Who is training the online teachers to teach online?

Posted on January 9, 2013 by David Grebow

NEWSFLASH: Online Education is Here to Stay.

Okay so tell me something I don’t know. When I start to see articles and stories appearing in the NY Times, NPR, WSJ, on TV and lots of other places I start to think “mainstream”. What every one of you reading this already knows has become The Latest Big News. Online education is here to stay.

So that begs an important question. The more traditional onground version of education has been around since Moby Dick was a minnow. As in forever. And formal education was truly formalized when Teacher’s Colleges were started and teacher’s were taught to teach.

From Wikipedia:

Generally, Teacher Education curricula can be broken down into four major areas:

Foundational knowledge in education-related aspects of philosophy of education, history of education, educational psychology, and sociology of education.
Skills in assessing student learning, supporting English Language learners, using technology to improve teaching and learning, and supporting students with special needs.
Content-area and methods knowledge and skills—often also including ways of teaching and assessing a specific subject, in which case this area may overlap with the first (“foundational”) area. There is increasing debate about this aspect; because it is no longer possible to know in advance what kinds of knowledge and skill pupils will need when they enter adult life, it becomes harder to know what kinds of knowledge and skill teachers should have. Increasingly, emphasis is placed upon ‘transversal’ or ‘horizontal’ skills (such as ‘learning to learn’ or ‘social competences’, which cut across traditional subject boundaries, and therefore call into question traditional ways of designing the Teacher Education curriculum (and traditional school curricula and ways of working in the classroom).
Practice at classroom teaching or at some other form of educational practice—usually supervised and supported in some way. Practice can take the form of field observations, student teaching, or (U.S.) internship.

All this leads to a certification and ongoing teacher education to make sure the level of quality of the teaching is maintained. We would not let our kids go to a school where the teachers were not certified to teach. We do not go to colleges and universities to learn from from people who are not prepared to teach. Yet we flip on our headphones and sit in front of our [fill in your device here] for hours on end taking online courses, not ever really knowing who is inside the screen, or what training they had that qualifies them to be the instructor.

Traditional onground teachers are highly qualified professionals. I cannot say the same for online teachers. According to the numbers I’m hearing lately, more than 63% of Americans have taken one of more online courses. That means a course with a curriculum and several sessions of teaching and learning, not a one-off webinar. And in many countries the numbers are dramatically higher (South Korea for example at over 85%).

Here’s the question:

Who is training the online teachers to teach online?

Some of the worst ‘teaching’ I have ever tried to learn from has been online. The worst. And I’m not alone. Everyone I know has stories about an online class that was a total waste of time. Poorly organized content. Terrible to no graphics. So many bullet points that the screen ended up being 8pt Arial. A droning voice with no modulation or interest in the subject. Talking bullet points. Less than a modicum of enthusiasm. Hardly any interaction in a medium defined by interaction.

In sum, it was taking the untutored teacher without certification person and putting that so-called teacher in a box, without so much as a nod to the tools afforded by the fantastic digital medium being used. Cheaper perhaps than getting people in a classroom. But what a waste of brainpower and yet another missed opportunity.

There are exceptions that always prove the rule. The free university level courses being taught by outstanding teachers who are first and foremost outstanding teachers and then outstanding online teachers as well. Starting with Khan academy. Great teachers using a new online approach and really working hard to find ways to make online education work online (e.g. Udacity and Coursera). Taking advantage of Communities of Learners, peer-to-peer learning, great interaction, and graduating students into Communities of Practice. Those are the exceptions.

The question again is when do we answer the question? When will we start to take online teaching as seriously as we take onground teaching? I found only one decent online teaching program and it’s from Cisco, where they are certifying their online – virtual – teachers so they know how to teach online. Certified to understand how online teaching – in a virtual classroom – is different than teaching onground – in an actual classroom. Some are still better than others when it come to teaching – the art and science of lighting a fire, not filling a bucket.

