What's in a design problem?

Instructional design problems aren’t really single, monolithic problems, and instructional designers don’t solve design problems all at once. Design problems consist of many different sub-problems which are identified by decomposing the large problem into smaller, more solvable problems. The manner in which designers do this decomposition makes all the difference.

What the Heck is an Operational Principle?

An abstract idea called operational principle is described by Polanyi (Personal Knowledge, The Tacit Dimension) as the principles by which something functions. An operational principle describes the transfer of energy and information that allows the something to function. Jane Darke (British architect, in Design Studies) described these abstractions from a designer's viewpoint as primary generators. Whatever you call them, these abstractions form the effective core of a design, and designers can use the concept of "operational principle" to better comprehend what they are really designing and how to design.

I gave a talk on the operational principle at the Annual Technology in Teaching Idea Exchange (TTIX) Conference that is held each year at Utah Valley University in Provo, Utah (good conference, free). I tried to make the concept of an operational principle clear, concrete, and relevant.  I divided the video of the talk into short podcasts and put them on YouTube:

Part 1 – Operational principle defined (3:36)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nL9ambSGr4s

 

Part 2 – Operational principle across fields (3:36)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKi_puMPbL0

 

Part 3 – Operational principle of a yo-yo (3:42)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4ejZtRuNrg

 

Part 4 – Yo-yo operational principle in more detail (6:01)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29hTv0SRqYM

 

Part 5 – Operational principle and instructional designs (8:20)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiKPAZe5lSg

 

Part 6 – The operational principle of model-centered instruction (4:08)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1xJ-aSTWGI

 

Part 7 – Model-centered instruction in more detail (5:32)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoDG4R_q_2E

 

Part 8 – Results and review (3:11)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmagH69oiRc

Crystalizing a design

Designs--instructional designs--crystalize. They begin from a starting point disciplined by a seed structure and progress outward toward detail and concreteness. Good designs maintain the discipline of the seed. Bad designs are like mal-formed crystals that incorporate into their structures impurities which disturb the structure. I speculate that every design has impurities, but elegant designs have the fewest.

The seed can be any structural concept: a content structure, a strategic committment, an operational principle of instruction, a conversational pattern, a media commitment, an interaction pattern. Designers need to think through what they use individually and collectively as seeds for designs.

ISD

ISD (Instructional Systems Design/Development) is just an idea. It embodies a set of reified processes, each with its particular goal. It expresses an order of design and a dependency between design processes. In this way it guides the designer in prioritizing and sequencing decsion-making during instructional design. Embedded in the fabric of ISD  are many implicit categories that shape and condition the designer's thought, usually without the designer's awareness.

The invention of ISD was a major leap forward in its time. In a period of rapidly increasing size and complexity in electronic systems, including among other things computers and radar, ISD brought sanity into an otherwise chaotic instructional  design world. The order ISD brought to instructional design was highly desirable when compared with the lack of systematic design thinking that existed before it. Many benefits have accrued to instructional designers. It has become a standard design process--the water that design-fish no longer even have think about.

And that is the danger associated with it. Taking ISD for granted and applying it too literally has been overwhelmingly the rule. This led at one point to voluminous and highly detailed descriptions of the ISD process. It also led to the belief that ISD could be used by non-trained designers as a substitute for informed, skilled, and insightful instructional design. Untrained designers pressed into service in unfamiliar design tasks turn the ISD crank for comfort and assurance, turning ISD into an substitute for thought rather than a problem-solving tool and guide. The long-term disappointing results produced by these trends has led to a general questioning of ISD and a search for something else.

It is likely that we have been like the cook that forgot why it was important to cut the end off the ham before cooking it. We have lost the question ISD was trying to answer, and we need to find it again.

The Order of Design

A design cannot be produced all at once. Designing requires: (1) knowledge of the decisions to be made, and (2) a way of prioritizing those decisions in an order appropriate to the specific design problem. A designer designs by breaking a large design problem that cannot be solved intuitively and all at once into smaller individual problems that can be. Once made, individual decisions are tested, fitted, and aligned with the rest of the design in a way that produces a coherent design, yet one whose individual members have not lost their identity and can be modified. 

A designer’s most important tasks therefore are: (1) breaking the original design problem into solvable sub-problems, (2) imaging the broadest range of suitable solutions to each sub-problem, (3) finding the possible solutions to each sub-problem that are feasible, and (4) picking the solution for each sub-problem that best aligns with prior elements of the design and best meets the criteria of the design problem.

Design and decision-making

Designing is a process of making decisions for execution. Decisions can be made at any time: long before the decisions are actually implemented, or at the instant of implementation. A product may be designed and then developed into a package which is used in a different time and place, or an intelligent agent can be made to make some or all of the decisions about instruction and implement them on the spot. The great power of both live instruction and (potentially) computer-based instruction comes from the making some or all of the design decisions at the moment of instruction.

