What to Do When You Can't Follow Your Instructional Design Model

Nov 27

Nov 27 What to Do When You Can't Follow Your Instructional Design Model

As instructional designers, we have our go to models for designing learning experiences. What do you do though when you have to pivot? On today's episode, I'll share with you a crazy project I worked on where I had to heavily modify the backward design model.

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Transcript:

Luke is the only speaker in this episode

Have you ever been assigned to work on a project before where your boss apologizes ahead of time? Well, I’ve been there. It happens. Not every project is going to be a win and sometimes, the job just needs to get done. You essentially throw out best practices and common sense because the project is borderline set up to fail in the first place. Maybe this is because of a time crunch, budget cuts, or in most cases, zero interaction from the SME. In these dire situations, you can’t follow a traditional instructional design model. So, what do you do?

On today’s episode, I want to walk you through one particular real-life example where I was set up to create a course with a faculty member who refused to meet with me. It was certainly the most bizarre course I’ve ever designed, but I got the job done and I hope you can learn how to design a learning experience in a chaotic environment. So, let me give you the back story.

I think all of you know by now that I practice an instructional design model called backward design. This was a model created by Wiggins and McTighe that decided to flip the script when it came to how we design learning experiences. For years, teachers were given textbooks and materials and were told to teach with them, creating a foreword facing design. For instructional designers, we can face the same problem with being given a guide and then being assigned to build a course from the guide.

Backward design takes this concept and flips it where we start with the end goals in mind and then work our way backwards. But, there is one tiny little problem that instructional designers face when trying to deploy this model. And that is making people follow the model.

If you are like me and work in higher education, this means working with faculty members as subject matter experts and showing them a new way to design a learning experience. This usually means gradually introducing new concepts, walking them through the process, showing examples of well-developed courses, and then partnering with them on the backward design process and course mapping. For 99% of my projects, and SMEs, this works. It’s a simple process to understand and yes, it can take some time to get used to, but once you have the hang of it, your SMEs will follow.

For traditional faculty though, this goes against the ways they’ve always taught courses. Maybe they’ve never developed an outline before or created a strong and cohesive syllabus. It’s entirely possible that they chose a textbook first and then planned the curriculum based on the materials. For many, many faculty members though it’s all about the lectures. They are used to taking center stage and presenting about their research, experiences, and education. While I can convince most of my faculty to try backward design, there are those special cases where you can tell it’s just not going to happen.

Now to be clear, it’s pretty much non-negotiable to stray away from this path. I will move heaven and earth to start with the end goals first and then logically think how a learning experience will take place. But I have been in situations before where backward design is not going to cut it. In this case, the SME refused to meet with me and it took an extrodinairy amount of effort and coordination to get them for two 15-minute calls. Yes, this was insanity.

However, I was put on the project for this very reason in that my boss knew I could find a way to make this happen and still create an incredible learning experience.

So, if you find yourself in this position and you cannot follow the backward design process because of such little SME interaction, time, or another factor, however there is still hope. It’s going to be a modified version of backward design, but it can get done.

The first step is to make your rough outline. This is going to be the project’s description, target audience, project length such as how many weeks in a course or program, project timeline, as in how long will this take you to develop, etc. If possible, see if there is anyone else you can connect with to learn more about the project. For me, this meant meeting with this faculty member’s admin team who were in the know about the project. Truth be told, they were really the super stars who organized a ton on the backend and were such a tremendous help. Since they worked closely with this faculty member, they were able to get more of her time and to ask quick questions about the course. If there isn’t an administrator, you can talk to your manager or peers to see if they can provide more information.

Once you have this, I would do a rough draft of the learning objectives. These will 100% be revised, but you want to have some form of objectives for now. The idea here is that when you meet the faculty member or SME later on, you can present to them the learning objectives and ask for their feedback. Your main objective is to prepare as much information as possible before you meet up with the SME. This way, your conversation has a tight agenda of going through each and every item.

In your meeting, what most likely will come up will be the topics for the weeks and the video topics. This is when you can mention about breaking the videos up into smaller sections or we call this chunking. This is going to be vital for you to see the breakdown of the video topics and therefore, have a sense of what is being covered in this part of the course. If the faculty member mentions doing just one long video, this can always be edited later on. It’s not great, but it can be done in worst case scenarios. Either way, the video topics during this conversation really matter.

From here, you can take the video topics and space them out in course map to show to the SME where they would fit into the course. Your course map could be a google sheet or Miro or whatever you want to use. Also, use whatever makes sense for your SME to understand. This is why I tend to use Google Sheets since every SME I know has Google products. Now from this point, while you are still speaking to the SME, ask them what a successful course completion would look like. If a learner completes your course, what would they say they learned about? How would they show mastery of a skill? What would they submit?

You are essentially trying to speak their language. My best guess is that you will have some form of answers that revolve around submissions, presentations, or a kind of project. Is it going to be perfect? Absolutely not. It’s a rough idea of where we are trying to go and it will take more flushing out. At this point in time though, you’ll have an outline, a draft of learning objectives, video and reading topics, followed by rough assessments.

Hopefully, this is enough information for you to be able to work with. You can now go back to your course map and add in all the details. You can show what the introductory text is, the video descriptions, the activities, the assessments, the discussions, etc. You are creating a walkthrough of the actual product before building it in your LMS. Your next goal is to put together enough information that you are getting their buy-in and sign off. I’m assuming you need approvals for the course or program you are building.

This is exactly what I did and for the second meeting with this SME, I showed the every step of what the learning journey would look like. Funny enough, I actually surprised her. I came up with one assignment, and keep in mind I did not have the technical expertise to be diving into these things, but I pitched to her my idea. She was like wow, that’s really good. Can you do more of that for the course? Finally, I got some kind of real feedback and ran with it. She said if I design the rest of the course in this manner then she approves.

At this point in time, I knew that was it. I at least got my approval I was looking for and now, I had to come up with my next move. This is when I hired two outside subject matter experts to help me. I had to explain the situation in detail and showed them everything I had. Luckily for me, they understood the assignment and embarked on this journey with me to put the pieces in place. We had to revise and tighten up everything from the learning objectives to the readings to the assignments and everything else in between. I was stunned to see that we pulled it off and finally had a course.

Yes, we were up against the clock. We weren’t given the time to work with the faculty member, but the project was finished. So, the next time you are in this kind of position, just know that this does happen to the best of us. You might find that you have to bend your normal methods to finish on time. And as a reminder, there is no such thing as a perfect course. Revisions and improvements can always be made in the future.

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