An Editor’s Guide to Instructional Design

Presenters: Sunny Gagliano and James Peters

Day of Meeting: July 13, 2015

Announcements:

Welcome by Jennifer Hager.

1. Registration is open for the editors’ conference on October 10th: Beyond the Red Pencil, Editing in the 21st Century. This is a full-day conference and a wonderful chance for your professional development, and for networking with colleagues. Rich Isaac is here to help you sign up for early bird discount, which is good through the end of the month.

2. Announcement about board positions: we are recruiting board members. A board happy hour will be happening and announced through the listserv. You can find out about serving on the board, which is a 2-year term, by talking with other board members. The up-coming term will be 2015-17.

Presenter Bios

Sunny Gagliano, President
Trillium Publishing
www.trilliumpublishing.com

Sunny has been helping publishers, nonprofits, and educational institutions develop print and online educational content for almost twenty years. In 2003, Sunny founded Trillium Publishing to provide editorial design and production services for K-12 educational publishers. Then in 2014, she co-founded Trillium Instructional Design Services to expand into eLearning and to provide instructional design and course and media development services.

James Peters, Director
Seabold Learning
www.seaboldlearning.com

James Peters is an instructional designer, project manager, and entrepreneur with over twenty years of experience in online course planning and publishing. In 2013 he founded Seabold Learning, a national provider of curriculum for post-secondary education. James is a member of the advisory board for the UW certificate program in eLearning design.

Sunny:
We are excited to be here tonight and to share with you something we are very passionate about. Our agenda:

[Overhead Slide]
Agenda
Introduction
The Instructional Design Profession
A Brief History
4 Big Ideas
Overlaps with Publishing and Editing
A Case Study
Q & A

James is going to talk about the instructional design profession and give us a brief history with some big ideas of instructional design theory. I will talk about how instructional design overlaps with editing and show you some examples.

James:
Sunny and I both have been in some form of the publishing field or online course content for years, and during that time I’ve had the pleasure of teaching a number of writers and people with editorial backgrounds about instructional design. I’ve always said I would much rather start with someone who is a strong writer and a strong editor and teach them instructional design than the other way. So, it is really fun to be here with you tonight, and I want to talk about the industry which is very parallel to yours.

There are a lot of subject matter experts who create a lot of curriculum and so there is an enormous amount of ad hoc instructional design going on. The profession of instructional design encompasses a lot of different industries, any time there is a need for design in the learning experience and some type of training with a very specific outcome that must be achieved, that is where the instructional designers typically get involved. These are just some of the industries or products that have been built by instructional designers:

[Overhead Slide]
The Instructional Design Profession
Compliance Training
Academic Learning Materials
Sales Training
Educational Games
Casual Learning
End-User Product Training

There are a lot of specialties when you are in instructional design.

Compliance Training: there is a huge need for instructional designers in this area. Think about the people who are running our nuclear power plants; we want them to be well-trained and do their work accurately. So, there is a tremendous need to have high-quality instruction that works in those environments, and also for large companies that manage a lot of data and are required by law to have certain levels of training around security practices. There are companies that just supply security training through eLearning; that’s all they do. There are a lot of specialties in instructional design.

Sunny’s background is in academic learning materials, both online and in print.

Large corporations have sales training teams that may be working out of HR departments and have instructional design teams creating training. Designers may start as trainers and then one day are asked to create the materials themselves—that’s how they get into instructional design. Amazon, Starbucks, Microsoft, Tableau all have sales readiness training for their sales forces—that is one application.

Recently, as many of us age and have a bit more time, this whole area of casual learning arose, where people take courses for enrichment online. So, there is a lot of curriculum work done there to translate print classroom materials into online learning experiences.

Finally, educational games is one of the earlier areas for instructional design.

[Overhead Slide]
Brief History
WWII training films
Instructional radio
Early teaching machines
Programmed instruction
Computer-Based Training (CBT)
Distance learning
eLearning/mLearning

With the development of communication technology there has always been this moment when people saw the potential to use the new medium for instructional purposes. When Edison created the moving pictures, he thought he would revolutionize classrooms—that everyone would sit back and watch films. There has always been that promise, but it wasn’t until WW II, when the government needed to train thousands and thousands and thousands of people very quickly and very efficiently, that they actually did start to use film for training. The point was to take the teacher out of the experience so they could standardize on one learning experience and everyone would get the same quality of information, and it would be sequenced in a way that would put learning at the maximum. That was a huge step.

