ADDIED - D for Destroy

Question for you. Are you ready to take your instructional design skills to the next level? Come join us for the eighth cohort in instructional design institute. In our instructional design fundamentals course, you'll learn how to make learning experiences meaningful, relevant, and of course interesting. We cover topics like Androgi, backward design, learning strategies, UDL, generative AI because of course we have to talk about that nowadays, and evaluation methods. You'll receive weekly feedback and can attend optional live sessions to join your fellow learning nerds. You'll also walk away to knowing how to create a robust portfolio and copies of my ebook. Go down below inside of a show notes to apply for the next cohort that starts on Monday, October 13th. Can't wait to see you there. And now, let's start the show. Hello, learning nerds and welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome back on in. It's been a while. Well, I am ready to dive back on and into this podcast [music] episode. And yes, I've been awake since 3:00 a.m. And yes, I have had at least four cups of coffee. But I have to say, I am absolutely loving being a new dad. My daughter is now 12 weeks old, which is absolutely insane to think. I swear. I was like just at the hospital the other day when she was born, and then now here she is giggling, smiling. This is so cool. It's been amazing to be a dad and I have been loving every single second of it. But now that things are certainly rocking and rolling a little bit more, it is time to jump back into action into the podcast because I've also absolutely missed podcasting. Even though you might have me on a little bit less sleep, I promise to keep on bringing the energy and the passion just like with every episode. And if this is your first time listening to this podcast, well, hey, welcome on in. This is uh the vibe that we are going to be going for in 2025 and beyond. My name is Dr. Luke Hobson. I'm an assistant director of instructional design. I'm also a lecturer, author, blogger, podcaster, and really my life is all around how to design meaningful, relevant, and interesting kinds of learning experiences. And being able to share them with all of you has absolutely been a blast. And I have been doing this for the last 11 years or so. It's been a while at this point in time. And of course, you can find all the content that I have created over this period of time over at drluke hobson.com. Today's episode is a sneak peek of what's to come with one of the new articles that is going to be featured on my newsletter over on LinkedIn that's called Confessions of a Learning Nerd. Be sure to subscribe to that newsletter if you haven't yet already. Lots of fun, lots of whimsy, lots of research, and a lot of nerdy things over there. And for this one I want to talk to you today about some idea that I have around atti or should I call it atti because of course as we all know when we think about atti we have analysis we have design we have development we have implementation and we have evaluation but if we called it addied and we threw an extra d at the end of that well what would that actually be and I think that the ending should be d for destroy. This makes me think about how my old driver's ed teacher used to nervously say before I left the parking lot of put it in D for destroy. And 21 years later, I still think about this saying, but in a little bit of a different way. As instructional designers, so much of our world focuses on creation. we design, we build, we develop, and we create learning experiences that are impactful and meaningful for our students is actually drilled into our heads when we first start learning about instructional design with the atti process. I know that all of you know what that is. And the entire framework walks us through each step that will continue to help us make a learning experience all the while evaluating every component. I'd argue though that Addi is missing one more D at the end, hence for destroy. The current process ends with evaluation where instructional designers and stakeholders decide what changes to be made based on feedback, performances, outcomes, and results. Perhaps the instructions for the last assignment weren't clear enough and they need to be adjusted. Or maybe one topic was still perplexing to students, so adding in an additional video or reading is going to be beneficial. This is what I've experienced as an instructional designer is that the evaluation part means that the experience could be better by addition, not subtraction. And this is especially true in higher education. I can't tell you how many times a problem was identified and then the quote unquote solution that was proposed was just to throw more resources into the course and see what sticks. And eventually this leads to courses becoming dumping grounds for additional resources that may or may not be helpful to students. Now I can take a guess as to what you might be thinking of eh how bad can it be? You throw in some more resources and you know everything kind of works out. Well my question for you is what is your definition of more? Recently I was asked to audit a few courses at another institution. They they brought me on to be able to kind of review everything that they had because they wanted an outside perspective. And everything at first seemed normal. And then it was the textbook definition of cognitive overload. 