Feedback: Forgotten art

From the earliest days of our infancy we use feedback from the world around us for learning. No one tells us how to do this: it is a natural phenomenon—the key to our development. We act, the world around us responds, and we learn. If feedback stops, learning stops. Feedback is our friend and the most powerful of instructional forces. If the right pattern is followed, at the moment of receiving feedback a person is the most teachable.

As infants we receive constant feedback from an attentive world around us. We receive natural feedback from a material world and agentive feedback from fellow humans. Natural feedback is without mercy and implacable: the laws of nature are unforgiving. Feedback from humans may be judgmental, inadvertent, or nurturing, depending on the intentions and awareness of the giver, and it may be helpful or corrosive, depending on how it is received and interpreted by the learner. But how it is received is learned from how it has been given in the past. Feedback is not just cognitive: it is bathed in emotion as well.

Feedback has different names: “knowledge of results”, “outcome”, “correction”, even “discipline”. As humans we learn to use feedback deliberately as a means of controlling each others’ behavior. The primary purpose of feedback changes by this use from learning to manipulation. We learn to use feedback as a means of judging, correcting, and sorting: “you are better than…”, “you are worse than…”. The use of feedback becomes institutionalized and thoughtless in formal education, and the learning and growth value of feedback is often destroyed, except for those who excel or those who are strong.

The constructive uses of feedback are often ignored, and the art of giving nourishing feedback—which should be one of our most coveted skills—becomes routinized into an impersonal exchange of mostly negative, often terse messages and a potential source of contention and hardness—at the very least a source of negative self-judgments and an absence of rekindled hope and anticipation. The inspiring stories we hear about “the teacher who cared” is really an unspoken story about the tens of teachers who didn’t care—or who were perhaps thoughtless or overtaxed by their duties.

The learner who has received nourishing feedback is in a position to learn and to change. The moment of giving and receiving feedback is one of the most important in all of learning, but it is often the one where the teacher is most distracted, most overtaxed, and most unable to respond with the adaptive nurturing that could turn an inadequate performance by the learner into a triumph.

If our goal is improvement of learning—and even more important, improvement of the learner’s ability to self-teach and become a learner for life, then we must raise the importance of feedback in our calculations, cultivate the skills of feedback-giving, and organize our teaching procedures to place feedback in its position of central importance. When this occurs, teaching gives way to mentoring, and we become companions in learning rather than learning-masters. When we do this, self-direction in learners improves, and there is a positive anticipation associated with feedback occasions.

We can change the occasion of feedback from being punishing to being inspiring, or at least hope-building, even in an institutional setting.

1. We can make feedback the stimulus for a better effort rather than a summary judgment. This requires that we allow students to test themselves against the criterion more than once—even repeatedly. There should be an opportunity for learners to make the determination within themselves to improve. There should be room for agency to act toward self-directed change.

2. We can make the feedback we provide disciplined, fulsome, and encouraging. A few cryptic notes on a paper is not sufficient. Feedback can be principled and disciplined by an ontology-based feedback message structure. We know from experience that feedback messages are not unique. There are patterns—kinds of things that we say over and over. We should become aware of the patterns and master the construction of complete feedback. There are only a few basic elements to feedback, regardless of the specific content.

Contents of feedback might include: re-assertion of the expectation, identification of the location(s) and type(s) of error, hearing of the learner’s reasoning about the error, provision of models of adequacy and excellence at the learner’s level of understanding, solicitation of alternatives from the learner, commitment to a plan for subsequent action, affirmation of the learner’s determination, affirmation of the teacher’s confidence, etc.

3. We can make our standards and expectations more clear. We can provide models. We can be patient in giving re-explanations.

4. We can change our image of the learner and eliminate the automatic assumption of the learner’s guilt or improvidence. We can see learners as if they were infants with respect to the principles and theories we are teaching, because that is what they are. We can treat them with the same tender care we would give an infant, reserve negative judgment, and still hold high expectations of them.

5. We can construct grading systems in which there is room for choice and self-determination. Re-try should be possible.

6. We can take the threat and pressure out of receiving feedback. We can reduce the stresses and uncertainties that normally surround feedback encounters. We can exhibit respect toward the learner and use patient, personal attention to reaffirm our regard for the individual. 

7. We can give learners the ability to track their own progress toward improvement as they are attempting improvement.

In short, we can become more Christ-like. By doing these things, we reclaim feedback as an instructional rather than a sorting technique and allow learners to use the feedback we provide in a self-directed and self-determined (and satisfying) learning process. We teach learners to be agents.