Not long after that, in other places in the world, instructional radio became important. We think of radio as a one-way medium, and it is, but there can be so much instructional impact there. After the formation of India in 1948, when India was growing and being modernized, they used instructional radio to reach people in villages all around rural India to teach how to raise crops, and to teach health curriculum. It was a one-way experience, but it was instructional content extended to create a learning experience.

In the 1950s we get into teaching machine—like the one shown here that was developed by B.F. Skinner—and how this became the lineage of what is still considered instructional design. Next to it is another machine called the Dydac 500. These were all mechanical devices that allowed you to see a card with information on it, and you answer a question about it and give feedback, and the feedback branched. It was the beginning of adaptive learning. That was happening when Skinner made the first teaching machine. With the machine came something called programmed instruction, programmed learning. It was very careful sequencing of instructional presentations with feedback, so it was an interactive learning experience. Many of the principles that began in the 1950s are still being used today. In the 1960s, when computers began to get smaller, was when computer-based training began, with a machine called Plato. It was the original teaching computer. Throughout all, the idea of distance learning has been there.

Really going back to the correspondence courses that people would take—where someone could sign up in the backs of magazines in the 1940s—those types of courses are another example of someone designing something in sequence with an intended outcome. Correspondence courses were the first examples of distance learning, but as video cameras, and satellite link-ups began to become more ubiquitous, and eventually webcasts came along, distance learning really has come into its own. It wasn’t until the 90s when someone realized you could do a high school diploma online, which was the birth of the online high schools. Technology revolutionized learning and it brings us to where we are today, where we have this confluence of all these different technologies, with devices as small as the iPhone. A lot of people who want to teach something to someone else, or they might be one of our clients who is looking for a way to develop a program that is going to achieve the right results.

Question: What is mLearning?

mLearning is mobile learning. It started as eLearning, and then people wanted to make the learning for the mobile devices. Now much of the learning is designed strictly for the mobile device.

I want to talk about four things that I learned when I got into instructional design. My background is teaching and I had the good fortune of learning instructional design from a graduate student of B.F. Skinner’s. I got a nice little lineage completely by accident. When I got my first job at Microsoft, we would talk about these four big ideas:

[Overhead Slide]
4 BIG ideas
Instructional Objectives
Bloom’s Taxonomy
The Addie Model
Kirkpatrick’s Model of Evaluation

Instructional objectives: I like to think of this as the atom of all instructional design. It is determined very early on in the instructional design process. It is a very precise statement of what it is you want someone to be able to do, under what conditions you want them to do it, and to what level of mastery you want them to get. Once you specify the instructional objects, you have the basis of creating the instructional content. It tells you how to discuss it. It tells what activities you might want to do.

Preparing Instructional Objectives by Robert F. Mager is the book that set out instructional objectives, instructional content, activities, and assessments. These are the three parts of Robert’s objectives:

Instructional Objectives
Instructional Content
Activities, Assessments

[Overhead Slide]
3-Part Objectives
1. Performance
a. What will the learner be doing?
b.  Perform an instrument landing
2. Conditions
a. What conditions will you impose?
b. At night, in windy, rainy weather.
3. Criteria
a. How will you recognize success?
b. With 100% accuracy!

When we get into instructional materials, often they start with “in this section you will learn X”. Sometimes what they are doing is stating broad goals. Goals are great, as long as people are clear about the difference between goals and instructional objectives. You can’t build curriculum based on goals. It is a starting point, or an overall focus, but the real nuts and bolts of developing instruction is all about the objectives; it is about being very careful to define those up front.

[Overhead Slide]
Examples and Non-Examples
By the end of this unit, you’ll be able to list and describe . . .
In this lesson, you’ll learn about . . .
In this chapter, you learn how to analyze . . .
By the end of this module, you’ll demonstrate an understanding of . . .

We often see “By the end of this unit, you’ll be able to list and describe . . .” Listing and describing is a performance. We can set some criteria for whatever they can or can’t do.

Look at the second one: “In this lesson you’ll learn about . . .” You still have a verb. The verb becomes learn, but it is not specific and it is not objective and so there is no way of using that to help design instruction.

“In this chapter, you learn how to analyze . . .” This still might point to performance and how to analyze it.

“By the end of this module, you’ll understand . . .”
Understand is the verb. Understanding is not a learning objective, so they try this next phrase:

“By the end of this module, you’ll demonstrate an understanding of . . .”

