn't really understand this when I was in school. When I finished my undergraduate work, I thought, "I've arrived." However, continuing my learning beyond that has shown me just how much I don't know. That, I believe, is where true learning begins.