25 Feb 97
Rob Foshay
I certainly don't mean to imply that the people designing the products on the market set out to intentionally do trivial designs. I only mean to accuse them of ignorance, not intentional malfeasance. The ignorance I have in mind is ignorance of instructional design, not ignorance of content, or ignorance of multimedia design (though there certainly is enough of that around, too).
Without naming names, I can say that one of our more depressing tasks is to review a steady stream of products produced by other companies for inclusion in the PLATO offering. We reject all but a handful, often for what I consider to be basic, novice-level weaknesses in instructional design. Here are a few examples:
- An algebra curriculum (generally well-reviewed by the educational press, and recommended to us by some large school system customers). It had excellent multimedia production values. But in the sections labeled "problem solving" there were nothing but very simplistic story problems of the sort found in math textbooks 20 years ago. No attempt to so much as ask a series of questions about the process the learner is using to solve the problem, no feedback other than "correct," and no answer checking except on the final answer. But it had a really neat pop-up calculator, and another equation writing tool (not equation evaluating, or even syntax checking, mind you). Certainly nothing like situated cognition!
- A middle school science "projects" offering. It opened with a great animation clip of planets rotating around the sun, and a great opening scene setter (something like "you are an astronaut planning a trip to the edge of our solar system..."). But when you got through all the sexy hoo-ha, the actual learner interaction consisted of dragging and dropping pictures and names of the nine planets into linear order from the Sun outward to Pluto. The wrong-answer feedback consisted of having the planet move from wherever it was dropped back to the pool of choices. This was also well reviewed and purchased in quantity by some large school districts on the basis of a teacher evaluation of instructional value, even though the program itself had no published instructional objectives--only a topical description in the teacher's guide.
- A popular "adventure game" in which the object is to chase the main character across history, geography, etc., by "solving problems" which involve no more than recall of arbitrary verbal facts. No attempt at building a cognitive structure, by presentation, feedback, etc., and no attempt at any cognitive activity other than knowledge-level (in Bloom's taxonomy terms) recall. You can buy titles in the series at your local mass merchandiser for $49.95 or so, and they are among the company's largest sellers--have been for years. In the AERA-C listserv, someone recently commented that an evaluation of one of the titles showed miserable retention and no transfer (big surprise, huh?).
- a course on a widely-used skill for machinists, with excellent content provided by a highly-regarded SME in the field. Built in Windows, with great example blueprints viewed through a draggable "window" allowing the learner to "zoom in" on details. The objectives were really topic statements ("The learner will understand about...."), and the questions were limited to badly-written, fact-level multiple choice and variations on true/false--often done with clicks instead of letter choices (presumably because this was interactive multimedia?).
Do these sound familiar? Or, do we only attract the ignorant producers? (If you think you do better, and you're in one of our markets, please contact me!). Do these examples correspond to your mental model of "trivial design?"
By the way, every one of the above was done by a commercial company, and some of the companies are among the leaders in their market segments. Production budgets were in the hundreds of thousands of U.S. dollars for each of the above projects--in some cases well into the six digits.