CHAPTER 1

The Journey to Instructional Systems Development

In every corner of our world, for as long as there has been intelligent life on this planet, people have been teaching skills and passing on knowledge to others, from a fire to going on a successful hunt, to today’s world of unlimited hashtags. Civilization has always revolved around learning and sharing information in one form or another. Life is learning in every conceivable way.

Through the centuries, the art of teaching has been marked by a number of different formats and advances in the efficiency and reliability of learning transfer. It is not too simplistic to say that without learning, knowledge, and skill transfer, all of us would still be struggling to make fires and hunt dinner with little progress in anything else. This is because each new level of knowledge builds on what has taken place before; without the process of learning transfer, we have no bridge to new discoveries. It can be argued that there is really no new information in the world, just the process of discovering the knowledge we didn’t previously know. We then combine it with already established information to create something we consider new.

Through eight generations of learning transfer, from demonstration to digital technology, the process of both teaching and learning design has matured considerably, and we now enjoy the most reliable methods and practices for preparing instruction we’ve known yet. This formalization of the process of curriculum design has brought us into the age of instructional systems development (ISD).

For each new learner there has to be at least one teacher. While the specifics of the teacher-learner relationship have materially changed with the advent of each new generation of learning transfer, there is no escaping the truth that teaching is both timeless and universal. In this chapter, we look at the history of learning, the generations of learning transfer, and the foundations for the practice of what we now label instructional design.

Learning Is a Process

The passing of skills and knowledge has always been a process. It can be argued that humans, at the very beginning of our existence, acted mostly on instinct when learning new ways to obtain the basic informational elements of life. A need prompted a response, which then became the basis for learning a skill. After repeated similar situations and outcomes, learning of some sort took place and became the foundation for any knowledge that followed. This is a reasonable proposition, but really holds together only when speaking of the earliest interactions of life. At some point, instinct had to give way to learning and transmission of this knowledge to others. While instinct certainly lives in all of us, the maturation of informational transference has been a steady and progressive process to what we have in the modern world of learning.

However, there has still been much discussion about the relationship between instinct and learning. Abraham Maslow, who developed a needs hierarchy that we look at later in the book, argued that instinct is in fact learning. Oscar Oppenheimer (1958) disagreed, suggesting that instinct is not the same as learning and that something more has to take place for instinct to evolve into learning. If this is true, our instincts must be supplemented by some vehicle in order for learning to transfer from one person to another. Today, there is universal agreement that instinct is but one of a million data points that each learner uses to process and then store new information through the process of learning.

Given what we know today, it is reasonable to assume that the earliest forms of skills enhancement came from both instinct and experience, which then fostered sharing of this information. Being cold would trigger a hunt for warmth, both clothing and shelter. Hunger would lead to hunting, fishing, and gathering available roots and berries. And, as each new challenge offered insights into the best way to perform any of these skills, passing on this knowledge would become an incremental process, which started with the validated skills and then built each succeeding layer of improved revision based on the previously tested knowledge.

Survival was unquestionably the most important priority in early human history; even before the existence of formal language, skills that helped in this struggle were being passed from one person to another. Sometimes this was the older passing to the younger. This could be as elemental as finding the safest shelter for the night or finding sustenance for meals. It is also probable that the skills needed for a person to survive a traumatic experience, like defending oneself against an animal attack, would also probably be passed on to those who had not yet had this life-threatening experience.

Defining Learning Transfer

There are any number of definitions for the term learning transfer; we define it as the action of a learner processing and storing knowledge or skills obtained from another source. This other source may be another person or medium, such as a book or electronically distributed information. You may also see this represented by the term training transfer.

The formal adaptation of the construct of learning transfer is rooted in the work of Edward Thorndike, who deemed it “transfer of practice” (1916); this also set the foundation for connectivism, which we review later. Thorndike wrote, “The sciences and arts arose by the impetus of wants, and continue in their service” (Richardson and Slife 2013). This suggests that learning has its roots in the needs of the learner, and no matter how learning is presented, it still requires stimulus and response. This is a common theme in modern learning theory.

The Generations of Learning Transfer

The process of passing knowledge and skills from one person to another has several milestones from inception to the present day. Each of these periods represents a turning point in the incremental growth of the learning transfer process. It is fair to say that none of these periods was heralded at the time as significant, but the benefits of time and reflection have proven that there exist several important points of departure from previous ways of transferring knowledge.

Perhaps the easiest way to begin thinking about learning transfer and the process of instructional design is to put the practice into a context of generations of learning transfer. Each of these generations has characteristics that reflect the practices and processes generally thought to have existed during each of these periods of time. After the first generation, which is essentially everything before the use of pictures and drawings for communication, there is an obvious milestone that marked the advent of a new generation.

While these generational periods are dynamic, both beginning and ending based on larger historical and societal influences, they give a clear context of how the process of learning transfer moved from one accepted norm to the next. Each generation after the first used the previous one as a foundation for the advances that were taking place. This highlights one of the most prominent aspects of instructional design, which is that the basics still exist and that advances in the field are more enhancements and improvements than a complete replacement of these basic principles.

