How to Stop Worrying and Love Instructional Design in Higher Ed
By Kristin M. Neumayer
I recently pitched an instructional design project to the British director of a language academy in Spain. “Oh, we tried online learning last year and didn’t quite like it,” she chimed pleasantly. “We’re old school.”
The debate between old-school teaching versus technology-supported learning had been simmering for decades before COVID-19 (Diaz & Carntal, 1999; Palvia et al, 2018); the global quarantine and mass shift to online schooling merely spiked its temperature (Dhawan, 2020). But now that vaccines have proven effective and campuses have re-opened, many are questioning what labels like “old” and “new” mean when applied to higher education (Adedoyin & Soykan, 2020; Herman, 2002; Villasenor, 2020).
How old is “old-school”, anyway?
The premise that “old-school” professors eschewed technology prior to 2018 is misleading. Throughout the twentieth century, teachers incorporated all manner of rapidly-evolving technology in their classes (Koh & Lim, 2008; Molnar, 1997; Reiser, 2001; Weller, 2018); a Dominican nun taught me how to play “Lemonade Stand” on an Apple IIe back in 1983 (see Figure 1 below). Instead of lamenting our dependence on computers in 2019, we might acknowledge that technology saved our livelihoods by allowing us to teach, albeit imperfectly, on computers we already knew how to use.
Furthermore, we eagerly embrace new technology in nearly every other area of our lives. At the turn of the twenty-first century, when many of today’s professors were themselves undergraduates, Hollywood movies reflected anxiety around then-emerging technology that strikes us as downright comical today: a computer genius uses the name of his deceased son as a password, with dire consequences for the U.S. Department of Defense in 1983’s War Games.n 1998’s You’ve Got Mail (AOL, lol), independent bookstore owner Meg Ryan and big-chain exec Tom Hanks discover that the Internet is a place for bookworms to fall in love but not to buy an actual book. As late as 2000, American Psycho, antihero Patrick Bateman’s clunky DynaTAC cell phone symbolizes his homicidal narcissism (see Figure 2 below).
Twenty years later, however, professors blithely upload their syllabi to the Learning Management System (LMS), check the International Standard Book Number (ISBN) of their course textbook on Amazon, and dual-authenticate their Virtual Private Network (VPN) login before the first day of class. We may have had to teach on a computer last year, but at least it wasn’t on HAL 9000, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) villain from Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 futuristic thriller, 2001: A Space Odyssey. We teachers ought to stop calling ourselves “bad” at technology when we’ve proven ourselves to be quite good at it.
People aren’t the problem
So, how did I respond to my British colleague in Spain? “I don’t like online learning either,” I confessed. It’s true; I felt disoriented, overwhelmed, and incompetent teaching in 2019. Even though I knew my first attempts at a Zoom class in no way resembled a well-designed online session, the experience certainly depressed my enthusiasm for e-learning (Hodges, et al 2020; Lederman, 2021; O’Neill, 2021). But my feelings didn’t change the fact that I was teaching online.; I had to teach where my students were. The same holds true today: as 2021 draws to a close, we should look forward to teaching in 2022, instead of looking back wistfully to 2018.
Some instructional designers believe that if education is evolving, old-school professors should just get with the program and accept teaching online (Heitz et al., 2020). After two decades and a global educational crisis, this argument hasn’t gotten us very far. Instead, we’ve developed discourse on how to work with “resistant” faculty who present us with “challenges” and make our job “difficult” (Crosslin, 2018; Ervin, 2016). However, when we label a teacher as “resistant,” we identify the teacher as a problem. If we approach the teacher as a person having a problem, we can problem-solve together.
U/X (User Experience): A new solution for old-school teachers
An attractive option for instructional designers is the application of a “concierge model” to higher education; McCurry and Mullinix lay out ten “keys” that re-frame instructional design as a premium-quality, high-touch service for online course delivery, in which the professor is more of a client than a collaborator (2017). However, the number and depth of designer-faculty interactions for a customized online course—McCurry and Mullinix envision at least five—might be a negative for a professor who also has advising, research, and service obligations. In fact, many faculty members consider their teaching classes the easiest part of their day. Thus, tThere’s very little practical incentive, then, for them to take on more meetings and tasks with instructional designers, no matter how white-glove the service may be.
