eLearning Roadtrip

Lines are being drawn...over learning technology standards and specs?

Interesting article in today's Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus about a growing shitstorm around learning technology standards.

Per Jeff Young, author of article in question: "The issue centers around a single line of the 53-page grant guidelines for the program, known officially as the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Grants Program: “All online and technology-enabled courses developed under this [program] must be compliant with the latest version of SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model).”

So what's the big whiff?

And then I read a little bit further and all became clear: Dr. Rob Abel, IMS Global CEO, is pitching an absolute hiss over this particular requirement. Why? Because his group supports a different standard.

There is a rich and storied pissing match history that has developed between Dr. Abel and the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative of the US Department of Defense over the past several years, and I am very sorry to see that the stains are going to get all over this exciting new collaboration between the US Departments of ED and Labor. 

A bit of perspective -The federal government made a decision 11 years ago to develop SCORM as a specification to serve as a cost-saving criterion for RFP / vendor selection. ADL/DOD have been the keeper of SCORM on behalf of all the Feds. So it seems to me that the US Dept of Labor is well within their rights to adhere to their own government spec. Especially since the SCORM spec is built upon the standards coming from IMS Global, and other standards bodies, including AICC, IEEE-LTSC, and ARIADNE.

Hats off to Dr. Abel, he has done a great job persuading .edu that the IMS Global is the only standard that really matters. I mean that sincerely. IMS's Common Cartridge helps institutions get better value from LMS vendors and publishers. Even the most technically skilled educators don't want to worry about learning technology standards. The tap dances required to get things to interoperate in the old days of LMS ops were excruciating. Common Cartridge is a good thing, and he should be commended for his leadership on offering a solution to the big audacious higher ed  problem of content distribution and management.

But CCCT is a whole different initiative, one of several federal projects designed to force issues of openness precisely to have the different conversation. Because the IMS conversation only addresses part of the new opportunities. And the CCCT efforts are about tying education to training, jobs and development. Not the other way around.

(inserted note - SCORM dominates in corporate and government and  non-profit learning platform tech as an RFP "checklist" item. IMS dominates in higher ed. They are not mutually exclusive. They are different.)

It is pretty amazing to watch the lines getting drawn. Time to pull up a chair, grab some popcorn and get ready for some great pyrotechnics. 

What Big Brands - Including The Apollo Group - Are Spending on Google

Over the weekend, an article published in Advertising Age discussed the significance of search optimization, the importance of Google, and just how much certain big brand companies are spending on Google advertising. 

The focus of the article dealt specifically how BP rose in the ranks of Google advertisers as a way to manage information about the Gulf oil spill. It was also a way to manage their reputation. Interesting piece. BP spent $3.9 million USD on Google advertising in June, 2010.

But the most interesting part of the the story was the "just how much certain big brand companies are spending on Google" part, because it also named the other Google advertising mega-spenders. 

Take a look. The Apollo Group, parent organization for the University of Phoenix, is second on the list. That would be Apollo Group. EDU, thank you very much. One of those for profit education companies we have been reading about lately.

 $6.67 million USD in June of 2010. In one month. The former public educator in me is blown away. 

I have a lot of admiration for what the Apollo Group and the University of Phoenix have done for adult learners and for the world of higher education. Not saying it's perfect, not saying that there aren't a bunch of ways for improving the experience, or for actively dealing with the problems of student recruitment and financial aid defaults. But I really can't think of any other institution that has put traditional higher education on notice as has the Univ of Phoenix. 500,000 students, growing at the size of a good sized land-grant institution per month.

Now, just think about how good they will be when they spent some percentage of that amount of money toward student success programs, once they get those students in the house. As in focusing on retention, progress, completion. 

It will be an interesting tide, floating all online boats. Might be time to get out the life-jackets, chart a course, find ourselves a fleet of like-minded sailors, and get ready for the journey. 