At the very least, when they are certified – actually certified after going through a process as rigorous as any other Cisco certification – they know how to correctly use the online classroom to maximize the capabilities of their virtual presence and get learners interacting and, dare I say it, actually learning something. As in those rare and wonderful “Aha!” moments.

So once again I leave you with a question.

Who is training the online teachers to teach online?

Learning

Which Kid Becomes a Successful Entrepreneur?

Image | Posted on January 4, 2013 by David Grebow

Which Kid Becomes a Successful Entrepreneur?

The drawing by Rutan Motan “The Art of Distraction” summed up my experience in school. I was the kid in the pink sweater …

Flipapalooza – When Education Moves @ Lightspeed

Posted on December 11, 2012 by David Grebow

The next two articles actually make me believe that change can come to Education sooner than later. It’s a case of ‘if it’s broken fix it’. It’s the model that was first talked about here by Daniel Pink two years ago, in September, 2010. Two years in the world of education is mere pedagogical blink and yet here we are.

I added some sources for you to learn more about this rapidly spreading way of learning in the new Idea Economy. The next step is to get corporate education flipped even if it’s a virtual classroom so the lecture is your “homework” and the time spent with your peers and instructors practicing what was preached is your schoolwork.

All I can say is “Flip it, flip it good!”

Great infographic: http://www.knewton.com/flipped-classroom/

A how-to primer: http://www.edutopia.org/blog/flipped-classroom-best-practices-andrew-miller

The secret flipped side of Khan Academy: http://www.khanacademy.org/coach/resources

An Educator’s Take on The Flip http://connectedprincipals.com/archives/1534

Here are two articles, the first from NPR and the second from Liz Dwyer, Education Editor for Good Education.

From NPR

Welcome to the 21st century classroom: a world where students watch lectures at home — and do homework at school. It’s called classroom flipping, and it’s slowly catching on in schools around the country.

When Jessica Miller, a high school sophomore in rural Bennett, Colo., sits down to do her chemistry homework, she pulls out her notebook. Then she turns on an iPad to watch a video podcast. Whenever the instructor changes the slide, Miller pauses the video and writes down everything on the screen.

Miller can replay parts of the chemistry podcast she doesn’t understand, and fast forward through those that make sense. Then she takes her notes to class where her teacher can review them.

Back in the classroom, chemistry teacher Jennifer Goodnight walks up and down the rows of desks giving verbal quizzes, guiding students through labs and answering questions.

Goodnight is one of about five teachers flipping their classrooms at this small school on Colorado’s Eastern Plains. She’s part of a growing group of teachers using the concept since it emerged in Colorado in 2007.

In Durham, N.H., Oyster River Middle School seventh-graders Patrick Beary and Morgan Bernier play with StoryKit, a free app that helps middle-schoolers put together simple presentations, and elementary students make storybooks.

Goodnight’s been teaching for 12 years and has been flipping her class for the past two. The effort is paying off with better test scores, she says.

“If they’re going to have their iPods all the time, might as well put a lecture on it,” Goodnight says. “So on their way home from school, on the bus or whatever they can maybe watch your lecture for homework that night. It’s truly about meeting them where they’re at, and realizing that the 21st century is different.”

Jerry Overmyer, creator of the Flipped Learning Network for teachers, agrees. “The whole concept of just sitting and listening to a lecture is really, that’s what’s getting outdated, and students are just not buying into that anymore.”

Overmyer’s network has almost 10,000 members. He says the flipped classroom concept is particularly popular in math and science classes, where students can easily become frustrated working problem sets at home.

And while the video component of the program seems to get the most attention, he says what really matters is how teachers use classroom time.

“It’s about that personalized face-to-face time. Now that you’re not spending all of class time doing lectures, you’re working one on one with students,” Overmyer says. “How are you going to use that time?”

While there’s little academic research on the concept, it appears to work in a variety of schools from Colorado to Illinois and Michigan. Outside Detroit, Clintondale Principal Greg Green tested the idea in 2010 as a way to curb disciplinary issues and boost test scores. It worked well enough that Green flipped the entire school, which has a large number of at-risk students.