When you are looking at curriculum, at these statements, see if you can actually do the thing or not. There are many times when the end user, the learner, will not see the objectives, and this is fine. Creating objectives are what we do in the background to create instruction, but in an educational game we are not going to tell you the objectives up front. There are many times when the end user will not see these objectives, and that is fine. There are a lot of cases where this is what we do in the background to make the instruction, but in an educational game, we are not going to tell you what the objectives are up front. There are certain kinds of situations where it is appropriate to lay out up front those objectives. What we hope is that good objectives are in the background.

I want to talk about Bloom’s taxonomy. Benjamin Bloom was an academic in the 1950s. He did a taxonomy of all the types of learning and divided it into domains: physical (this would control learning how to throw a baseball), or affective domains (like how I would look at myself), but his main domain was a cognitive domain.

[Overhead Slide]
Bloom’s Taxonomy
6. Creating: Make judgments based on internal evidence or external criteria.
5. Evaluating: Compile component ideas into a new whole or propose alternative solutions.
4. Analyzing: Break ideas into parts and find evidence to support generalization.
3. Applying: Apply knowledge to novel situations.
2. Understanding: Demonstrate comprehension of facts, concepts.
1. Remembering: Remember previously learned information.

He broke cognitive into six groups. Starting at the low end, the basics:

⦁ Remembering—recalling facts
⦁ Understanding—describe it
⦁ Applying—able to apply the concept
⦁ Analyzing—analyze one concept against another
⦁ Evaluating
⦁ Creating

So I could tell you about the concept but that doesn’t mean I could apply the concept. These are cognitive building blocks. They are very important to instructional designers because we have to think where are we are heading and what we are actually trying to do. Is it important that they just be able to describe, or do they need to apply it? It becomes really important.

People come up with charts of verbs that you can use in objective statements. It is helpful to read down the chart:

[Overhead Slide]
Bloom’s Verbs
Remembering Understanding Applying Analyzing Evaluating Creating
Define Describe Apply Analyze Appraise Create
Identify Distinguish Practice Compare Assess Compose
List Discuss Compute Contrast Estimate Construct
Name Explain Demonstrate Categorize Test Assemble
Recall Recognize Interpret Differentiate Critique Design
You can start some of your objective statements with these verbs. This gives you a sense of how these work. There are other taxonomies.

This does become helpful in thinking about what it is you are trying to teach and to what level.

Sunny: If you ever need vocabulary to describe cognitive, there are websites that give lots of options.

The Addie Model
This is just an instructional design model, a classic way people go about doing instructional design. There are many models, but most of them will roughly fall into these five phases:

[Overhead Slide]
The Addie Model
Analyze
Design
Develop
Implement
Evaluate

Some models have nine phases, some have four, but all models generally work this way. At the beginning you need to analyze.

Analyze the audience, figure out what their goals are. Analyze the tasks that the learner might be doing. If you want to teach a person a job, you have to analyze the job and figure out what they actually have to do. That is called a task analysis and would be done during the analyze phase.

From there you get your learning objectives and begin to design and start sequencing materials—thinking about the right combination: how do I start teaching this first, and that second. Again, the Bloom’s level is really helpful. Then there is the work of development, which involves a lot of writing, editing, and media production; and then implementing the final piece either in a testing situation or out there in the world and then evaluating it. It is an iterative process with many circles of gradation in the process.

The last one is Kirkpatrick’s model of evaluation.

[Overhead Slide]
Kirkpatrick’s Model of Evaluation
Level 1
⦁ Reaction
⦁ Did participants like it?
Level 2
⦁ Learning
⦁ Did they acquire skills, knowledge?
Level 3
⦁ Behavior
⦁ Did they apply what they learned?
Level 4
⦁ Results
⦁ Did it make a difference?

Kirkpatrick was an academic who in the 1950s said you need to start with evaluation—the assessments—and work backwards. This was a big deal. Before you can design instruction, you need to evaluate, start with evaluation—with the assessments—and work backwards. He did a lot of work with companies doing corporate training, where return on investment is incredibly important. Idea is how do you know you’re getting your training dollars worth—how do you know it’s worth the money? He looked at different levels of training and the feedback you might get back from the learner.

Levels:
Level 1: Reaction/Did participants like it?
What is the reaction? Did they like it? Did they fill out a survey at the end with smiley faces or frown and walk out? That is the classic level 1 reaction.

Level 2: Learning/Did they acquire skills, knowledge?
Did they learn the skills? Maybe not.

Level 3: Behavior/Did they apply what they learned?
Did it really alter their behavior? Did they actually apply what they learned?

Level 4: Results/Did it make a difference?
Did the behavior get the results out in the field? If so, was the whole approach effective?

There are just four levels. Good evaluations don’t tell you about instructional design, just perhaps that the presenter did a good job.