Mobile Trends that Matter for 2010

CTIA is the international association for the wireless telecommunications industry, dedicated to expanding the wireless frontier. Its most recent annual conference was held in Las Vegas March 23-25. It is considered a leading industry trade show and premiere marketplace for all things wireless (e.g. what we need for our cell phones and personal digital devices like iTouches, iPhones and now iPads, at 2.5G, 3G, and 4G).

I enjoy tracking events like this since it is such a great place to find mobile industry statistics. I used to be totally fascinated by the possibilities for mobile learning until I came to understand that the swirling world of mobility was even more fascinating. I've been was especially interested in this year's CTIA conference, given the outrageous growth in interest in all things mobile this year.

During the recent event, the CTIA released the results of its Semi-Annual Wireless Industry Survey. Some interesting data tidbits: 257 million data-capable devices in consumers' hands. 50 million of these are smart-phones or wireless-enabled PDAs, and nearly 12 million are wireless-enabled laptops, notebooks or aircards. As of December 2009, there were over 285 million wireless connections in the United States.

The conference was also a great reason for press releases and summary reports. Here are some of the highlights of CTIA's 2010 in Review Top Trends in Mobile:

• 4G Networks - Imagine having the network speeds you have become accustomed to at home on your mobile device. Sprint is the first to market with WIMAX, in 27 cities and 15 more by the end of the year. When it is released this summer the HTC EVO 4G will be the first commercially available phone to use WIMAX. AT&T and Verizon are backing a network specification called LTE (Long Term Evolution) that won't be available for another year.
• Android - Android, the open-source system for mobile feature and smartphones, was the big platform winner at CTIA, with new handsets and tablets announced by a variety of manufacturers.
• Mobile Video - Cisco CTO Padmassree Warrior (I follow her on Twitter at @padmassree) asserted that by 2013, 91% of all Internet traffic will be video content. She also noted that video will constitute 66% of all mobile network traffic by 2013. Mind-blowing.
• Internet of Things - @padmassree also noted that by the end of 2010 we can expect to see 35 billion devices connected to the network, by 2013 that number is expected to climb to 1 trillion. These include RFID chips, Bluetooth, network-connected sensors and other devices beyond phone and laptops that will increasingly be talking to each other.

(Kinda nice to see that the Roadtrip has been been following the right trends. There have been several posts on Internet of Things, mobility and Internet video.) Looks like it is going to be a great year for the "unplugged" crowd.

By the way, do you have your iPad yet?

When Publishers Buy LMS Companies

I'm pleased about Sage Road's recent collaboration with the eLearning Guild on their new "Deep Analysis" Report on the Evolving LMS. You need to be an eLearning Guild member to get a copy of this report; Might I suggest that now is as good a time as any to join if you are not a member. 

The Report is a brief summary of top issues that eLearning practitioners are likely to encounter where LMSs are concerned in the next 18 months. It is not meant to size the LMS market  - or evaluate LMS platforms  - or to identify Moodle Service Providers. It IS meant to give people in the trenches a look at the biggest issues they will mostly likely encounter where LMSs are concerned, to get a head start on planning for how these trends are likely to affect their elearning business.

So, with this in mind, one of the trends we did NOT discuss in the recent LMS report was an observation from the world of educational publishing.  Educational publishers such as Pearson have acquired LMS companies such as eCollege (Pearson acquired eCollege in 2007) and Fronter (acquired by Pearson in 2009) and publishing houses like Thomson's Cengage forge LMS relationships with companies like Angel (now part of Blackboard). 

This week's announcement about Sungard and Epsilen's new partnership is raising a flag on the horizon that eLearning practitioners might want to observe over the next several months - specifically, keeping and eye on what publishers and LMS vendors are doing together related to strategic partnerships and market consolidation.  