Grace HoodJessica goes over her work with teacher Jennifer Goodnight. Goodnight says “flipping” her class has improved students’ test scores.

“Now you can simply just take about five steps and record a video and then simply send it to your students and parents and keep everyone informed,” Green says. “So now we’re becoming even more transparent.”

That transparency can go a long way toward winning over parents who are skeptical of the idea.

Back in Colorado, Bennett High School parent Denise Patschke was once one of them. She questioned classroom flipping videos when her son first came home from school with one. But as time went on, she began to watch them.

“I can listen to the video as well when they need help, and then I can try to help him understand what [the teacher] is saying,” Patschke says.

Chemistry is tough enough for high school students — let alone parents whose last chemistry class was 25 years ago. A flipped classroom, advocates say, could make helping students easier for everyone.

From Good Education – One Small Step for Students One Giant Leap for Education

lecturing.professor

Another sign that the college lecture might be dying: Harvard University physics professor Eric Mazur is championing the “flipped classroom,” a model where information traditionally transferred during lectures is learned on a student’s own time, and classroom time is spent discussing and applying knowledge to real-world situations. To make it easy for professors to transition out of lecture mode, Mazur has developed Learning Catalytics, an interactive software that enables them to make the most of student interactions and maximize the retention of knowledge.

Mazur sold attendees at the recent Building Learning Communities conference on this new approach by first asking them to identify something they’re good at, and then having them explain how they mastered it. After the crowd shared, Mazur pointed out that no one said they’d learned by listening to lectures. Similarly, Mazur said, college students don’t learn by taking notes during a lecture and then regurgitating information. They need to be able to discuss concepts, apply them to problems and get real-time feedback. Mazur says Learning Catalytics enables this process to take place.

The way the software works is that first the instructor inputs the concept she wants students to discuss. The program then helps create either multiple choice or “open-ended questions that ask for numerical, algebraic, textual, or graphical responses.” Students then respond to these questions using electronic devices they’re already bringing to class, like a laptop or smartphone.

The instructor can see a snapshot of who “gets” a concept and who still needs extra help, and then pair up students accordingly. The students even receive personalized messages on their devices telling them who to talk to in class, like “turn to your right and talk to Bob,” until they master the concept. And, when it’s time to study, they can access questions and answers from the class discussions.

Learning Catalytics was so successful in Mazur’s physics classroom that it’s being rolled out across Harvard, but it’s also open to other users on an invitation-only basis. If this tech-based flipped classroom approach takes off, maybe we’ll end up with a generation of students that retain what they’ve learned, long after the final is over.

FLIP IT, FLIP IT GOOD!

Food for Taught

Posted on December 4, 2012 by David Grebow

Schoolteachers should have to pass a stringent exam – much like the bar exam for lawyers – before being allowed to enter the profession, one of the nation’s largest teachers unions said Monday.

This headline was from a recent news story about a proposal from the American Federation of Teachers calling for a new written test and stricter entrance requirements for teacher training programs.

“The proposal, released Monday as part of a broader report on elevating the teaching profession, calls for a new test to be developed by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. The nonprofit group currently administers the National Board Certification program, an advanced, voluntary teaching credential that goes beyond state standards.

There is no single, national standard for teacher certification, although the federal government does ask states to meet certain criteria to be eligible for federal funding.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan commended the proposal, describing it as part of a broader push to raise the bar for teachers and enable schools to predict a teacher’s potential for success in the classroom.”

I read the story (link here) and sat backing wondering how many classroom teachers I had in the last 3 years. The answer? None. 37 courses, classes and webinars and all my teachers have been online. The classes were online, the study materials were online, the students were all online and the teachers were online.

I take notes every time I take an online course and have the habit of grading the teacher.

