In case you aren’t up to speed, I am the lead instructional designer for a virtual lab school trying to develop online courses that don’t look like online courses everywhere else, even at our own university. We follow – or attempt to follow – a specific design model that is constructivist in nature and fairly well-regarded among educators. That model is Understanding by Design by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe.
Why do we use this model? Well, as I mentioned above, it’s constructivist and student-centered. Most online courses are not written this way. You have your correspondence course model where students read some materials and email/snail-mail their work to instructors. There’s also the “flipped classroom” model made famous by the Khan Academy where students move through content at their own pace, watch videos of lectures, and take assessments that either allow them to move on or require them to try again. These approaches do little if nothing to overturn the banking system of education where schools and teachers are the bankers handing out knowledge as they see fit. Yes, this all goes back to Friere somehow, but I digress.
UdB is the model we use. The model prescribes a process of backwards design which most instructional design models (ie lesson planning) would support in one way or another. By “backwards design” I mean that we start with standards or objectives, develop summative assessments that meet those standards, create formative assessments that build toward the summative assessments, and finally develop instructional activities to support the skills and knowledge measured in the assessments. Honestly, it makes sense.
Additionally, UbD includes components to a lesson or unit of study that insure students’ needs are met. There are sections dedicated to engaging students’ interests and background knowledge; building the skills and knowledge necessary to meet lesson goals; providing opportunities to explain or reflect on their learning; presenting activities for application; and assessing the learning. This of course is the abbreviated version. You should do yourself a favor and check out the UbD manual we employ.
Anyway, as we move forward with new instructional design challenges and possibly implementing a new LMS in the coming year, the model appears to need some tweaking. Now, the philosophy and guiding principles of the model will stay in tact, but there are challenges that are not always neatly tied up with this particluar model. For one, we have struggled to find content matter experts (CME) who understand the model. While this might be a case of providing better professional development, it might also mean that we have to meet CME’s where they are. Secondly, we are taking a lot of existing courses that were never intended for this model. It’s the whole fitting a square peg in a round hole scenario.
Of course, this doesn’t even begin to address the research aspect of our project. Since we are a part of the college of education at a R1 institution, we will be conducting research on our courses, instructors, and students. (Not to mention the research that I will eventually have to do as a PhD student.) What if our research shows that this model doesn’t work in this context? What if we test some different approaches and find something else along the way? These are real possibilities.
What I expect is that we will design a new model, one that remixes the original UbD model to fit what it is we do. That’s kind of exciting. I love UbD, but find the template we have to be frustratingly limited. Of course, I test the boundaries whenever I can, but it’s not always easy. (I’ll have to remember to tell you about doing the “Ms. Yetts version” when I write next about instructional design. Don’t let me forget.)
So, for now, we use UbD – a really close version to the original, in fact. Does it fit perfectly? Not every time. Is it the best thing we’ve got that gets us close to our vision? Sure is. And maybe with some well-conceived research down the road we may find that it does fit. Maybe it’s just we who need to be remixed.
Is that 25 minutes? This is nearly 10.5 minutes…
25 Minutes a Day 