Higher education publishers and administrative management systems companies appear to be exerting their influence in the area of higher education learning management services provision. In addition to helping to carve out a new learning resources management niche NOT completely dominated by Blackboard, publisher/LMS partnerships are looking for ways that make it easier to cluster, bundle and (eventually monetize) digital learning content assets, giving publishers a new digital revenue stream.  

eLearning content authors may find that they may be increasingly caught between a rock (commercial publishers who are deconstructing professionally produced content assets and buying LMS companies to help take that content to market in new ways) and a hard place (the user-generated content producers, who are creating "good enough" video, audio and apps that are relatively easy to find and share on the open web). 

Where Do You Get Your Market Research?

Where do connected, practicing elearning professionals who wants to keep an eye on market forces go to get smarter about choosing which solutions to build without hitting the adoption curve too soon? We SAY we're doing market research....but I wonder.

Research is one of those things that just about everyone does at some level or another. It can be as simple as reading a short article on a topic about which you know nothing, or as complicated as a longitudinal scientific experiment involving hundreds of human subjects.

There are a lot of mixed feeling about research in the elearning practitioner community. When asked, execs admit that they simply don't have the time to pay attention to research, as they are too busy doing billable work. Not too surprising really, as elearning people tend to be doers. Producers. Designers. Developers. We think in terms of creating solutions, not in terms of crafting the arguments for proving or disproving a hypothesis.

But still, it’s not safe to go plunging into new business directions without having a good handle on the environment, the opportunities, the pitfalls. So maybe it’s a matter of shifting gears. Such as figuring out how to using research strategically. or moving away from empirical studies toward metrics that measure more of what we are actually doing.  

Surprisingly, when Sage Road conducted focus group meetings with elearning professionals to hear what they want from their research, we also heard that business research can be hard to make relevant. When a Forrester Research or a Gartner Research or an IDC produces a research report on elearning related topics (being mindful that they don't really talk about elearning all that much these days, at least not by that name) it is typically written on vertically segmented topics for companies with research and strategy departments who are slicing and dicing vertical markets to figure out how to sell stuff to people like us. 

eLearning research vendors like Brandon Hall Research and Bersin & Associates do a nice, more targeted job with their market descriptions about the things that matter in elearning. Nevertheless, I find that these reports are often written for prospective elearning customers rather than for elearning service providers themselves. For market leading practitioners, some of these reports can seem positively recursive. But of course, there's a lot more "newbies" interested in elearning these days than every before so I completely understand the positioning.

The eLearning Guild is a great resource for eLearning professionals, since it provides a safe haven for practitioners to find others who are dealing with many of the same issues, to find useful advice, tons of resources and safety in numbers. But still - it's more descriptive research about the practice, not about the market(s) in which we are all trying to do our work.

So let me ask again...where DO connected, practicing elearning professionals who wants to keep an eye on market forces go to get smarter about choosing which solutions to build without hitting the adoption curve too soon? Or do we still tend to cross our fingers, go all in on the innovation we believe in and hope that something sticks?  

mLearning at the Tipping Point

A few months ago (March 4th to be exact) I asked a question in this blog about whether it was possible to successful deploy mobile learning and performance support initiatives at the enterprise level. I am happy to say that, thanks to ongoing developments in several key market segments, we seem to have reached a tipping point for mobile learning. After years of watching and waiting and poking and pushing, the market variables that needed to be in play to push mobile learning over the top of mainstream awareness and adoption seem to have finally converged.

I was pleased to be at BlackBoard World 2009 this week for Michael Chasen's announcement that Blackboard has acquired TerriblyClever Design LLC, makers of MobilEdu((TM). As noted in the PR release, MobilEdu apps "allows education institutions to deliver a rich set of campus life services and content to mobile devices, uniquely branded for each institution, to better connect current students, parents, faculty, prospective students and alumni to the campus experience in a way that wasn't possible before. With an Apple((R)) iPhone, iPod Touch((R)) or other device with a mobile Web browser, MobilEdu users can navigate course catalogs and campus maps, e-mail professors and classmates and get real-time updates on their course schedules, campus events, news and sports teams."