Here’s a graph of the grades:

So I began to think that my online teachers were every bit as important to my learning as my classroom teachers yet there was no certification programs or advanced credentialing that I knew of and that might have saved me from experiencing some of the worst teaching I have ever experienced,

Now I know I’m not a voice crying out in the elearning wilderness since every person I know who has taken an online program gives very few of the teachers a A grade and most get a sub par D or F. Why? Why is online teaching not considered as professional and as important as onground in class teaching?

Just wondering if anyone out there had the same idea? Maybe it’s time for some real online teacher certification. Thoughts?

A Seat at the Grownups Table

Posted on November 15, 2012 by David Grebow

The short history of the training or education department within corporate organizations is an interesting mirror of the shift in economic paradigms from the Industrial Economy to the Knowledge Economy. These departments have moved from the operational level as cost centers to profit centers with their own “C” level leadership that in many cases reports directly to the CEO. It’s a glimpse into the future of where these “Departments of Learning” will be in the corporate hierarchy and how they will be perceived.

Let me back up a bit. The global economy has undergone three major and notable economic paradigms each with an attendant educational system. They can be summed up simple in the following list:

Agricultural Economy: We managed backs – we basically learned on-the-job.

Industrial Economy: We managed hands – we primarily learned in the formal classroom.

Knowledge Economy: We manage minds – we learn continuously in an ever-growing variety of ways.

Here’s a story that sums up the changes:

In 2007, I gave a presentation to the annual gathering of CIO’s at Boeing in Southern California. As the top CIO was leading me into the conference room, she told me that the building itself has an interesting history. Originally an orchard grove for oranges, the building was first used as a giant manufacturing facility for the production of airplanes. When the demand for planes was reduced, the building was cut up into floors, offices and cubicles and people spent their workdays in front of computers producing, refining, defining, revising, discussing, an communicating ideas. Ideas for new planes. Ideas for improving production of planes. Ideas about related projects that had something to do with planes. One piece of land, three economic paradigms.

The point is all they did all day was produce ideas, work with ideas, think about ideas, write and talk about ideas. There were still a small group of people who ultimately made those ideas into things – planes. But they were followed by the people who had more ideas about how to market it, sell it, teach people to fly it and so on and so on. So the Knowledge Economy is all about the mass production of ideas. Success in the Knowledge Economy is the ability to sift through all those ideas to come up with the ones that can be produced and sold. Turning ideas into money.

These workers are literally the corporate brain. In a flat digitally-interconnected world where 24×7 marketplaces are open to all and as a result are hypercompetitve, the Corporate IQ separates the winners from the losers, the successes from the failures. So making sure that all the employers can learn as much as they need to know and know-how to do, anytime and anyplace, become a strategic fact. Learning has become the most critical differentiator in this newest Knowledge Economy. And the “Department of Learning” is at the center of it all.

In a recent report by SABA Transforming Learning into a Strategic Business Enabler, the following facts emerged from interviews with over 612 leaders from the Director level and above:

Overall 52.7% of respondents report that the learning function at their organization is seen as a strategic enabler for the business
Only 13.7% report that the learning function at their organization is seen as a cost center.

With regard to the way these newly perceived strategic organizations are operating, here are some vital statistics:

4-6% more likely to deliver training to customers.
8-9% more likely to deliver training to partners/channels.
4-6% more likely to deliver training to suppliers.
25-42% more likely to report that training is aligned with business strategy.
Twice as likely to use objective measures of employee performance to align their learning to the business strategy.
Twice as likely to do formal learning requirements planning.
Four times more likely to have a learning advisory board with members from the business and the learning function.
26-43% more likely to have an annual process of mapping the learning strategy to the business strategy for the year.
39% more likely to have been demonstrating the impact that training has on the core business.

The study goes into much greater depth if you’re interested in getting into the weeds. The point for me was that the training department in which I started only 30 years ago has moved from a cost center focusing on operational training that often was the first to be cut during a downsizing, rightsizing or capsizing, to being viewed as a critical strategic component to the core business. All those early discussions about ‘getting a seat at the table’ are finally being realized.