The eight generations of learning transfer are more symbolic than anthropological. Each is a distinctive point of reference to a time when new ideas arose that impacted learning transfer in a fundamental way. These are the eight generations of learning transfer:

• First Generation: Demonstration

• Second Generation: Pictures and Drawings

• Third Generation: Written Language

• Fourth Generation: Printing

• Fifth Generation: Distance Learning

• Sixth Generation: Analog Technology

• Seventh Generation: Social Sciences

• Eighth Generation: Digital Technology

Let’s take a look at each generation and discover how each of these periods had a significant influence on what exists today in ISD.

First Generation: Demonstration

The first generation of learning transfer could easily be called “doing what comes naturally.” At this first, binary, and naturalistic stage of learning, everything was essentially based on instinct. It was show one, do one—or in ISD terms, demonstrate one and perform one. If one couldn’t hunt or gather food, one probably didn’t eat. Hunger was the motivation, and survival was the real test of performance.

At first, humans collaborated in small groups to forage, which was the beginning of creating joint goals and of the simplistic sharing of information by “pointing and pantomiming” (Tomasello 2014). This should be considered the first effort at sharing knowledge interactively, with one person communicating important content with another, using fundamental vocalizations, which might have been enhanced by pointing or gesturing.

The first verbal communications used single-syllable words, such as ha, which might have meant air; va, which might have meant water; and ta, which seems to have indicated an inanimate object (Cordall 2019). One can imagine an animated conversation transferring knowledge of birds (ha), fish (va), and perhaps a rock (ta) between two of our early ancestors.

Hunting, shelter construction, and fire building were learned skills, either from personal experience or from a lesson from someone with more knowledge. That knowledge was skillfully, yet almost instinctively, handed down from one generation to the next, first by demonstration and later supplemented by oral dissemination and visualization of skills.

Self-education, mostly among children, was the standard for hundreds of thousands of years. Schools as we know them today are a very recent development. In fact, before the advent of agriculture approximately 10,000 years ago, play and work were indistinguishable from each other. Children were given “almost unlimited freedom to play and explore on their own” (Gray 2008) because this was considered the way that children learned naturally.

The hunter-gatherer life was a skill-based existence that was not considered labor intensive or even work; it was considered in today’s context to be play. The skills and knowledge necessary to exist in this environment were supported by initiative and creativity and not necessarily hard labor. It was a challenging way to live, with education evolving as the product of need, both for sustenance and for life itself. In instructional design terms, this population learned through trial and error and probably would have been confused by any suggestion of formal education as a concept.

This all changed with the onset of agriculture and the labor-intensive nature of work; the resulting civilizations required more permanent places of dwelling and long hours of repetitive, back-breaking labor. There was no time for play and informal discovery, and civilization turned a corner in how education was both perceived and practiced.

Every learning experience from the beginning of time required some form of instructional design. At first, it was simply show and tell. Someone hunted; others watched and learned. Practice and feedback were the glue that made the learning stick, and with each new combination of teacher and learner a new generation of refinement was added to this accumulation of knowledge. Trial and error were incorporated into the incremental progress within each skill, and the seemingly modern engagement of best practices had its genesis in these early teachers and learners.

Second Generation: Pictures and Drawings

The earliest forms of lasting communication were probably cave drawings. It wasn’t until 73,000 years ago that abstract drawings were made at Blombos Cave in South Africa (Henshilwood 2018). Oddly enough, one of the glyphs appears similar to the hashtag symbol we find in rampant use in social media today. It is this evolution to drawings that marks the second generation of learning transfer, since learning could now be enhanced by more permanent visuals.

According to Christopher Henshilwood, an archaeologist from the University of Bergen, the Blombos Cave drawings show that “what they could do with symbols is, for the first time, store information outside of the human brain. And that is a major advance” (Guarino 2018). The reason this is important to learning transfer, and clearly a generational marker, is the fact that knowledge was now being stored, in this case on the wall of a cave for others to see and learn from. No longer were humans passing knowledge and skills only through first-person actions; we now have a concrete example of how they passed their knowledge in a way that was permanent.

Third Generation: Written Language

The first known language preserved in writing is often considered to be either Egyptian or Sumerian. Egyptian language can be traced back to the writings found on tomb walls dating from around 3,250 BC. These writings belong to the “Manito-Semitic family of languages” and contain the first known “instance of a complete sentence” (Allen 2012).

Sumerian was written in cuneiform script, and it is thought to date to around 3,000 BC. It is an interesting language with six vowels, and is considered an agglutinative language, which has no inflection when spoken.

Written language is a turning point in learning transfer because this more permanent form of communication is incrementally more complex. It certainly lasts longer than simple oral communication and allows for information to be as permanent as the means of recording it. Rather than being more instinctive, as oral communication tends to be, writing takes more thought and intent and represents a more cognitive approach.

Fourth Generation: Printing

Most scholars credit Johann Gutenberg with inventing the printing press in 1436, although some say the Koreans may have predated him with movable copper type printing in 1392. In either case, the practice of writing and distributing information in written form has been with us for roughly 600 years. Gutenberg’s incredible accomplishments have a very interesting link to instructional design. He was trained within the goldsmith guild of the times and he also taught the printing process to his friends, making him both a product of instructional design and an instructional designer himself. Little did he realize that his invention would someday be the single largest distribution method of instructional material that has ever existed, challenged only recently by digital systems.