Sunny:

[Overhead Slide]
Objectives
What do I want audience members to take away from my presentation?
⦁ A general understanding of instructional design
⦁ An understanding of the parallels and differences between editing and instructional design
⦁ The ability to determine how their editorial work interplays with instructional design
⦁ Information they can use in the current/future jobs
How do I assess audience achievement?
⦁ Questions/activities embedded throughout presentation
⦁ Type of questions during Q&A
⦁ Feedback/survey
How do I best present and contextualize the information to achieve my objectives?

When I thought about my presentation, I thought about my objectives. You are always thinking about the end first. What is the objective? What do you want the learners to learn? What do I want the audience members to take away:
⦁ a general understanding of instructional design
⦁ an understanding of the parallels and differences between editing and instructional design
⦁ the ability to determine how their editorial work interplays  with instructional design
⦁ information they can use in the current/future jobs

This was my laundry list of what I wanted to get across. And then I think about assessments. How am I going to know you got all of these things? An evaluation at the end? I can see what questions you ask at Q&A, and how much you take it to the next level. How do I assess audience achievement? Questions/activities imbedded throughout the presentation. What type of questions during Q/A? Feedback/survey?

We would both love to hear from you down the line, or if you have questions, to know that what we said today made a difference. That kind of thing is really important.

So, how do I best present this information to achieve my objectives and hopefully get some assessment built in there? I started a publishing workflow. It will look very familiar to most of you.

[Overhead Slide]
Publishing Workflow
Author – Editor – Revision (author/editor) – Copyedit – Design/Layout - Page Review – Proofread – Publish (print/ebook)

[Overhead Slide]
E-Learning Workflow
Subject Matter Expert – Instructional Designer – Revision (SME/ID) – Copyedit – Design/Build – Content Review – AQ – Publish (online)

For eLearning you start with a subject matter expert who works with an instructional designer. They work through the content and figure out how it is going to be presented, how it is going to be sequenced and all those things—get the content all figured out. Copyedit, goes to graphic designers, then media developers—they build it in whatever form it is going to be built in—and then there is a content review. A lot of our layout review can happen online now. Finally, Q/A and then publish it online.

[Overhead Slide]
Workflow Comparison
Author – Editor – Revision (author/editor) – Copyedit – Design/Layout - Page Review – Proofread – Publish (print/ebook)
Subject Matter Expert – Instructional Designer – Revision (SME/ID) – Copyedit – Design/Build – Content Review – AQ – Publish (online)

The author/subject matter expert writes the content. You have an editor who works with the subject matter expert to craft the message, to craft the organization, to help it achieve the author’s goals. The instructional designer does the same thing but with more instructional educational purpose and foundation. The revision cycles are quite similar. Copyedit is super important. Graphic design and layout happens. There is a lot of instructional design that graphic designers do; user interface is all about knowing the audience and creating the user interface, how you can put the buttons in the right places to make them more easy to use. Content review, QA—we just add the dimension of usability on the different platforms making sure it works on everyone’s browser. There is still the element of proofreading that happens as well. Very similar.

Here’s a little activity: think about the top 3 things you do as an editor.

[Audience Answers]
1. Check for errors
2. Paid to be nitpicky
3. Works to make sure text is effective
4. Analyzing author’s intentions and helping them best express them,
5. Clarify message and audience
6. Fact-checking
7. Represent the reader, advocate for the reader
8. Assure clear phrasing and style
9. Consistency from beginning to end (another mark of quality: consistency)
10. Knowing the scope of what the author wants them to do, not overstepping, keeping things in scope, containing scope, maintaining/understanding scope

[Overhead Slide]
Roles
What does an “editor” do?
What are “editorial” responsibilities?
What makes a good editor?
What does an “instructional designer” do?
What are “instructional design” responsibilities?
What makes a good instructional designer?

Instructional designers organize the content and think about how it is going to play out.
[Overhead Slide]
Range of responsibilities:
Editorial:
⦁ Consulting with author
⦁ Content organization
⦁ Heavy rewriting
⦁ Editing for clarity
⦁ Editing for style
⦁ Editing for consistency
⦁ Proofreading

Instructional Design:
⦁ Consulting with SME
⦁ Content organization
⦁ Write instructional material
⦁ Plan media/interactives
⦁ Storyboard
⦁ Build content in LMS
⦁ QA/review

When we think about this range, it applies to editors. Not every editor works with authors; not every editor is a copyeditor. There is a lot of specialty in-between that is not linear. A good editor can visualize and think about how the audience will respond to it. A lot of instructional designers are tech savvy.