Education, Not Guns and Bombs, Creates The Future

Posted on November 9, 2012 by David Grebow

Other people around the world pray

for what we take for granted.

From the article:

“As the recent Taliban assassination attempt on Malala Yousafzai, the 15-year-old Pakistani champion of girls’ education, shows: The Taliban are most scared of books, not bombs. Establishing an educational infrastructure in Afghanistan is the most cost effective long-term strategy for grassroots change.

The cost effectiveness could be shown in multiple ways. “For the cost of just one soldier in Afghanistan for one year, we could start about 20 schools,” said Nicholas Kristoff in a July 2010 column in the New York Times.”

Education is the most powerful weapon

which you can use to change the world.
Nelson Mandela

Education is a better safeguard of liberty

than a standing army.
Edward Everett

Give Afghanistan Schools Today (or Don’t Blame Islam Tomorrow)

Posted: 11/08/2012 10:39 am

After a gruesome reelection campaign, President Obama should unwind. And instead of playing basketball, he should watch a movie. How about the 2007 biographical drama, “Charlie Wilson’s War”? It’s about the period when the United States was leaving Afghanistan after wrapping up its covert anti-Soviet operation there. Tom Hanks, who played the role of Congressman Charlie Wilson in the movie, pleaded with lawmakers, “$1 million for school reconstruction. … Did you hear me say? It was a million, not a billion, for a school construction?”

This is what he got in return: “Nobody gives a sh** about a school in Pakistan.” Or Afghanistan.

Caution: A quarter century later, America is about to make the same mistake. President Obama and Mitt Romney both pledged to leave Afghanistan by 2014. But neither discussed the importance of establishing schools for the children of a war torn nation where nearly half the population is now under the age of 15.

As the recent Taliban assassination attempt on Malala Yousafzai, the 15-year-old Pakistani champion of girls’ education, shows: The Taliban are most scared of books, not bombs. Establishing an educational infrastructure in Afghanistan is the most cost effective long-term strategy for grassroots change.

Kristoff says Greg Mortenson, the author of “Three Cups of Tea,” told him that “for the cost of just 246 American soldiers in Afghanistan for a year, we could pay for a higher education plan for all Afghanistan.”

Can you imagine the global impact of educating a tribal society over the next decade, all for less than 0.1 percent of our annual military spending?

“Why build,” some push back, “when the Taliban are going to destroy these schools anyway?” Again, ask Greg Mortenson who reported that the Taliban have not destroyed even one of his schools.

To be fair, the U.S. government has made some strides. In December 2011, an Afghan version of “Sesame Street” — a program funded by the U.S. State Department and produced in consultation with Afghanistan’s Ministry of Education — was launched. Afghanistan has one of the highest proportions of school-age children in the world, yet less than half are in school.

This leaves millions of young Afghans, mostly girls and women, vulnerable to poverty and Taliban influence. As the U.S. withdraws its troops and the Taliban regain control, which they will in varying degrees, they are likely to enforce misogynistic policies with impunity and recruit 14-year-olds for suicide bombings.

Some will blame Islam itself for this inhumanity. But their reasoning doesn’t hold up. Why don’t American Muslims blow themselves up? Primarily, because such acts of cowardice are an affront to Islam and its prophet. But they have this understanding because they are educated. They have a good life. They have plans for tomorrow. For an Afghan kid, it’s different.

About 12,000 Afghan civilians were killed just between 2007 and 2011. Think about their orphan children who could be recruited by a Taliban run madrassah (school) to fight in “God’s army against the infidel.” This army is funded in part by Saudi oil money to nurture the extremist Wahhabi and anti-western mindset in the religious madrassahs. In the 1980s, the Saudis matched America’s anti-communism budget of $500 million to uproot the Soviets in Afghanistan. Now, their motivations for funding the Taliban are different.

Helping Afghanistan establish schools today, Mr. President, would prevent American lives tomorrow. It shouldn’t be this way. But sadly, it is.