15 videos on one page, 20 articles on the next with zero explanation or rhyme or reason for why they should be reading or how it's going to be helpful. It was just read these billion things. And there was no connection to the course topics at all. And as much as I would love to say that this is an outlier, this seems to be quite common. Adding more resources won't make things better without intentionality. Just going to say that again. Adding more resources won't make things better without intentionality. And I'm repeating myself because this is something that I feel that a lot of us need to hear because the quick solution is always add more stuff and hope that it's going to work out. What's interesting is going back to a literature and seeing when Addi was first established, what did the authors and the researchers have in mind around this process? So, here's the thing. I found the original documentation when it came to establishing ADI. It's called the executive summary and model and it has a stamp for the United States Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force. and it is titled for the interervice procedures for instructional systems development national technical information service. Uh when I push this on the newsletter, you're going to check out this screenshot. It's it's really cool to see some of the uh history and the artifacts going back to our days of instructional design. Branded at all were the ones who wrote this and originally they called the evaluation phase as the control phase. In here they go on to document this and about this process and here is exactly what they said in a large block quote for you is that they said that in phase five for control this deals with procedures and techniques for maintaining instructional quality control standards and for providing data from internal and external sources upon which revision decisions can be made. Data collection, evaluation of the data, and decision-making about the implications of the data represent the three principal functions described in phase 5. Emphasis is placed on the importance of determining whether the trainees are learning what was intended and upon determining whether what they have learned is of the expected benefit to the receiving command. A negative answer to either of these would suggest revisions in the content or procedures in order to make the instruction meet the need it is intended to serve. The last part of that quote is kind of interesting about how there is a negative answer that then we need to be able to think upon and then decide where we should go in order for us to be able to have these different types of revisions. Now, notice about how the word revisions was heavily stated inside of that paragraph, which is something that once again I think we all need to be able to hear, is that when you revise something, it means that you could add to it or you could take away from it. Now, I get it. You might feel like you're killing your darlings by removing content or activities, but sometimes that's what you need to do. In one course that I designed before, the professor and the course team were excited about including every aspect of a course content, anything you can think of. There was a resource in there for someone for somewhere about anything. And originally my thoughts were like, "Wow, this is amazing. I love the enthusiasm. Sometimes it is so hard to be able to work with faculty who want to dedicate this much time and energy and effort into a type of a learning experience. So I was thrilled that they were essentially predicting every possible student question and making sure there was a resource that was going to meet their needs. What I was not expecting about this process and level of enthusiasm was that the course became so large that the learning management system at the time we were using it couldn't handle it. It was essentially crawling trying to fit everything in. Yes, this was, you know, many years ago, but this was a reality of what we had to uh try to be able to figure out from there. So, want to take a guess as far as to what the most common student questions were inside of the course? Well, when it finally went live, all of the questions were essentially around navigation issues and trying to locate resources that they saw once and then they just like disappeared and they were lost in the void forever. And then of course the support team was having difficulties finding these repairing broken links and communicating back to students. What started off as a really helpful thought became a nightmare for students or for the teaching team. And in this case it absolutely made sense to remove a significant amount of content to make it cleaner, succinct and more direct. As you go through this type of review process and for evaluating things, my suggestion would be to create a priority list and determine what needs your immediate attention and what can wait. As designers, I know we want to get everything done ASAP, but that's not always possible. For instance, broken links and videos, that's an immediate fix. But swapping out one resource for another because it only received okay feedback and you want to find something better. Well, that can wait. So, you can use your best judgment for these. And you can even make a tiered-based system and color coordinate them if that's going to help you. Overall, I would be asking, are your revisions essentials or nice to have? Is something truly adding value or is it just noise? If there is too much fluff in your learning experiences, you need to cut them out. More is not always better. And your students will thank you for removing the clutter and prioritizing what matters most. So, what do you think? You going to put it in D for destroy? What do you think about emphasizing the need for removing clutter inside of a learning experience? Let me know. Feel free to either tag me on LinkedIn to go into the newsletter when it does come out. Once again, you're getting a sneak peek. Eventually, it's going to come out, but definitely feel free to tag me on LinkedIn or of course you can always send me over an email, lukewin.com. Would love to hear your thoughts. If you haven't yet already, now that the podcast is back, be sure to subscribe Apple Podcast, Spotify, wherever you are listening. You can also catch out the clips over on YouTube, doing a lot of YouTube shorts over the last couple of months. So, be sure to subscribe to the YouTube channel if you haven't as well. And of course, you can join the mailing list at drluke.com. As always, reviews for this show are very much appreciated, so be sure to review as well. And as a reminder, Next Cohort for Instructional Design Fundamentals is starting up again on Monday, October 13th. If you want to nerd out with me and fellow learning nerds, be sure to apply today. And that, my friends, that is all I have for you today. Stay nerdy out there and I'll talk to you next time.