Fifth Generation: Distance Learning

The concept of distance learning generally accepted and practiced today originally appeared in a 1833 advertisement in a Swedish newspaper for a composition course offered through the mail or post, as it was then called (Simonson and Seepersaud 2019). This was quickly followed in 1840 by Englishman Isaac Pitman offering shorthand lessons via the penny post. As we will see in a later chapter, distance learning has come a long way in the intervening years, but the end product of the process has remained relatively the same, offering learners an alternative to attending in-person courses.

With the appearance of a model that removed the necessity of the direct, real-time involvement of a teacher, learning transfer turned a significant corner. It is doubtful that anyone at that point would have predicted that this conceptual model would become the mainstay of learning that it is today. However, it is these seemingly small changes in approach and thinking that build the foundation for much greater and more impactful ways to teach and learn. It is important to remember that these early offerings in distance learning didn’t rely on technology for their implementation. Yet as advanced technology has entered our lives, we continue to see how one breakthrough in practice supports and encourages the next.

Sixth Generation: Analog Technology

Whether you consider the first telephone call (in 1876) or the first radio broadcast (in 1896) to be the first example of technologically distributed information, it is obvious that the late 19th century served as a significant turning point in the ability of humans to communicate information.

These analog forms of communication were the first real glimpses into the way that technology could enhance learning transfer. The major innovation was that communication of information could take place at a distance through analog transmission of voice or data. Distance learning as a concept could now be offered by technology, exponentially expanding the opportunity for one teacher to reach large numbers of learners in real time at multiple locations.

And, while Alexander Graham Bell’s first voice transmission to Thomas Watson wasn’t by any stretch a learning moment as defined today, it did prove that gathering a teacher and learners in one spot was no longer required. Humans can use technology to communicate at a distance. This is the very essence of how learning transfer progresses incrementally based on milestone events that at the time seem unrelated to ISD.

Later, more significant digital technology, specifically the computer, would usher in a new age of learning transfer (the eighth generation). The distinction between the two generations is related to how the technology was used in learning transfer, with the sixth generation being more one-directional and the eighth being more bi-directional.

Seventh Generation: Social Sciences

The challenges of preparing millions of people for their roles in World War II advanced the complexity and sophistication of training and instructional design. Psychologists and the training and education communities worked together to lay the foundation for what is now known as instructional systems development. This early and critical period in ISD’s history witnessed a more effective design of training materials as well as new approaches to selecting trainees based on the psychological principles of finding the best fit between learner abilities and available job classifications.

This period marked the beginning of a formalization of instructional design and the recognition that learning, curriculum design, and mastery are much more complex concepts than previously thought. This partnership of subject matter experts, psychologists, and training professionals provided a number of foundational building blocks to the then-emerging field of ISD. The most important of these were a recognition that curriculum design was in fact a science as well as an art, and that mastery could be both objectively measured and used as a design element.

For example, Robert Reiser points out that aviator training during World War II led to an excessive and unacceptable failure rate, so testing was developed that “examined the general intellectual, psychomotor, and perceptual skill” of aviation candidates, allowing a much better selection for training. This approach was then generalized to other positions. The results were impressive, as reflected in the considerably higher percentage of successful trainings that took place. It was during this period that figures such as Robert Gagné and Leslie Briggs rose to lead the fledgling ISD movement and exhibited considerable influence in the design of training materials (Reiser 2001).

The publication of Gagné’s The Conditions of Learning and Psychological Principles in Systems Development, at least partially based on his military work during WWII, were significant in the history of the field. His later collaboration with Briggs and Walter Wager on Principles of Instructional Design (1974) is now considered a classic text in the field. It was also during this time that Gagné’s Nine Events of Instruction took root and established a solid psychological road map for designing learning.

Eighth Generation: Digital Technology

It is fair to say that the largest leap in the use of technology for learning transfer came with the introduction of the personal computer and digital communications. There were varying rollouts of this concept, beginning with the IBM 5100 in 1975 and the Apple II in 1977. Both opened the door for affordable home computers that were more likely to be used for learning than the hobbyist computers, which had appeared first and were somewhat expensive. As production increased and the costs dropped, more computers were appearing in the home for both children and adults to use and enjoy.

What really made this digital technology come to life for knowledge transfer was the development of the internet. On December 6, 1967, the Department of Defense allocated $19,800 for the “design and specification of a computer network” (Congressional Digest 2007), and four months later, ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) evolved into what we now know as the internet. The effort got more expensive a year later, when $563,000 was invested in the design and construction of a system to link computers at the University of California–Santa Barbara, the University of California–Los Angeles, Stanford Research Institute, and the University of Utah. All of this was foundational to what we now use for state-of-the-art learning transfer.

The Path to Instructional Design

The system for both improving content and sharing skills is the basis of instructional design. Each succeeding generation of learning transfer sits on the shoulders of the learning that preceded it. The fact that education and training courses are designed and delivered every second of every hour of every day in a constant cycle of information-sharing highlights the never-ending cycle of knowledge flow. This is true for every level of learning transfer, from pre-K exploration courses to doctoral-level courses in astrophysics.