Before declining to help the Afghans, we should remember that the Taliban have other help anyway — notably from the Pakistani Army, politicians and mullahs. Recently, even a relatively liberal ex-cricketer-turn-Pakistani-politician, Imran Khan, publicly gave legitimacy to their cause by declaring the Afghan conflict “a holy war” justified by Islamic law. Ignore this paradigm of support, and America’s decade-long gains will be washed away within a year.

“This is what we always do. We always go in, with our ideals to change the world. And then we leave. We always leave,” Charlie Wilson lamented. Mr. President, regarding Afghanistan, please don’t display the body language of a leader who just wants to leave.

Before leaving Afghanistan, Washington should pledge at least $1 billion to establish secular schools for boys and girls in Afghanistan. And policymakers should work with Islamabad to help fund and establish schools in the tribal areas of Pakistan. The funds should go toward hiring qualified teachers, developing standardized curricula, and constructing a robust infrastructure to support these schools, their staff and their students. If armed protection for such schools is required, it should come from locally hired forces.

Spent right, these dollars could achieve what counterinsurgency missions, bombers and drones could not.

Dr. Faheem Younus is a clinical associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and the founder of Muslimerican.com. Follow him on Twitter at @FaheemYounus.

Into The Age of the Smart Things

Posted on November 2, 2012 by David Grebow

It’s almost a New Year – 2013 – and already the Next Big Thing is upon us. Actually that’s ironic since the Next Big Thing is all about things, Smart Things.

Refrigerators that scan bar codes and tell us what we have, which items we need, send shopping lists to our networked printers and suggest recipes from The Food Channel on our iPads.

Cars that use electricity and call our Smartphones to tell us how they are doing and what they need.

Entertainment systems that scan the Network and record the programs we like, or instant message us to ask if we want to watch a movie we listed. And before the movie starts, this Device2Device (D2D) networked cyber universe sends a signal to the microwave to zap the popcorn.

There’s actually a lot more than I know about or can imagine right now. The question I always come back to is how will all these smart things impact upon our ability to learn what we need to know and know-how to do?

Neuroscientists and others who study how we learn are already discovering a long list of activities and approaches that enable and disable the learning process (e.g. Brain Rules by John Medina). Will they be embedded as rules into the Smarter Learning Things that will help us learn? Can we develop a Smart LMS? And what about the innovative new methods and approaches that are being adopted by the people who develop the learning tools we already have? AI tutors and new formative assessment analytics? Will these Smarter Learning Things help enable our learning process and help us to be smarter? Does the next step in our evolution involve linking our brains to these machines?

And has it already started …

Will we become embedded as part of these Smarter Learning Things?

I don’t have the answers. I’m simply asking the questions. I was born before computers started appearing everywhere and the Internet became the digital brain of the world. Things were dumb. Now thanks to embedded computers, things are “smart”. What does smart mean? If you are smart, is a computer embedded in you? Is that the new meaning of being a “Smart Person”.

What do you think about the impact of smart technology on the future of learning? Can it enable the learning process and make learning easier, more enjoyable and more effective by using ‘smart’ technology? Or does it. as some early studies indicate, disable the learning process and dumb us down?

Let me know. I’d like to hear what you think as we charge inexorably into this Brave New World of Learning and Smart Things …

121 Blogs About Learning

Posted on October 24, 2012 by David Grebow

Here’s my daily reading list from which I pick and chose every day. The represent the best minds in the area of learning and learning technology. Enjoy!