When a mainstream company like BlackBoard makes an investment in a small edgy mobile apps company like TerriblyClever, LLC, that's a big deal. It means that there is finally enough evidence that the education market will support demand for mobile applications. I also like that Blackboard is strengthening its previous commitment to mobile services that it initiated with its acquisition of ConnectEd, now known as Blackboard Connect. This successful emergency notification business now has a number of use cases that point to how higher education customers are deploying notifications systems for campus security and operational announcements, as well as now extending their infrastructure to do more with student services, enrollment management, business continuity, and even with learning support and campus community-building. 

It's taken long enough to get to this point of recognizing the value and impact of enterprise mobility. I had my first real brush with mobility and learning in 2004 when my former boss at Macromedia asked me to take a look at scoping out the mobile market for education, to see what we could do to support Macromedia's agenda for getting Flash on mobile handsets around the world. I was thrilled. I worked with Bob Regan (now Director of Adobe's Worldwide Primary and Secondary education marketing) and Adi Sideman (CEO of Oddcast) to develop a Spanish language tutorial called "Let's go to Peru" for deployment on my Flash-enabled Nokia phone. We featured mobile learning at our Macromedia Higher Education Forum. I carried a variety of Nokia mobile phones that were loaded with Flash apps that I could demo at a moment's notice. I gave a presentation on mobile learning during a somewhat infamous Forum session with Curt Bonk and Chere Gibson at the University of Wisconsin Teaching and Learning at a Distance Conference.  I submitted an article called "Enabling Mobile Learning" to EDUCAUSE Review in May of 2005, and was very pleased when it was accepted for publication.

And then we waited. And waited. And wondered why mobile learning wasn't the killer app we thought it was going to be. It's not that individual innovators didn't keep trying to do cool things with mobile phone apps - it was just that individual pockets of innovation don't make a very good business case for supporting enterprise or institutional deployment. I wrote an article about THAT particular phenomenon in June, 2008 that was published by the eLearning Guild. The biggest reason, in my humble opinion, was that we completely "mis-underestimated" the complexity of the infrastructure - and organizational change and IT support required -for enterprise mobility to be achieved. Also the need for many early adopters to craft their own, "gerry-rigged" solutions for making their mobile services/ apps come together in any meaningful way limited adoption to those organizations with the tech capacity for building one's own mobile apps. And guess what else- it wasn't as much about Flash as many of us had hoped.

We in the US are still somewhat constrained by the need to choose either a handset OR a carrier. For example, I've had my eye on a Palm Pre. Problem is, the Pre only works with a network carrier that I don't currently use. I have resisted getting a new iPhone because AT&T has made it fairly unattractive for current subscribers to purchase a new phone, given the required service contract.

But regarless of these little irritations, it is really nice to see manufacturers taking smart-phones seriously. There are lots of choices, whether you are looking for an iPhone or a Pre, a Blackberry or a Nokia or an HTC Android phone. Depending on whether you want ATT or T-Mobile or Sprint or whoever else happens to be in your area there are choices for phone plans and data plans. I suppose it's not surprising that that phone companies are the largest advertisers when it comes to Internet ad spending (Download ComScoreDataPassport_1H2009).

It is also really wonderful to see that the market for mobile apps has been exploding thanks to the very successful Apple iPhone Apps portal. It is clear that mobile infrastructure needs to be robust enough for apps to be reliably connect users and distribute apps and content on demand, but that the real differentiators are the applications themselves. When the Apple App Store team celebrated its 1st birthday a few weeks ago they could point to more than 1 billion downloads of more that 50,000 different applications.

It's fantastic to see the number of mobile app designers and developers growing, seeing how many design schools are featuring mobile app development as part of their curricular offering. It's also especially nice to see more instructional designers who have specialized in mobile learning applications receiving more and more attention in the literature and on community websites.