The teachers in today’s world share many of the same qualities as our distant teaching relatives; they both found a way to transfer knowledge and skills at a level necessary to ensure learning mastery. Complex fields of science and engineering are really no different at their core from hunting and fire building when it comes to the process of teaching and the design of lessons. The only real differences are the complexity of the content and the choices available for implementation.

Since the mid-1980s, the educational environment has begun a slow but steady journey into technological delivery of learning in its unlimited forms. Classrooms are now considered legacy educational environments by some, and a small group believes that this current wave of technological learning transfer could lead to even more advanced systems that will be implanted in learners.

Instructional design has no preferences when it comes to choices made in the design process, like decisions about classroom or online implementation. It requires only that rigorous attention is paid to all aspects of the design process. This is where the importance of instructional design comes into play. There is a formal and proven way to design learning that incorporates all possible variables.

Just as most of the learning transfer of our distant relatives was completely carried out informally, today, most learning transwer is still carried out in less formal settings like home schools, retail stores, shop floors, repair facilities, sports fields, and anywhere two people are together working through challenges and finding solutions. In the fascinating world of informal learning, right this minute new employees are watching and listening to more tenured colleagues to learn the ropes and imitate the skills required of their new position or responsibilities, all without any formal classroom setting.

The difference between the excellent and the mediocre in most of these learning experiences is that without instructional design knowledge, most courses are essentially best guesses at how to transfer learning. Little is done in the way of analysis and even less is attempted at measuring mastery. This is where instructional systems development enters the picture.

Instructional Systems Development (ISD)

ISD is a systems approach to designing and implementing training. Think of it as the rocket science of learning design. There is a significant difference in how well learning and retention take place when knowledge transfer is directed by a trained instructional designer. There exist today courses and programs in ISD at most major colleges and universities, and organizations have significant ISD training and certification programs. You will see ISD defined and referenced in a number of different ways, including the following:

• Instructional Systems Design (ISD)

• Instructional Systems Development (ISD)

• Instructional Design (ID)

• Systems Approach to Training (SAT)

• Instructional Systems Approach (ISA)

All variations mean essentially the same thing and are often used interchangeably.

ISD is used by education and training professionals worldwide, and it is estimated that more than $83 billion a year is spent on designing and implementing training (Training magazine 2019). With this much money being spent, organizations want the very best training product available, and the only way to ensure this level of quality is by using a professional and proven design method.

Every day you hear about training in the news, and more often than not it is related to an absence of training or to training programs that are not effective at teaching content at the level of mastery required for learners. Every time a train, plane, bus, or truck is involved in a serious accident, one of the first culprits raised is a lack of training. This is the same for law enforcement, the military, and civil and emergency services. Without training, and more specifically the correct training, there is eventually going to be a problem. In some situations, the results of this lack of training are minor and may cause either inefficiency or loss of revenue. In other cases, lives are lost, and reputations and credibility are severely and sometimes permanently damaged.

Training is always one of the first things reviewed in federal investigations by the National Transportation Safety Board in the search for the cause of an accident. Did the pilot have training on the emergency procedures when an engine failed? Did the engineer know the speed limit for a specific section of track? Did the bus driver have training in driving on snow-covered roads? These and thousands of other similar inquiries all go back to one basic and inescapable question: “Was there sufficient training and evaluation in this situation for the pilot/engineer/driver to avoid or prevent this accident?” Even if the initial answer is no, a more in-depth investigation will often lead to a root-cause discovery related to training.

In most civil lawsuits filed against an organization relating to an accident or other liability, one of the prime areas of litigation is directly related to the quantity and quality of training required by an organization and if involved employees received and passed these courses. Questions also relate to the course content, employee requirements and work practices, how often and how long ago employees took a specific series of courses, and how well they did in evaluations of mastery.

The world of professional training and education is an enigma to the uninitiated. As consumers of the product for most of their lives, they are blissfully disengaged from the process of designing and delivering instruction. The minutiae of how all of this happens rarely invokes any thoughtful reflection by the end user except on the extremes of excellent and awful. The rest is simply consumption.

This is no different from thousands of other elements of daily life that we have come to accept without any thought about how they happen or why. Consumers of our educational products focus on their role as the student and are less likely to think about instructional design than about what to have for lunch.

By anyone’s reckoning, the training industry and instructional design are formidable fields of study and practice, and the formalization of learning transfer has never been more important. Tight budgets and ever-increasing requirements for courses in every field demand more efficiency and professional skills. It is not acceptable to simply offer courses; there has to be a system that supports both evaluation of mastery and documentation of impact. Dollars spent must be justified, and knowledge increases must be documented.

With such investments, organizations want to make sure they are getting the best training available; that doesn’t happen by accident. It is the direct result of highly qualified instructional designers working with teams of subject matter experts and other professionals to design, develop, and implement this training.

The issues of course design and evaluation of learning in K–12 and higher education always make their way into discussions of both the competency of our school-age children and our competitiveness with the rest of the world. If American test numbers are lower than those of other comparable countries around the world, we essentially have an instructional design problem to address.

ISD is the energy behind medicine, law, accounting, and countless other occupations that require specified levels of education and some form of licensure or even yearly refresher courses. None of this exists without professionally designed courses, programs, evaluations, and other peripheral elements to establish standards and ensure subject mastery by those we trust with our lives, our money, and our livelihood. This is no small task, and professional instructional design is behind all of this work.