Instead, designers ought to conceptualize teachers as users, and themselves as user-experience (or U/X) experts. Conceptualizing teachers as users This means that we stop arguing for online learning and, by default, against in-person teaching. We don’t leapfrog the fundamental role of teachers in their students’ academic and personal lives by declaring that our models are uniquely learner-centered. We no longer compete with a professor’s decades of classroom experience by lecturing them on how students learn. We don’t foreshadow the end of their teaching careers by championing the instructional design field as the inevitable future of education. We stop badgering them for training and consulting and then calling them “resistant” when they don’t reply to our emails.
Instead, we focus less on instruction and more on design. We pay just as much attention to how people use technology as to how they learn. We treat course content like any other kind of content, and design for its efficient delivery. We offer tools that are intuitive, plug-and-play, and training-free, with simple interfaces, big buttons, and accessible navigation (see Figure 3 below). We limit meetings with busy instructors and instead employ class observations, LMS data-tracking, student evaluations, and professor critiques to improve course performance. We accept errors, lags, bugs, and frustration as design flaws we need to solve, rather than instructor ignorance we need to remedy. After all, teachers want from their technology what we all want: to lighten mundane tasks; to connect with others; and to share cool stuff. If we can design online learning experiences that lighten teachers’ everyday chores, create relationships with their students, and make it easy to share cool stuff, we’ll stop debating 2019 and start designing for 2022.
References
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Crosslin, M. (2018, June 12.) Working with Resistant Faculty as an Instructional Designer. EduGeek Journal. https://www.edugeekjournal.com/2018/06/12/working-with-resistant-faculty-as-an-instructional-designer
Dhawan, S. (2020, September). Online Learning: A Panacea in the Time of COVID-19 Crisis. Journal of Educational Technology Systems, 49(1), 5-22. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0047239520934018
Diaz, D. P. & Cartnal, R. B. (1999). Students’ Learning Styles in Two Classes: Online Distance Learning and Equivalent On-Campus. College Teaching, 47(4), 130-135. https://doi.org/10.1080/87567559909595802
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Herman, Peter C. (2020, June 10). Online Learning is not the Future of Higher Education. Inside HigherEd. https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/views/2020/06/10/online-learning-not-future-higher-education-opinion
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About the Writer
Kristin M. Neumayer holds a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she currently serves as a Faculty Associate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. She is an award-winning classroom teacher and experienced instructional designer who spends her free time learning to code and attending her three sons’ soccer matches. Visit Kristin at her website Kristin Neumayer, PhD – Instructional Design & Consulting (www.kristin-idc.com).
I would point out that I never used the words “Challenge” or “difficult” in my post, so its inaccurate and misleading to use my post as a citation for those terms. If you would read my pose, or at least read it again without preconceived bias against me, you would see that the whole point is not to look at the faculty as the problem. But I also don’t view resistance as always being a problem or something negative, so of course I didn’t write it thinking that others would assume I meant it as a problem. Of course, that is just the bigger political problem – some people will always see any kind of resistance to the status quo as bad. People sometimes resist for good reasons, and you can learn from that. Anyways, I agree with your point about how to view people, I am just confused as to how you got that out out of my post.
Hi Matt, thank you for reading the article and taking time out of your day to respond … I hope that you share your comments on LinkedIn, because I think it would start an interesting conversation among our fellow instructional designers!
I didn’t cite your article to contest your ideas, which, as you point out, are not incongruous with my own. Instead, I cite your title as an example of how instructional designers label faculty members as “resistant,” and suggest that we make our own job harder by doing so.
To take your article as an example, readers will understand the word “resistant” in your title as “oppositional” because that’s the most common use of the word. This means that readers must overcome their understanding of your title in order to comprehend your argument.
In the same vein, instructional designers who perceive faculty, prima facie, as “resistant” set themselves up for a confrontation, rather than a conversation.
I’d love to keep our conversation going!