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Instructional Design, Learning Objects and SCORM revisited
Alexander Romiszowski
(Educational Technology 47/4, July-August 2007, pp61-63)
The ID+SCORM conference.
As I write this column, in April of 2007, the third ID+SCORM Symposium has just taken place at Brigham Young University, in Provo Utah. Shortly before the event, I accessed the conference description and call for papers. I was directed to several URLs, including one to the paper, published in this journal, that summarized the principal issues discussed at the first of these conferences, held in 2002 (Bush, M. D. Connecting Instructional Design to International Standards for Content Reusability, Educational Technology, 42(6), 5-13, November-December 2002). I had read the paper at the time of publication, as I had been following, maybe with some skepticism, the growth of interest in the creation of learning object economies and application of standards that might facilitate their reusability. I was also directed to a critique of some of the points raised in Bush’s paper, which I had not read before, that was published by Stephen Downes in 2003, in his Blog. This was interesting, especially for Downes’ claim that “…design and reusability are incompatible….. design requires specificity, and specificity prohibits reusability…. conversely, reusability requires generality, and generality prohibits design.”
Is ID really dead? Or is the rumor of its death exaggerated?
Downes also (in his own words) “shoots an arrow straight into the heart of the discipline known as instructional design….. instructional design is not about considering different ways of presenting different types of materials, and different uses to which these materials may be put, in order to foster learning…. the difference is …(like)… the difference between writing a play and creating a game…. the difference between telling people what to do and when to do it, and creating an environment where people decide for themselves what to do and when to do it…. the difference between giving a person directions to the Forum and giving them a map of the city and letting them choose their own route… the difference between the way learning was and the way learning will be”. This line of argument raised counter-comments from many well known names in both the ID and e-Learning standards-development fields. In about equal numbers, these reactions either disagreed with the argument (e.g. pointing out ways in which Downes had supposedly “missed the point”), or agreed and extended the argument (e.g. suggesting that Downes had shot his arrow into the heart of an already quite long-dead “corpse”).
The comments reveal the same split in the distance-learning-materials-design community that was evidenced at the 1990 ICDE World Conference on Distance Education, in the “Neats versus Scruffies” debate. In case readers are unfamiliar with this debate and the “waves” it created for years after, the “Neats” were defined as those that believed in and practiced a prescriptive-model-based approach to instructional design (e.g. the authors in Reigeluth´s “Green” books) and the “Scruffies” as those who neither practiced nor believed that it was either feasible or desirable to seek research-based prescriptive ID models (“research on learning is a backdrop that the designer refers to while creatively and intuitively inventing learning activities, rather than a source of prescriptive rules”).
At that conference in 1990, after initial presentations by four excellent debaters, two for each side, an audience of some hundreds of the world’s distance education practitioners voted, more than two-to-one, for the “Scruffies”. It would be interesting to know whether a repeat of this debate seventeen years later would swing the vote back somewhat towards the “neats” position, or whether the constructivist and post-modern camps would show their increasing strength by carrying the vote even more in favor of the “scruffies”. Whatever the possible percentage changes, there is no doubt that a considerable proportion of practitioners would still take a position that is in alignment with that expressed by Downes in his comments on ID and learning object reusability.
Will SCORM live or die?
The above issue is important, as it raises the possibility that the large investments being made in efforts to develop learning object economies and to establish interoperability standards such as SCORM, may fail to pay off. I therefore accessed the presentations at the two previous conferences, held in 2002 and 2003, to verify whether this issue had been addressed. Apparently it had not. I then looked at the suggested themes of the current conference. According to the call for papers, there were 14 themes, or key issues, that the authors of papers were invited to address. However, none of the 14 themes addressed such questions as return on investment or cost-benefit. I found this interesting as it seems to me that one of the main motivating factors for the birth of interest in design of reusable learning objects, creation of a learning objects economy, and indeed the invention of standards such as SCORM, is to rationalize the work involved in development of new courses, by avoiding unnecessary rework and the continual “reinvention of wheels” – all this in the name of reduced costs and increased efficiency. Has this been forgotten, or is it taken as a foregone conclusion not worth addressing?
However, right from the beginning of the learning objects economies movement and the first release of SCORM standards, I have been haunted by the feeling that the e-Learning profession, while seemingly embarking on a voyage that is both logical and necessary, may run aground like so many other technology-driven initiatives on the unpredictable shoals of human nature and organizational behavior. To illustrate my point, I would like to review some recollections from the past that may indeed still be relevant today.
Some past cases – with future relevance?