And it's great to see a mainstream provider of learning management, transaction and notification solutions giving "the mobile lifestyle" such a vote of confidence. In tough economic times, people want to stick with enterprise solutions providers that can weather the slings and arrows of recessions and hype cycles. Looks like Blackboard has voted with its venture capital.

Will mLearning stand on its own? Frankly one of the big problems with enterprise adoption of innovations is that until there is a clear differentiating reason for people to change at an enterprise level innovation is not likely to get the kind of attention and support it needs to be successfully deployed. We've learned the hard way that mLearning will be successful when enterprise mobilty makes it economically feasible to do so. But it sure is a lot easier to consider when there is an enterprise-ready platform to help with the aggregattion, distribution and management of mobile experiences.

Think Like a Product Manager

 "Business as usual" isn't so usual anymore. I'm sure that has a lot to do with questions about the relevancy of learning, elearning and instructional design as we've known them. While I know there are some calls to dump ID and to transform elearning into metaverses and social networks, I would suggest some additional reforms.

In the midst of all of the economic chaos it has become clear that we need to pay better attention to the business side of our business. Tony Karrer had a great blogpost on this topic. Jay Cross has taken this on as his next mission. And of course this is what my co-workers and I do at Sage Road Solutions every day.

Personally, I'm delighted about this change. The shift in awareness and new demands for accountability, value on investment and providing real business value with learning solutions is so palpable you can almost feel it.  It suggests that we are maturing beyond the "craft" model of elearning and performance support where we (had to) do everything ourselves. It suggests we are ready for teams and specialization. It also suggests that maybe we are ready to think about the value that we drive in business terms.

It has always bothered me that a profession that puts so much stake in systematic processes has been built more on the foundations of self-evident truth than on real evidence. "What?!" I can just hear you shriek. "That's heresy! Why, every ID knows that the first thing we do is to ANALYZE! We are systematic. We use ADDIE! We know Kirkpatrick's Four Levels! We follow process models that are based in research and theory!"

What most IDs count as systematic analysis is when we figure out who will be learning, what they will be learning, how long will it take, when will it take place, for how long and how to test for success. These are the basic building blocks of any learning design. But they are also dictated in large measure by the conditions and context in which they are built and deployed. These kinds of things are not typically revenue driving activities. Which means that they end up being counted as costs. Costs without revenues to justify them - and pay for them - are bad.

For better or worse, I learned this lesson long after I had been an ID professor. When I started working at Macromedia I was a lone learning and design solutions market specialist working with a team of MBAs that needed to take learning and education solutions to market. I quickly realized that it really didn't matter that I could tell all about the learning theories I'd used and the instructional design model I preferred, and which level of the Kirkpatrick model I used to evaluate whether I achieved more satisfaction than impact.

My business partner at the time needed me to help her figure out answers to far more important business questions - what kind of demand could we show for the solutions I wanted to develop? What technology features really mattered to our customers? What could we actually sell? Who would buy what I was designing? Really? How much money would my customers be willing to spend for the kinds of things I was thinking about? Which demographic might be most likely to want what I was doing?  What kinds of objections would we need to overcome? How could we best make our case with the customers?

I learned the lessons pretty well - well enough that Beth Davis, my former Macromedia business partner (best known in this industry for bringing a little product called Dreamweaver to market back in the Web 1.0 heyday, along with many other similar kinds of product successes over the past decade) and I decided to continue our unique blend of helping customers drive business value with learning products and solutions here at Sage Road Solutions. We have realized that the way we approach solving our customers' business problems has little to do with process, and has everything to do with dealing with our solutions as products.

Basically, Beth has taught me to think like a product manager. She has helped me understand that learning solutions may function as processes, but the solutions themselves ARE products - they need to be clear, definable, concrete, operational, has boundaries and has a fixed price. and not focusing so much on the processes that get us to the point of use, but more about figuring out how to solve problems. We need real metrics, because if we dont get the market defined right then we have no way of capturing the new and emerging opportunites. And these days, capturing the opportunity is maybe almost as important as getting the learning design right.

