Kozma and Clark's Media & Learning Debate

Our Foundations of Instructional Design and Educational Technologies class participated in an online debate recently. It dealt with the 1990s journal-based debate between Robert B. Kozma (1994) and Richard E. Clark (1994) about media and its possible influence on learning. Clark’s research on educational media at the time led him to claim that there was no evidence of learning benefits from using any medium to deliver instruction. Kozma, on the other hand, called for the reevaluation of educational technology’s foundational assumptions. He asks, “In what ways can we use the capabilities of media to influence learning for particular students, tasks, and situations?” (p. 18) Kozma reframes the question from do to will media influence learning, a potential relationship.

I invite bloggers to contribute on either side of this debate from their own perspectives and experience. Certainly a great deal of research has taken place on the subject of media and learning, instructional media, and educational technology since Kozma and Clark had their debate in the academic journals of the mid-1990s.
My own view is that, as long as reframing the debate’s central question is on the table, I posit that media is method. The teacher who lectures to their class, uses a blackboard to highlight important points, and has a discussion section where his class divides into groups for focused discussions has a method, and his method is to use certain media to deliver his instructional materials. In this case the teacher is using the medium of vocal and visual tools in his lecture, blackboard and chalk media in his highlighting of important points, and small group social discourse as the medium for focused discussion.

The instructor who delivers their instruction with a PowerPoint presentation, question and answers, and an open discussion is using the PowerPoint media to deliver important information and get students thinking, a one-on-one vocal exchange medium for questions and answers between the teacher and individual students, and open group discourse as the medium for class discussion.

A constructivist teacher may use a jigsaw learning activity or a Jeopardy game approach to deliver instruction. Each of these methods, a jigsaw and a game, serves as the medium for delivering the intended instruction. If individuals or groups were asked to assess their experience with the activity or the game verbally or in written form these would be two other mediums for dispensing learning.

Webster (Webster’s II New Riverside Dictionary, Office Edition) defines media as a variation of medium. I think the thesis that media is method is sound and I invite your thoughts for or against the thesis.

I have a practical consideration to pass on to those of you instructional designers who may care to consider it. When I was working on my Master’s Degree in England, I was asked by my Department Chair, who was also in charge of the American Studies program at the university, to design two classes. He knew I had helped develop and design the two classes on the history of Native Americans and wanted two classes for their university program. One class was to be on Native American history and the other on Native American culture.

I eagerly got into the work, in addition to my studies, and when I had both classes designed I presented them to my Department Chair. He commended me on my efforts and thought the classes would be excellent additions to the American Studies curriculum. Then the kicker…he informed me that, unfortunately, there was no one there currently that could teach the two courses because they were beyond the expertise of all of the American Studies professors.

While I had designed two new classes that were exemplary in covering the history and culture of Native American civilization, sampling both its breath and depth, I had neglected to consider the abilities of those who may be asked to teach the instructional materials. Dick and Carey consider this kind of situation in Chapter 9 of their book, The Systematic Design of Instruction (pp. 243-247) and it is worth a second look. I had designed the materials with the unspoken assumption that I would be the one who also delivered the instruction, whereas in reality the instruction needed to be independent of the designer. In this case there was no Instructor in the department who had the extensive content expertise I had. While I had taken into consideration the needs of future learners and had provided all of the instructional materials necessary for teaching the classes it would more likely be the case that Instructors would have to adapt the materials according to their own abilities and backgrounds for it to be really useful.

This is just a reflection of mine, perhaps a useful one, for those of you who may inadvertently design instruction beyond the capabilities of those who are to teach the newly designed classes. Dick and Carey recommend communication and collaboration and perhaps this would have helped. What do you suggest or do you have a model that would have addressed this kind of situation?

Formative Evaluation of Instructional Design

I continue to work with Dick & Carey’s The Systematic Design of Instruction (2005). I generally refrain from commenting on the book because, although I do quite a bit of higher education instructional design for online delivery, I find the book cumbersome and unnecessarily complex, to be polite. Unlike its promise in the Preface (p. xiii) to “simply and clearly introduce (Instructors) to the fundamentals of instructional design” it bogs the willing Instructor down in a mire of densely written text, tables, and examples that seem more self-serving to establish themselves as foundational authorities and text authors than as efficient guides to the busiest Instructor.

Let me give an example. They describe Formative Evaluation as a three phase process: 1) one-to one, clinical evaluation to gather data, 2) small group evaluation from a representative population, and 3) field testing of procedures required for the installation of instruction. Now this is simple and clear. Unfortunately, rather than guide Instructors through the processes, knowing their time to be valuable, they burden the Instructor/designers with the kind of complexity needed only by full-time instructional design teams. Their matrix for performing just the one-on-one formative evaluation criteria, for example, has 41 data points to consider. Is this really helpful for the over-worked Instructor who just wants the simple and clear fundamentals of instructional design as was promised?

Dick and Carey are certainly accepted authorities in the field and I acknowledge their expertise. I am not without my own experience, and from it I offer my own perspectives. My first instructional design project was for the American West Center of the University of Utah beginning in 1976. Our five-person instructional design team was funded by two National Endowment for the Humanities grants of $3 million to produce instructional materials at the higher education level on 1) the history of Native Americans in the hemisphere and 2) their history in the United States. The two works were written from the Native American point of view, a groundbreaking perspective, and were accepted for use by 64 U.S. universities. I designed the syllabuses for both works, 44 of the 46 chapters in the Americas work, and about a fifth of the chapters in the U.S. work. Had I been using Dick and Carey at that time I think I might still be in the instructional design process rather than having it as a part of my resume for over 30 years. Consider that there were over 500 distinct language groups in just North America to go through the Dick & Carey process.

Later at the University of Utah I was in charge of the Distance Education program for the University’s College of Nursing, which has both national and international renown for its distance education curriculum. Since that time I have designed over 30 online higher education courses and trained a number of instructional design teams. I was invited to train faculty members of the University of Dundee’s Centre for Medical Education in Scotland to convert their courses to online delivery and was an Advisor to the Royal College of Surgeons of England on their conversion of curriculum from knowledge-based to skills-based instruction. In the U.S., I wrote the Training Manual for the Artificial Heart Research Laboratory, trained 16 surgical teams in various aspects of the program, and was the Training Supervisor in the Heart Lab for three years. Not all, but to the point.