During the 1970’s, there were very many UN-supported projects throughout the world that were designing, developing and implementing education and training systems. In the process, most of these projects would generate new learning materials. It was realized that in many cases the projects in one country would be developing almost the same curricula and courses as similar projects in other countries. The ILO, for example, supported automobile mechanics training programs in several dozen countries – a typical case where the content of the required training would be very similar across all projects.
Throughout the early 1970’s it was standard practice for all projects that developed any educational or training materials to send a copy to the ILO headquarters in Geneva, where a samples-library was maintained. New projects could benefit by reutilizing, or repurposing, existing materials, rather than “reinventing the wheel” every time.
In just a few years, the samples-library grew in size so that it filled several large rooms. All projects dutifully sent in copies of their learning materials. But it was found that very few of the projects made any use of the library. There were several possible reasons. The process of searching through the growing store of print-based samples was inconvenient and time consuming. Possibly relevant materials had to be copied and shipped out to a project, or the project staff had to spend considerable time in Geneva browsing through the samples collection. The materials were not developed according to a standard design model, so modules from different samples would be quite different in style and design. The materials designers were not always competent instructional designers, and project personnel were not always competent to judge the quality of the materials, so there was no guarantee that “good” materials would be selected and “poor” materials rejected.
The overarching reason, however, was that most projects had some internal or local contextual factors at play that reinforced the local generation of new materials rather than the reutilization of existing materials. Therefore, project personnel did not even attempt to access and reutilize any of the previously existing materials. The end result was that, one fine day in 1977, just a few years after the start of the samples-library project, all the materials stored at the ILO office in Geneva were removed and burned.
Some of the inherent weaknesses of the samples-library project were recognized by those in the UN who were responsible for the effectiveness of international training initiatives. Therefore, a different form of intervention was attempted. Around 1977, a number of new projects were set up to generate, centrally at UN-agency offices in Geneva, Paris, Turin and elsewhere, libraries of specially designed and developed learning units / modules on many common and recurrent areas of curriculum, which were to be used by trainers in field projects in many contexts and countries. The modules were developed by specialist materials designers (I was one, and trained many others), who followed a standard instructional design model and methodology. They were also highly modularized to a fine level of detail (granularity) so that the training materials for each specific objective were separate and identifiable. These projects did not use the term “learning object” to describe their products, only because the term was not yet invented.
Most of these projects failed as well. Due to the high cost and slow pace of the centralized development of learning materials, and the consequent non-renewal of the necessary funding, they closed down after just a few years of operation. But, before the close-down, a large number of learning modules were produced and made available to the international education and training community. Once more however, it was observed that few of the projects in the field chose to use the high quality, centrally produced, learning modules. The human, organizational and political factors, observed in the samples-library project, were just as evident in the new projects. The arguments for the non-utilization of the materials included such questions as those voiced by the “scruffies” in the 1990´s and the constructivists of today. But really, they were just a smokescreen to conceal the fact that the various projects wanted to “do their own thing”.
Some points for reflection
It is worth reflecting on this 1977 case from the perspective of the year 2007. Many recent information technology developments could go a long way towards overcoming some of the problems and issues listed above - but not ALL of them. Electronic storage could eliminate the physical volume of the materials collections and also make them available on an “any time / anywhere” basis – this is useful provided that the potential materials re-users actually want to access and view the materials. Indexing standards and metadata, such as implemented in SCORM protocols for learning objects could help to reduce the time spent in searching the collections and selecting relevant items – provided the end-users learn to use the search procedures correctly. The use of a uniform set of instructional design standards and methodologies may ensure both compatibility of presentation style and pedagogical quality - provided, of course, that those applying the procedures in specific contexts are sufficiently skilled in their application.
But it is at about this point in the list that the contribution of information technology stops. It is most unlikely that all personnel in all projects will ever be fully skilled and competent in the application of the new technological tools. Mistakes will continue to be made - that is a characteristic of human beings. Also, the existence of technology-based tools does not ensure that they will be applied - personal and organizational philosophies, attitudes, cultures, or politics do not change just because it is technologically convenient for them to change. Many of the problems that were identified in the previously presented historical examples will not be automatically solved by the use of the technological tools of the current wave of e-learning standards innovation. The tools do little to address the pedagogical issues involved in designing, evaluating and selecting high quality learning materials. Also, the tools do nothing to overcome possible cultural and organizational resistance to the very concept of inter-institutional collaboration and materials utilization.
So, a host of questions remain to be answered. How should learning object development consortia organize their work so as to ensure a return on the invested effort and resources? What specific instructional design approaches are most promising? Will the promised “learning object economy” ever become a viable and sustainable reality? Hopefully, some of these questions were addressed at the recent ID+SCORM conference, and hopefully, the answers proposed will be summarized and published, maybe in this journal, in a paper similar to Bush´s review of the 2002 conference.
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