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.
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.
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