TRAINING INDUSTRY FACTS AND FIGURES

To better provide the context for how large the training field has become, let’s look at some statistics from the 2019 ATD State of the Industry report: • The average organization spent $1,299 per employee, per year on learning. • The average employee was involved in formal learning for 34 hours per year. • Traditional, face-to-face learning accounted for 54 percent of learning hours. • Self-paced online learning logged 22 percent of hours. • Virtual or live online learning accounted for 11 percent of learning hours. • Organizations in software, information, broadcasting, and telecommunications spent the most per employee at $2,184 per year. • Manufacturing spent the least, on average $487 per employee. • The average cost for each learning hour implemented was $78. • The largest percentage of training content was for managerial and supervisory training at 14 percent. • The lowest percentage of training content was for sales at 5.5 percent. • Technology-based learning accounted for 43 percent of learning hours. • Self-paced online learning was most likely to be accessed by a laptop computer, at 81.1 percent utilization. • On-the-job learning was emphasized highly or very highly by 55 percent of organizations.

The difference between the programs that engage the professional instructional design process and those that are created by nondesigners is not always obvious. However, programs and courses designed by instructional designers will benefit from the rigor expected within the field and generally are considered to be state-of-the-art products.

ISD Practices and Principles

There are four guiding principles and points of practice that help explain the professional foundation of instructional design. While not all-inclusive, this is a good overview of the basics of ISD from a practitioner’s point of view.

1. The ISD Process Is a Constant

One of the most valuable assets that ISD brings to the practice of instructional design is that the process of instructional design doesn’t change based on decisions made for any individual design issue. Whether a designer chooses online, in-classroom, asynchronous, or distributed implementation doesn’t in any way impact ISD as a process. These decisions are based on a number of design elements that are explored in the analysis phase of the ISD process.

This timelessness of ISD means several important things to a designer and to organizations. First, no matter when a designer learns and practices the ISD process, the process doesn’t change. It also means that whatever new technologies make their way into the instructional landscape, they can be easily incorporated into an instructional program. The idea of “keeping current” as used in ISD simply means keeping up with the trends in various aspects of analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation—not the process used to make these necessary design decisions.

2. ISD Is Without Bias

The neutrality of the ISD process is vital to its effectiveness as a system. It must not contain any inherent bias or preconceived notions. This is vital when an instructional designer is making important decisions about various aspects of a course design, including implementation choices and other non-content-related areas. For example, analysis may show that a population can read only at a fifth-grade level, but a designer decides that the materials for the course will be written at a high-school level, because the participants are adults and should be able to read at that level. This is a major mistake and, frankly, unprofessional.

It is possible to see bias enter instructional design when a popular new technology is promoted as the best way to reach a specific population. This was the case in the beginning of each new approach, such as online learning and social media. Some designers will attempt to make any new approach work, and in many cases the technology is not yet mature enough to be used effectively. A good example is the early adaptations of e-learning, where courses were designed with large graphics and other audio and video features that couldn’t be used by anyone with anything less than very fast internet access, but most potential learners were using dial-up access. They were a major flop in most cases and really brought home the point that a technology has to mature to be considered for most design work.

ISD has no preordained way to solve a specific design issue. Every decision evolves from gathering and analyzing data. The system guides the process, and the variables inform decisions. If the best choice is a classroom-based course, then a designer should not attempt to make it work using social media.

3. ISD Is Not Technology Dependent

It seems that every new technology or learning model spawns a new approach to implementing instruction, and these are almost always no different from the last big thing in education and training. Multimedia, distance learning, social networking, and tablet computing all have a place in effective instructional programs. However, the process of designing curricula is not impacted by any of these technologies. ISD guides a design decision; it never makes one, although the choices should be pretty obvious after analysis is completed.

4. ISD Self-Evaluates

One of the basic axioms of the ISD process is, “If you are having a problem with a specific ISD design task, it is likely because there is something wrong with the design.” Simply put, design problems are usually at fault when the design process stalls. A designer may struggle with writing a lesson plan and making the content work with the population. This is not because of a lack of skill in the designer; it is because the population is probably not well defined or is too diverse for the design approach.

For example, including five-year-olds in the same class as adults in content areas like art or music appreciation is almost impossible due to the obvious differences in learning styles, attention spans, and motivation. If the objectives are not related to building a bond between the populations, then separate them into two courses and design for each population separately.

Another example is when a designer can’t write objectives for a very simple content area. Closer examination reveals that the course is actually a conference seminar where participants simply attend and do not in any practical way participate. A designer can never write behavioral objectives for this type of event because there is seldom real learning taking place and students can’t be evaluated. The choice then becomes either to admit that this session is not training and do not try to design a course around it, or to upgrade the course to something real that offers lasting instructional value.

ISD’s Theoretical Foundation

As you will learn later in this book, there are numerous ISD models and approaches that are available for study and adoption in the world of instructional design. But you will probably find after some investigation that almost all of these are based on the ADDIE model. Some practitioners like to tinker with these basics, but they are generally doing so at the risk of eroding or confusing the foundations of the profession.

