Presented by Sivasailam Thiagarajan (Thiagi Inc.)
This was a visionary approach to instructional design and very refreshing. I was thinking that it may be useful to order the mp3 audio for this session if any of you are interested in hearing more (I wouldn't mind listening again). The challenge for us here is to determine which courses are ripe for this approach - it may be difficult for our "technical" subject matter.
Why faster, better, cheaper for instructional design?
-it is closer to just-in-time when you spend less time to prepare for the course
-if you write too much stuff on slides/handouts the class has to read more too!
-you are forced to focus on critical, important, need-to-know information
-the instructor could be sucking the life out of material by dumbing it down for part of the audience
-you won't get emotionally attached to your training package if you didn't spend much time on developing the package
-if you do it fast, you push a lot of responsibility on to the learner
The instructor suggests that the best instructor for this method is someone who is NOT a subject matter expert because then you have the "curse of knowledge". The less we know, the cloer we can be to an authentic outcome. In addition, you should never create new content! Your job is to build activities around existing content. The major delusion that we suffer from is thinking that our content is the only valid one or is better than the rest. Ideally you should have the class decide which ideas are important and they can immediately use on the job.
This is a very different approach to instructional design and you could see the session attendees wondering if this guy was for real. Someone even put up their hand and asked him what he meant by all this, how could this be accomplished? So Thiagi gave an example of when he was asked to do a leadership training course at a major company. There is no need to develop new content since so much is available so he went to amazon.com and looked up "leadership development" - thousands of hits popped up. Then he and his team chose 30 books - basically choosing books by their covers: whatever looked nice and had decent reviews and ordered them. When it was time for the class, he showed up and dumped the books on the table, and asked the class to each pick a book (19 people in the class). Once they had each picked a book he asked them to go into a corner, spend 20 minutes skimming the book and highlight 6 concepts in the book that seemed to be the top concepts for leadership development. Then he put them in groups of two to discuss what they had chosen and why. Then they expanded the discussion to larger groups and finally to the entire class. In this manner, the class chose the concepts that they were interested in - and the instructor did not have to design cirriculum for the course. Of course there were many other activities that they did in this course but this illustrates the concept.
Thiagi was very entertaining and seemed a bit nuts at times but I think his approach can be valid in some cases and he is less nuts than he tries to appear. He did state that the best instructional design team has an instructional designer (one of us), a subject matter expert (possibly one of us - but preferably we don't know too much!), and a typical learner.
I thought this was a great idea for how to develop a course (because it potentially takes less time!) and I think may try to use it in Chem for Bio. It will be challenging to think about this especially for a scientific topic but at least I can try to use it for some parts of the course. I think the key is that this approach is not suitable for all subjects (although Thiagi seems to suggest that it is the answer to everything!). But it does help to get the class involved - a quote that kept popping up at the conference is that "whoever does the most talking, does the most learning".
If you would like more details on this approach, I have the handout available which gives the step-by-step approach (which almost goes against the whole concept!). More importantly it gives some expamples of activities that could be used in courses.
By the way, feel free to unsubscribe yourself from these blog updates if you aren't interested (or it is too much for you to read). No offense will be taken. In fact, I may just be happy that you are using the blog function in its intended manner!
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2 comments:
Hello Kleem, Gene here. I'm part of a team that develops elearning modules for pharma and medical device companies. Typically we work on the basic science underlying a product. Most of our learners are sales reps.
What is find confusing is the idea of asking students to select the topics they want to learn. This sounds useful for experienced students, but I'm not sure it would work for beginners who have no understanding of the topic. What's your take on this?
Hello Gene:
Of course, you don't ask people who are totally unaware of a topic to select what they want to learn.
In a situation like this, I give the participants an overview of the topic and then ask them if there is any particular topic they are want to learn more about.
If you are into eLearning primarily, I recommend that you take a look at the 4D approach to designing and delvering eLearning.
You can go through a free online course on how to design online courses by visiting thiagi.com and clicking on online courses.
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