Aaron Silvers

Adventures in Corporate Education

Blogger in Middle-earth

Bottom-Line Performance

Courseware Development

Daretoshare

Dawn of Learning

Designed for Learning

Designing Impact

Developer on Duty

Discovery Through eLearning

Dont Waste Your Time

e-bites

e-Learning Academy

E-Learning Provocateur

eLearning Acupuncture

Experiencing eLearning

Getting Down to Business

Good To Great

I Came, I Saw, I Learned

In the Middle of the Curve

Integrated Learnings

Interactyx Social Learning

Jay Cross

Jay Cross’s Informal Learning

Joitske Hulsebosch eLearning

Latitude Learning Blog

Learning and Technology

Learning Cafe

Learning Conversations

Learning Developments

Learning in a Sandbox

Learning Technology Learning

Learning Unbound Blog

OutStart Knowledge Solutions

Performance Learning Productivity

SharePoint and Assessment

Simply Speaking

Skilful Minds

Social Enterprise Blog

Take an e-Learning Break

The Learning Circuits Blog

The Learning Generalist

The Peformance Improvement Blog

Twitterpated with Learning

Upside Learning Blog

Vikas Joshi on Interactive Learning

Asleep at Midnight

Aside | Posted on October 19, 2012 by David Grebow

Wisdom about education comes at us from many sources these days. I found this on TED (no surprise there). What is a surprise is that the presenter is a former teacher, and what he learned about “smart failure” is a lesson that is not only relevant for education, it is relevant for everyone everywhere who was, as he says, “…asleep at midnight when all the rules changed.”

The implications are profound. Eddie Obeng is one of the few on this planet who can see the forest and the trees, who gets it – that we have moved from one paradigm to another and most of us still operate in the old one. To move forward – in the classroom, in the workplace, in our own lives – we need to accept that fact and begin to fail smartly if we are ever to succeed.

The world is changing much more rapidly than most people realize, says business educator Eddie Obeng — and creative output cannot keep up. In this spirited talk, he highlights three important changes we should understand for better productivity, and calls for a stronger culture of “smart failure.”

ADDIE Must Die!

Posted on October 17, 2012 by David Grebow

NOTE (October, 2012): I first posted this piece in 2004. At the time I was looking at educational theories and methods that had been developed in the early 1970’s and that rather mysteriously became the de facto standard for developing educational programs.

I saw two major problems with ADDIE.

The first is obvious. The way we learned back then was simple and singular. Classroom, teacher, facing front in rows, be quiet, raise hands, take tests and more tests then PASS or FAIL. The ADDIE model worked and perhaps that is why is was adopted as THE standard even though there was no standards body that developed and accepted ADDIE. Thanks to Don Clark‘s research into ADDIE (which I recommend), it was developed by the US Army in 1975, and then copied by corporations, presumably by people who heard about it and experienced it in that environment. The problem is that today – and into the future if the past is any guide – we learn and will learn in dramatically different ways. Ways that ADDIE cannot support as a developmental model.

Second, either explicitly or implicitly ADDIE still is the default for defining, designing, developing, delivering, managing and measuring education. That means – and I still experience this – whenever educational programs are being created, the underlying thinking is A – D – D- I -E. This not only limits the way new educational programs are developed, it hamstrings the creative use of new learning technologies. Technologies that were not even dreamed of when ADDIE became the accepted guideline for development. It precludes many, if not all, of the powerful capabilities technology promises . Learning that is blended, mobile, flipped, social and more. So my conclusion then and now is that ADDIE must die.

The Premise

ADDIE is the illegitimate child of the Industrial Age, and using it is an addiction that almost always leads to formal training programs that are, in these digital days of rapidly advancing Blended,Mobile, Flipped and Social Learning, close to worthless if not actually counterproductive.

The good news? There is a better alternative …

Note: This is Part One of a two part series.

The future is a foreign country where

they do things differently than we do today…

Preface

I never minded school that much. It was the place where my friends hung-out and occasionally suffered through a class with me. I’m not sure what I learned or if it was of any use, but it was at least social. Learning in the workplace was the same until the computer started to pop-up everywhere. Then learning became lonely, it became anti-social.

Those of us who are trying t put the social back into the learning too often focus on the forest. The Big Enterprise 2.0 picture. This is a look at one of the trees – ADDIE – and it’s contribution to ongoing tradition of cranking out ineffective Enterprise 1.0 formal learning programs.