Like every branch of science, instructional design started with commonsense approaches to teaching and later looked to theoretical models to shape the foundations of the field. The most prominent and field-tested ISD model is ADDIE, which is an acronym for the five elements of the model: analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation. Several hundred other instructional design models exist, the most notable being Rapid Prototyping, Dick and Carey, Kemp, SAM, Transactional, Gerlach-Ely, Hannafin-Peck, and ASSURE.

With the advent of online and technology-enhanced learning delivery, many other models have emerged, including ADDIE-M and IDM-DT (Schoenfeld and Berge 2004). In all, there are enough ISD models for every designer to find something they love and something they hate about each of them. In the end, models are only a place to start, and no single model covers all of the unlimited variations of content and learners that exist in the world of instructional design.

In chapter 4 we will cover several of these ISD models, but the important takeaways for designers are that there is a scientific foundation to instructional design, that the process of learning and storing data in long-term memory has been studied for years, and that to this day it is still the subject of much research and discussion.

Just as in physics or any hard science, there are both theoretical and applied practitioners within the field of ISD. This is a perfect and encouraging state for the field to be in, and it highlights the fact that ISD is as dynamic as any science. There isn’t always consensus on every aspect of instructional design, but there are very lively discussions about many of the important elements of ISD and how to make the process more efficient and learner friendly. Every day is a new day in the world of instructional design.

Systems Theory and Instructional Design

ISD is by its very nature a system. Ludwig von Bertalanffy is widely regarded as the one who brought systems theory to the attention of the scientific community. His focus initially was on biology and what he considered a “systems theory of life” (von Bertalanffy 1926), which later evolved into what is now known as General Systems Theory, or GST (Drack 2009). He built on the principle that “the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts” and further defined it as a complex of elements in interaction (von Bertalanffy 1945). From here the definition becomes more complex, with the notion that the more that is known about each element in a system, the more it can be made predictive. In instructional design parlance, the more we know about learners, subject matter, and expected outcomes, the better we can design courses. The term systems approach is commonly used to describe instructional systems development.

Systems theory in ISD is directly tied to the fact that there are crucial elements within every variable, like population and content, that have the potential to significantly impact one or more of the other elements. For example, we have quickly defined a population of learners based on the simplest demographic data points of age and income and decided that they will be defined as millennials working in service trade occupations. If we had performed even the basics of analysis, we would have learned that this population is in fact composed of doctoral students in academic programs. The lower income was based on the fact they are living on student loans and scholarships, and while they are millennials, they are still not making the expected levels of income. In this system, the element of income changed and therefore impacted any potential course design.

Programed Learning and ISD

Well before the advent of computers and the internet, instructional designers were looking for ways to improve the implementation of teaching tasks by automating the processes of teaching and evaluation of mastery. Most consider Sidney Pressey to be the first to move this idea to reality, since he wanted to change the way teachers used their time so they “could do more real teaching” (Pressey 1927). Initially, his testing machine actually interfaced with learners and evaluated mastery by presenting a series of questions and scoring the answers. This then evolved into a teaching machine with the addition of a device that prevented a learner from moving on from an incorrectly answered question until it was answered correctly. The assumption, from Pressey’s view, was that immediate feedback and remediation would enhance the ability of a learner to retain the correct answer in long-term memory. Even B.F. Skinner credited Pressey with initiating the discussion of the importance of immediate feedback in instruction design (Day and Skinner 2019).

This early experimentation with programming learning had several significant impacts on instructional design. First, the revolutionary instructional concept of moving the art of teaching from a human being into the world of automation was the precursor for today’s world of asynchronous learning programs in formats such as online and distributed learning. If one could envision learning coming from a source other than a teacher, there is no limit to how far this might progress. Almost 100 years later, we have only touched the surface of how far these early concepts may evolve as technology expands and learners find these types of communications second nature. It is also important to note that Pressey was living in an era when the assembly line process was coming of age after its invention by Henry Ford in 1913. A culture of improvements in productivity was happening across many elements of society. Within this context it would seem reasonable that the practice of teaching would be revisited and any perceived inefficiencies would be addressed.

The second impact of programmed learning was the practice of teaching and evaluating mastery in a behavioralist’s mindset. Skinner is considered by many to be the architect of behaviorism and is probably best associated with the Skinner Box and his teaching machines. While Skinner is the one who receives the most credit for advancing this work, he was first drawn to this academic arena after reading John B. Watson’s book Behaviorism (1925), in which he described psychology as the “science of behavior” and discussed how it was possible to predict and influence behavior. This eventually led to Skinner’s work on operant conditioning, which he believed led to mentally healthy individuals being able to manipulate and thereby control their environment.

The third influence of programmed learning was the ability to scale up implementation to any required level. This was demonstrated in WWII as millions needed to be trained in thousands of different content areas, and finding teachers and materials to cover all of these learners was simply impossible under the old classroom approach of each teacher starting at the beginning with each course. It was now feasible to design and then duplicate and distribute courses and materials to many learners of different ability levels.

The fourth element of programmed learning that still thrives today is the practice of standardized testing, both pre- and post-course, to best ensure both learner mastery across a population and the ability to best fit measured knowledge and skill for each individual to a specific trade or learning pathway.