There is a point where talking about all the processes and possibilities just gets to be exhausting. For me, getting tangible and real about getting down to business is the most satisfying part of what we do. So much better to show, not tell. My .02.

My Top 10 for IDs

ID is about producing value through the design, development and distribution of learning solutions. Used to be that IDs looked more like psychologists than programmers, but that's not the case any longer. Any ID looking for a job these days must expect to work with technology tools, because so much of today's learning and performance support is enabled / managed / distributed via technology. But IDs are not just elearning content authors. IDs are also engaged in supporting and enabling distance learning's web collaborations. IDs are starting to work more with mobile learning's apps and podcasts. IDs are learning first-hand that game design and instructional design have a lot in common. If only we don't suck the fun out of it...

For better or worse, I don't think about ID competencies as a supervisor or a professor needs to think about them. I think about ID more in terms of what I hope to see from our emerging professionals - the ones that will be strong enough to take technology-mediated learning to the next level. I would hate to lose the learning part of what we do. I do think we need better business skills. I think we need to stop thinking about instructional design as a process and to think about what we do as product development. We need to be more assertive, more focused on the so-called business of our respective businesses. Maybe head in the clouds, thinking of new solutions...but definitely feet on the ground. It's the only way to get things get done.

So. My fantasy. Ellen's imaginary ID-cathelon. MY Top 10. It's not ADDIE. It may not even really be instructional design when you get right down to it, maybe more like ID Life Cycle Management. Whatever. Don't tell me about your favorite learning theory du jour (although I do expect that you have one). I don't really care which model you use, although I do hope that you use one. What I really care about is whether or not MY ID can do these things:

1. Determine real opportunities /consequences. Show me how a learning intervention can drive sales. Increase revenue. Open new markets. Create new lines of business. Attract new customers. Save money. Even if you are working in education or non-profits.
2. Propose solutions that respond to real problems/opportunities. Help me see what my alternatives are, give me scenarios to consider and help me make a good decision for moving ahead.
3. Socialize proposals with key stakeholders. Do you believe in your plan enough to pitch it? Can you persuade funders to your point of view? Can you articulate value, make the pitch, create some buzz?
4. Analyze solution requirements. What are you going to build? For whom? what does it need to do? How does it need to work? What platforms will you use?
5. Analyze customer requirements. This is much much more than thinking along the lines of whether one is a visual learner or an auditory learner. This has more to do with defining the attributes of the target market. The kinds of distribution and management requirements that need to be met, Funding cycles. Hiring cycles. Platforms. Networks.
6. Create Prototypes. More than a clickable model. Calls for research. Content development. Scripting. Storyboarding. Rough cuts. Final cuts.
7. Field Test solutions with stakeholders, customers. Collecting real data describing real life experiences of real live customers/users. Factoring in what people want.
8. Develop and produce solutions. Or finding the people who can produce it for you. It's product management, pure and simple. Developers, Coders, DB analysts. artists and programmers.
9. Launch the solution, get organizational buy-in and get systems online. Knowing how to get the word out, how to go to market. How to successfully socialize and roll out a new learning intervention. How to determine if everything is working and ready to rock and roll. Keeping the power on. Keeping the LMS up and running.
10. Evaluate, Summarize, Document. Building the assessments. Validating the screening tools. Summarizing costs, comparing to benefits. This also means having a handle on statistical methods, survey methods, evaluation methods as well as basic budgets and financials.

Whew. That's a lot. Maybe too much for one person. But maybe not. That's what's so great about thinking of this as an ID-cathelon. It's not for everyone. Only the best.

Join us for Learntrends, April 21-22

Ellen Wagner is Principal Analyst with Sage Road Solutions, LLC. This is her blog.

Please join me, Jay Cross, Tony Karrer, George Siemens, Marcia Conner, Clark Quinn, Charles Jenning, Curt Bonk and many others for a 24 hour global discussion on the future of organizational learning.

