Introduction to Instructional Systems Design

Theory and Practice

Chuck Hodell

• Publisher: Association for Talent Development
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781952157134
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Gestion des ressources humaines

The A–Z Resource on Instructional Systems DesignModern, adaptable, flexible, timeless. Instructional systems design (ISD) is more relevant than ever and critical for organizational success. ISD is used by education and training professionals worldwide, with billions of dollars a year spent on designing and implementing training. Given such high stakes, organizations need the best training product available, and educational programs need the best textbook for cultivating professionals in this field. Introduction to Instructional Systems Design is just that resource.This book provides comprehensive instruction for professors, instructors, and students of ISD who seek a professional and proven design method in an academic foundation. Written by long-time professor and practitioner of instructional design Chuck Hodell, this is a through line to his earlier bestselling volume ISD From the Ground Up and offers an even greater practicality with a strong theoretical base to answer the questions of why designers do what they do. In chapters that detail the building blocks of instructional design, the ADDIE process, and advanced ISD processes such as determining criticality and content mastery, Hodell creates a guided learning experience with discussion questions and case studies to prompt deeper reflection. Preparing learners for digital learning and adapting in-classroom courses for remote learning are a particular focus, and Hodell provides an overview of career options and development. Perfect for professors and instructors, this textbook also includes an instructor's guide.

SECTION 1

Theoretical Foundations of ISD

CHAPTER 1

The Journey to Instructional Systems Development

KEY CONCEPTS

• Sharing skills and knowledge as an inherent part of life

• Learning as a process

• Learning in formal and informal settings

• Eight generations of learning transfer

• Instructional design as a systems approach to curriculum development

• Instructional design as both science and art

• Impact of programmed learning and the advent of scaling of teaching

• Criterion testing and standards for evaluation of mastery

• Interlocking knowledge and skill areas required of an ISD practitioner

• Infinite landscape of ISD careers

CHAPTER OBJECTIVES

At the end of this chapter, the learner should be able to:

• Define learning.

• Describe the process of learning transfer.

• Define instructional systems development.

• List one key feature of each of the eight generations of learning transfer.

• Give examples of the scope of the field of ISD.

• Define systems approach.

• Define programmed learning.

• Cite two examples of how criterion-referenced testing has impacted learning transfer.

• List several knowledge areas and skills required of instructional design professionals for competence and mastery.

• Describe the range of careers available to instructional designers.

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.

No matter how learning is presented, it still requires stimulus and response.

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 w...