Criterion-Referenced Testing (CRT)

Robert Glaser introduced criterion-referenced measurement in 1963 (Glaser 1963), and it expanded the field of evaluation into previously untested waters. Criterion-referenced tests and the associated results are thought to indicate expected behaviors of a learner based on the outcome of a specific evaluation. For example, a learner who scores higher than another learner is said to have greater potential based on the evaluation results. In its simplest form, it is a binary process with answers being either correct or incorrect.

The philosophy and utilization of CRT helped establish the use of standards for both analysis and evaluation of mastery. This building block for the way ISD evolved and is still practiced sets the foundation of all forms of determination of mastery.

How This Works in Practice

For the purposes of this discussion, let’s say you have just been given the responsibility to teach a course in onboarding new employees for your organization. You have three months until the first offering of the course and you have been told you can expect to have 15–20 new employees to teach. Your client is allowing four hours of implementation time for the course. At this point, the average instructor might gather some materials, map out an outline of the important topics, and start designing a slide deck with the information they want to teach. This is how almost everyone starts as a designer, and in many cases, this is the workflow that is followed for any course on any topic until teachers become students of instructional design.

It doesn’t usually take significantly more time to design using ISD for a short course like this, but there are several ways that ISD prompts a teacher or designer to ask and answer a series of basic questions that if answered and acted on will improve any course design. For example:

• Is there a problem that can be addressed by designing a course?

• What specifically are the expected outcomes from the perspective of the organization?

• What specifically are the expected levels of mastery for the course of each learner?

• Exactly what content is required to be covered?

• What extra content would be nice to cover if there is time?

• What does my population of learners have in terms of skills, attitude, language, level of education, and so on?

• What are the prerequisites for a learner to take the course?

• How will I measure whether a learner reaches mastery?

• Who is qualified to teach this course?

• What is the budget for design?

• Will I have access to SMEs (subject matter experts) for content validation and scope?

• Which type of delivery system is best for this population (online, blended, or classroom)?

While this is just a very abbreviated list of the basic questions that an instructional designer or a teacher might ask at the beginning of a course design project, it includes the highlights of what is important to consider. This may seem overly complex or perhaps simplistic to you at this point, but this is the very essence of ISD. You have to gather information and data, make design decisions about critical course elements, prepare materials, implement the course, and then evaluate mastery and course efficiency.

While all of this becomes second nature after a while, having a methodical approach and procedures for the design process takes some time to learn and practice, just like any new skill. And, the more you practice each of these skills, the more you realize the complexity of the relationship between learner, content, and delivery system.

Professional Practice of ISD

Every instructional designer should be aware of the generally accepted standards of knowledge and skills that act as the foundation of their work. These areas of guidance are extremely useful as a designer starts and matures in the field of ISD. Since there is a seemingly endless variety of different roles that a designer might play, a set of common points of practice provides the best place to start in acquiring and building professional skill.

There are different ways to think about these skills and knowledge, and each designer’s distinct view of these will be based on past experience and other forms of acquired capabilities. Some previous knowledge and skills are rather easily migrated, while others are elements that should be reviewed and retained as necessary.

For example, there is a variety of specific knowledge and skills to assess for instructional design competence and mastery. These include knowledge and skill in design models and processes, such as ADDIE and SAM; knowledge of needs assessment approaches and techniques; knowledge of instructional modalities, such as classroom learning, blended learning, gamification, and mobile learning; skill in eliciting information from subject matter experts; knowledge of formal and informal learning experiences; skill in designing blueprints, schematics, and other visual representations of learning and development solutions; and knowledge of methods and techniques for planning, designing, and developing instructional content (ATD 2019).

Instructional design capabilities include all the basic elements of modern curriculum development, including demonstrated skill in analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation. Designers must be able to design products that integrate the most appropriate learning strategies to ensure high levels of learner mastery and knowledge transfer.

Not only do designers need to be able to look at populations and design cutting-
edge courses, they also must be able to find the best fit between populations of learners and course delivery options. Training and facilitation capabilities demand that the latest learning approaches, which include distance learning, online learning, technology-enhanced learning, blended learning, and other new approaches to implementing training, are considered and used if found to be the best choice for a specific situation.

It is almost impossible to work as an instructional designer and not be involved with technology in some way. A designer must have the ability to identify, review, and select from an incredibly wide range of technologies in the design of instruction. The key to any technology decision is knowing what works best for the learner; it is imperative that a designer be able to make informed recommendations on every aspect of technology in learning.

Types of Careers in ISD

Today, there are literally hundreds of thousands of people worldwide working in ISD-related careers. Some are actually called instructional designers or ISDs and have very clearly delineated roles and responsibilities. The vast majority are teachers, trainers, facilitators, instructional technologists, subject matter experts, or human resource professionals, but there are hundreds of other titles that relate in some way to designing and implementing courses. Most of this latter group would not consider themselves instructional designers or may have never even heard of the term before. The reason for this unfamiliarity with the process is the fact that anyone who has shared information with others usually considers the process commonsense or something that comes naturally. The reality is that this is a process that has to be learned and practiced to be accomplished at a level of competency expected in today’s world of high tech and mass distribution of knowledge.