Change is Hard

Change is the most difficult yet desired state to which people want to move. Yet we live in the past in which habits rule and rules become habits. They don’t even need to be good habits or intelligent rules. Just habits and rules.

You’ve probably heard that expressions “If every problem is a nail, then every solution is a hammer”?

With ADDIE, if every problem is a lack of knowledge or know-how, then every solution is a formal training program …

Now I already know that you are falling into one of several categories of readers.

You are so hooked on ADDIE that anyone who tries to show you that ADDIE has no clothes is an instant turnoff, and you are in the process of clicking away as fast as your finger can find your mouse
You think ADDIE is okay, agnostic and can be used ‘back then’ as well as ‘moving forward’ and might consider reading what I have to say
You develop really compelling and exciting social learning experiences and have no idea what ADDIE means … you can go.

Hopefully those of you in the first two groups will read on …

The ADDIE Habit

ADDIE. As you may (or may not) know, it stands for the five linear phases or guidelines for building effective training:

Analysis
Design
Development
Implementation,
Evaluation.

ADDIE evolved into a more circular model in the late 1990’s and looked like this:

Evaluation became embedded in every part of the model. The variation was often called “Rapid Prototyping” which simply meant you ‘evaluated’ how well it was working at each A-D-D-I step.

There’s only one problem.

It no longer works.

Background Check

Here’s some ADDIE history. After doing an extensive search for the origin of ADDIE¹, I came to the conclusion that no one created the model. It was not the outcome of years of research, or a brilliant point of insight at the intersection of the disciplines that explore how we learn.

This idea is not new. It was, for example, originally published in an article by Michael Molenda of Indiana University, In Search of the Elusive ADDIE Model(Performance Improvement, May/June 2003).

During my halcyon ISD days, I didn’t really care who built the model, or that it was merely “… a colloquial term used to describe a systematic approach to instructional development, virtually synonymous with instructional systems development (ISD).”

Happy New Year 2005 (2013). Now I do.

When Learning Was a Noun

It was around the late 1970’s when ADDIE suddenly became the de facto standard for developing training programs for the US government and everyone else. ADDIE seems to have been adopted as an acronym in all the RFP’s that were issued by TWLA (Those Who Love Acronyms).

That meant that ADDIE had its roots in the Industrial Economy. A time when we managed hands and produced things. ADDIE was useful for helping people develop formal education programs in which knowledge was transferred and tests proved that it was ‘learned’.

ADDIE became the cutout you traced, the “paint by numbers” approach to developing and delivering programs that were the formal start – and too often the end – of your education. ADDIE was popular when organizations were bricks and mortar, development of programs was top down, and performance with regard to training was about getting a passing grade not adopting and adapting what you learned and transferring it back into the workplace.

When it came to really learning how to do anything, ADDIE led to the place where, if you were lucky, your informal education began. That was when you really started to learn how to do something².

Learning is Now a Verb

Times change. Take a look at the following chart to see how different the world of work is today:

Shift Happens

Performance, Performance and Performance

Today it’s all about performance. What can you do for me? How can you do it faster and better? We’re well into the Knowledge Economy (aka Idea Economy), in which we manage minds and produce ideas. We no longer need to focus primarily on knowledge. We need to refocus on know-how and develop a model that supports learning how-to do something. Fix a thing. Make a thing. Come up with a solution. Steps to meet a challenge.

We need to focus on a developmental model that is more than just a “colloquial term”, one that helps incorporate new technologies and new ways of learning. One that enables rather than disables what we now understand as the learning process. A new model that provides knowledge AND is the launching pad for know-how and real learning in the future.

A model that drives a Social Leaning program.

From this perspective, let’s take a closer look at ADDIE and judge how relevant it is today. In Part Two of this blog, we’ll look at replacement model that enables Social Learning.

WARNING: Boring details and research up next!

David Grebow KnowledgeStar

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Other people around the world pray

for what we take for granted.

Give Afghanistan Schools Today (or Don’t Blame Islam Tomorrow)

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The future is a foreign country where

they do things differently than we do today…

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