ADDIED - D for Destroy — Dr. Luke Hobson

“Put it in D for Destroy,” my old driver’s ed teacher used to nervously say before we left the parking lot. 21 years later, and I still think about this saying, but in a bit of a different way.

As instructional designers, so much of our world focuses on creation. We design, build, develop, and create learning experiences that are impactful and meaningful for our students. It’s actually drilled into our heads when we first start learning about instructional design with the ADDIE process. 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 ADDIE is missing one more D at the end 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. Maybe one topic was still perplexing to students so adding in an additional video or reading would be beneficial.

This is what I’ve experienced as an ID. The evaluation part means that the experience could be better by addition, not subtraction. This is especially true in higher education. I can’t tell you how many times a problem was identified and the “solution” that was proposed was to just throw more resources into the course. Eventually, this leads to courses becoming dumping grounds for additional resources that may or may not be helpful for students.

Now, I can take a guess as to what you might be thinking. “Eh, how bad can it be to throw in more resources?” Well, my question for you is what is your definition of “more.” Recently, I was asked to audit a few courses at another institution. 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 connection to the course topics. 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.

What’s interesting is going back to the literature.

Branson et al. originally called the Evaluation Phase as the Control Phase. In here, they go on to document this about the process:

“Phase V, CONTROL, 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 based. Data collection, evaluation of the data, and decision making about the implications of the data represent the three principal functions described in Phase V. 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.”

What I appreciate about that last line is that it highlights revisions, especially in the face of negative feedback. It’s not to add in more, but to fix what is broken.

Now I get it. You might feel like you are 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 course team were excited about including every aspect of the course topic. Originally, my thoughts were wow, I love how enthusiastic they are about predicting every possible student question and making sure there was a resource that existed to meet their needs.

What I was not expecting was that the course became so large that the LMS couldn’t handle it. It was essentially crawling trying to fit everything in. Do you want to take a guess as far as for what the most common student questions were? They were all around navigation issues and trying to locate resources they saw one and then seemed to be lost in the void. And then, of course, the support team was having difficulties finding these, repairing broken links, and communicating back to students. What started as a helpful thought became a nightmare for the students and teaching team. In this case, it absolutely made sense to remove a significant amount of content to make it cleaner and direct.

As you go through this type of review process, my suggestion would be to create a priority list and determine what needs your attention immediately, and what can wait. As designers, I know that we want to get everything done ASAP, but that’s not always possible. For instance, broken links and videos are an immediate fix. Swapping out one resource that received average feedback for a better one is something that can wait. Use your best judgement for these and you can even make a tier based system and color coordinate them if that helps 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.

Your students will thank you for removing the clutter and prioritizing what matters most.

What do you think about emphasizing the need for removing clutter in the learning experience? Let me know!

References:

Branson, R. K., Rayner, G. T., Cox, J. L., Furman, J. P., King, F. J., & Hannum, W. H. (1975). Interservice procedures for instructional systems development: Executive summary and model (Technical Report No. ADA019486). Defense Technical Information Center. https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA019486.pdf

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