Instructional design is a dynamic field of work and study. Let’s take a quick look at some very common activities and see if you think they are related to instructional design:

• Coaching a sport

• Being a scout leader

• Managing a fast food restaurant

• Teaching K–12

• Being a college professor

• Having a YouTube channel

• Being active on social media

• Mentoring new employees

• Cooking a holiday meal with the family

• Volunteering at a local charity

• Writing an op-ed piece for your local paper

• Appearing on Channel 9 as the weather presenter

• Running for political office

• Helping an inexperienced friend change a flat tire

Now, imagine yourself as the person participating in any of these activities and think about how you are demonstrating the skills of an instructional designer. If you are coaching a sport, you are constantly, sometimes imperceptibly, passing on your knowledge and skills relating to performance of the sport. If you inspire and encourage your players, you are probably a positive influence in passing on knowledge and skills. If you are a bully and have a negative attitude about other teams, referees, and other aspects of the environment, you are also designing instruction, but with a different, negative outcome.

Let’s say you are the Channel 9 meteorologist and you are giving the weather report on the evening news. You say something that is new or reinforced knowledge about weather every time you are on the air. For example, you say the barometer is falling, and snow or a thunderstorm is on the way. We now know that a falling barometer means changing weather. Next, you say that the spring equinox arrives on March 19, another bit of new information. In times of bad weather, countless folks are hanging on every word and learning something every day.

Cooking with the family is a bounty of new information and skills for the younger participants. How many times have you heard someone say that they fixed “Grandma’s potato salad” or “Dad’s favorite grilled chicken?” Yes, they most likely learned from watching someone or copying a recipe. This is instructional design at its most basic level—passing on knowledge in a seamless form.

While ISD is probably not even recognized as being in play in these situations, let’s look at how a little instructional design assistance would make the transfer of knowledge more efficient.

Let’s take our coaching example and dig a little deeper. Let’s say as a coach you want to teach the most basic passing skills in soccer. Instead of asking each player to simply kick the ball to another player, you first tell the kids that you are going to demonstrate the skill of passing and that they will be able to do this at the end of the lesson. You then do it several times so that everyone can see what you are doing. You then explain in very basic terminology what is happening. You then ask each player to pass the ball to another player, and after each kick you offer feedback on performance and offer tips to assist with any problems that may exist. You close the session by asking each player to individually kick and then pass the ball, and then you offer a final evaluation of their mastery with suggestions for improvement as necessary.

You first told the kids what they were going to be able to do after the lesson. You then demonstrated the skill. You added more detail with an explanation. You had each student practice the skill and offered detailed feedback and mentoring. You then closed with each student by having them demonstrate mastery in an evaluation. This is the nucleus of ISD at work. By using sound principles of ISD, the difference in mastery for our soccer students is considerable.

See how this works? Even when we aren’t aware of our influence and teaching efforts, they are taking place. ISD moves this to a level of taking the most of each learning situation and turning it into something both observable and measurable, and, probably most importantly, something that can be duplicated and taught at scale from one to a million or more learners.

Summary

Learning has been a part of humanity since before words were spoken or even before the earliest forms of language or drawing were part of day-to-day life. What has changed in time is how learning is transferred. From basic, nonverbal communications to today’s digital domains of social media and smartphones, the process of sharing knowledge and skills has changed only in the sophistication of the process of both teaching and designing instruction. Instructional systems development is the magic that makes learning transfer as efficient and as effective as it is in today’s world of education and training. Instructional systems development is the professional field that combines the best of learning theory and practical, scientific approaches to solve real-world training challenges.

CASE STUDY 1

An organization is investigating the option to add a full-time instructional design department to improve training practices and materials. There are two distinct points of view within the organization.

One group thinks this is a waste of time because nothing new has really happened in training approaches in years, and all of the rush to online and blended learning is just hype and doesn’t really add anything new to the process.

The other group thinks that instructional design is the wave of the future and is practiced in some form by all of the top companies. They are anxious to begin an online asynchronous program for employees to use for many different types of instruction.

As an independent third party brought in to clarify the options, what would you say to this organization concerning the state of the practice of instructional systems design?

CASE STUDY 2

A medium-sized community college is proud that it is considered a college for working adults. It has applied programs in the skilled trades, culinary arts, retail, and hospitality. Its decisions relating to course and program implementation and faculty are focused on the traditional education model of hands-on courses taught in the classroom by experienced faculty.

With a younger instructor pool now starting to teach in most programs, there is pressure to have more formal course materials, newer teaching technology like digital whiteboards, and the ability to communicate with students via social media.

As the instructional designer tasked with answering these concerns, what approach will you take to address the call for newer approaches? Will you use the generations of learning transfer or systems approaches to course development in your response? What else do you think is important to consider and present as supportive information?

CASE STUDY 3

A community organization is requesting the assistance of an instructional designer to review its several short courses in suicide prevention focused on underserved communities like veterans and single parents. It has traditionally designed its own courses rather than use packaged courses from larger national organizations since it felt they seemed too commercial and not as personal.

The executive director has asked you to visit a board meeting and talk about ISD and how an instructional designer can impact the effectiveness of the organization’s courses, yet allow for the level of personalization and local community it is seeking.

What will you say and what examples will you use to make your case for a professional ISD approach that can meet all its course needs and still address its concerns?