What is April Learntrends?
Learntrends is a series of online conversations among people with an interest in improving the process of learning in corporations and government. It’s the April installment of Corporate Learning Trends and Innovation.

Who may attend?
Learntrends welcomes anyone interested in organizational learning. We are expecting a diverse mix of newbies, old hands, managers, practitioners, specialists and generalists. We hope to have storytellers and provocative thinkers joining in.

When does Learntrends take place?
The conversations begin at 9:00 Pacific time on Tuesday, April 21, and conclude 24 hours later at 9:00 Pacific on Wednesday, April 22. As Jay has noted n his FAQ, at any given time, some participants will be in their pajamas, others will be huddled around conference room tables, while others will be enjoying a cigar on their yachts after sumptuous dinners.

My session at 11 am, where I will be joining Charles Jennings and Curt Bonk for a discussion on the profession, will be coming to you direct from the Red Carpet Club at the San Francisco International Airport. Please see the main event page for the schedule. No cigars or yachts for me this time.

For more information about Learntrends please take a look at Jay Cross's FAQs for participating in the April, 2009 event.

Here is the link for joining the Elluminate session. You don't need to register, just be sure to check your system before logging in, and you should be good to go.

Talk to you in a few!

Walk Before You Run

Ellen Wagner is a learning industry analyst with a passion for sustaining innovation and accelerating enterprise adoption of technologies for education, training and performance support. This is her blog.

I closed my last post by saying that, when I envision my ideal instructional designer, my ID looks a lot like a decathlete. As part of this visioning exercise I had planned to think of the top ten events designed to demonstrate the levels of excellence of what I think the quintessentially excellent ID should achieve. My reason for this is simple - If we want to ensure that ID as we the practice defines it will be relevant in the  RIA-driven, cloud enabled, UGC-powered, multi-dimensional learning metaverse then we're gonna have to know what to do, and we're gonna have to show that we know what to do.

I'm not using the ADDIE model to frame my thinking. Not that there's anything wrong with good old ADDIE. It was always intended as a way to teach people about the processes that instructional designers use in their work. With all due respect to those who use it, it serves as a reference model for newbies. Looking forward, it is going to take thinking differently about what we do if we ever hope to get different results than the ones we've always had.

ADDIE is used something like this - "First, you analyze the situation. Then you figure out how to design your idea, then you produce (develop) it all of the things you need for your idea to work, then you implement it, and finally you evaluate it to see if it did what you wanted".  These are not a bad things to think about, especially if you have to start planning for a class project, or a grant proposal or a beginning brainstorming session where you don't have to worry about external constraints. If one is trying trying to put instructional design to work in a "business" setting - and my that, I mean any kind of situation where there are stakeholders to be served through your efforts - then there are a a lot of other things you need to be thinking about BEFORE you start planning an intervention, as well as after you put it in place. ADDIE ends up being one of a number of process models linked together over an extended learning value chain.

And that really is the place that ADDIE is insufficient. It's simply one link in a much longer chain. Practitioners need to know that there is much that comes before, and much that will come after, that has more to do with the ultimate life or death of an idea-as-solution than will the instructional design. If ADDIE falls short, it's because we expect it to do more than it was ever intended to do.

So maybe, before we jump from ADDIE to the TOP 10 ID COMPETENCIES OF ALL TIME  and start getting too focused on what the ultimate performances of our practice should be, that maybe we can start at the baseline requirements one must meet to metaphorically qualify for the events. Pre-ADDIE stuff that anyone who has held down a few ID (and related) jobs can tell you. Some things that every single one of us should be able to do.  Then maybe with each level of competition - e.g. whatever analogy we can come up with for regionals, sections, divisions, leagues, etc - we can start raising the metaphoric bar for the performances we expect.

I started making a list of all the things I think a competent ID should be able to do, and I have to tell you that my list looks very little like ADDIE.

More on that in my next post.