Case study: Rainbow
Original training material created in the 1980s—eight hours of the founder talking.
My first task was to watch the original training. Then I wrote program goals and created an outline of how we would envision the content for effectiveness, for cognitive growth. I developed an outline and wrote content based on the outline. I wrote the content based on the objectives. They were essentially chapters. Then I entered into the back and forth with the subject matter experts.

We envisioned some media design to take it from the book formet to something more interesting. We created a storyboard. It included text, graphics, and navigation information. This storyboard went to a graphic designer. The storyboard provided the content. MOODLE was used to display the content online. Graphic designers made it look pretty, added pictures and navigation. Sometimes instructional designers can direct the graphic design process. A second storyboard, which contained large amounts of text, was developed into an eBook. It was too much material for a PowerPoint presentation, but it worked well as an eBook. An instructional designer will have different ways to present information to get the message across. Copyeditors went through everything to make certain the links worked.

Q: was it copyedited in the original or just when it was ready for online?
A: Both. It was looked at before it was put into pages. The graphics were looked at twice. Anything that can be done earlier in the process saves a lot of time down the line.

Finally, a review of objectives (because we always end where we start).

If you are interested in learning more about instructional design, see some of these books:

Preparing Instructional Objectives by Robert F. Mager
Developing Technical Training by Ruth Clark
eLearning and the Science of Instruction by Ruth Clark

We also look for editors, so if there are any professional connections that can be made, we look forward to talking to you.

Q: How much of your development is taking into account different learning styles or kids with disabilities?

Sunny: Definitely we think about the different learning styles; the audience is a big part of that because of compliancy requirements. A lot depends on the scope of the project and the audience. A lot of basic considerations are foundational.

Q: Does it extend beyond K-12 into adult?

Sunny: It extends into adults.

Q: Can you talk about the difference between freelancing and in-house?

James: This is a big similarity between editing and instructional design. Many people freelance and work from home. People move back and forth between corporate work and freelance. This tool set can be applied. As far as what you would do to learn more about instructional design, there are programs. When I get asked to train people to do this work, I look for strong writers and editors. These people think of content, structure, sequencing, audience. When you get into a conversation—when you talk about instructional perspective, it is very basic. It doesn’t require a degree to do this work.

Sunny: I would add from our in-house staff, we have looked to help someone to move over to instructional design, the editors who have been successful are visual thinkers who can think about the content in a different way. Being able to think about objectives with any project from a measurable, achievable perspective will help. There is also a lot of opportunity for copyedit, QA in the ID world—lots of freelance possibilities.

James: Instructional design work is quite creative and quite detailed. The main quality is empathy for the learner.

Q: Curriculum design versus Instructional design

Sunny: Curriculum design is really looking at a much broader scope, a large series of objectives that are either mandated. Instructional design is more granular. There is an aspect of seeing how the content flows, curriculum design is much higher level—what courses do we need to teach. There is a gray area in-between the two.

Q: How early does graphic design enter into the process?

Sunny: it depends on how visual the instructional designer is. If the instructional designer can visualize what it will look like, the graphic designer is less relevant. But graphic designers can help instructional designers work through how elements will look.

James: when you are talking about navigation, graphic designers think about navigation, and it should happen earlier—the signoff.

Sunny: the storyboards were ugly, and the client was worried until content got graphic designed. Had we introduced the graphic design earlier, than it would have been easier for the client. It is not uncommon to produce the first module as a prototype, quite functional, so the client can visualize it.

Q: How do you verify to yourself that something is fully functional? Once we have something that is relatively complete, do we do a pilot?

James; there are a lot of levels of functional. It gets back to the Kirkpatrick levels of evaluation. What do they want people to come away with? Some things are very casual, some are critical. More money is spent on pilot programs to make certain that the training works.
Sunny: from higher ed, the courses run quarter after quarter, on a revision cycle. After the fifth time, it is time for a major revision. The subject matter experts are often the ones teaching the course, and they give a feedback loop.

Organization of Rainbows is in contact with their facilitators. They have a feedback loop.

Q: How often do clients update the material to keep up to pace with technology?

James: It depends on what you are developing? Training online can look out-of-date visually.
Sunny: mobile is forcing a lot of people to change. The software that the interactives have been developed will work on a phone, but not very well.

Q: Does PowerPoint translate to phones?
James: Yes, it isn’t bad. A new concept is responsive design, where the content will respond to the device. They do quite well considering. A lot of redesign is being driven by the phones.