Justin Tauber :: Blog :: What is an ed design template?

It seems like such an easy question to answer. Surely, it's just a model that can be replicated or customised to reliably achieve a learning objective. My institution works with Blackboard CE6, and so naturally, when I think of producing a design template for academics, my first thought is to create a CE6 site with the relevant tools. 

But if the challenge is to make academics comfortable or effective with using these tools, then this is obviously both too little and too much. It is too little because a site full of tools is like a toolshed without someone who knows how to use them - a roomful full of junk. We'll have provided access to the tools without providing the know-how required to use them effectively. 

On the other hand, it is too much because the toolshed is also full of tools that in any particular case will be irrelevant, and which will only serve to distract the academic from their task. After all, academics are not professional educational designers, though we want them to be capable of educational design.

It's tempting to think that what is missing is an instruction manual, or training. Here, the toolshed analogy is also helpful. No-one would think of writing a manual for using the tools in a toolshed, or even offering general training in the use of hardware, because the ways in which these tools can be used are as diverse as the tasks to which they are applied.

The situation is as bad or worse in the case of educational design. Telling someone that a blog is for conversing, or a wiki is for collaborative writing, is about as useful as telling someone a saw is for cutting. It is, they are, but so? If your learning objective is to get students to converse, then a blog is for you. But what sort of learning objective is that? Conversation isn't an objective at all; it's a means to an objective. Confusing means and ends is a sure sign that we're letting the tools drive our teaching, when it should be the other way around.

(What's worse is that, at some level, I believe students sense this is going on and feel patronised by the experience. It's like trying to convince someone that playing with scissors is training in art. You only ever do that with small children.) 

Yet, this is the way we often explain the success of effective educational design. We treat the course as an effective vehicle for the use of the tools whenever we say 'This is a really effective use of x'. We should strike this phrase from our vocabulary. It may be useful when talking to other educational designers, but academics (and teachers more generally) aren't trying to use x or any tool effectively - they're trying to teach. (This is a bit of a hard-line position, I know. I'll try to soften it a little as I go on. Still, I think it's an important constraint to put on ourselves as ED's.)

So far, I've mentioned three demands on an ed design template. 1) Providing access to tools, 2) providing the know-how to use them, and 3) keeping the focus on genuine learning objectives. What tough is to see how any template on the toolshed model could achieve all three. In fact, the problem with the toolshed model is that it necessarily starts with the tools, and the tools are (by definition) indifferent to how they're used, which is why it's a constant struggle to return the focus where it should be, on the learning objectives.

II.

Let's return to the original intuition about an ed design template: a model that can be replicated or customised to reliably achieve a learning objective. That seems to put the focus where it should be. However, it exposes a different problem, which is that learning objectives can be realised in an indefinitely large number of ways, and what constitutes the best way of realising them depends heavily on the context. Is working together on a group project or peer evaluation of individual work the best way of teaching students how to accommodate and respond to views that diverge from their own? It depends.

This is all too easy to see. No-one thinks there's a single best way to teach a language, for example. That is, no-one thinks the diversity of means employed is somehow a problem for the very idea of effectively teaching people to speak Indonesian or Russian. What is usually missed is the consequences this has for producing design templates for teaching.

Whatever a design template is, it seems it can't be anything like that first intuition. It isn't something that can be usefully replicated at all.

At one level, this is just the flip-side of a comment I made earlier. I criticised the 'toolshed' model of a template for treating academics as professional educational designers. The problem with a 'replication' model is that it implicitly tries to free academics of doing any educational design at all. 

Talk of customising a template is actually a bit of a red herring. You simply customise such a template in recognition of the limits of replication. The important point is that customisation of such a template is not design at all. After all, the aim of customisation is not to create something, but rather to get something to work. It's a fine line, I realise, but I think it's fair to say that if we encourage academics to believe that the only educational design they'll need to undertake is some form of customisation, we prime them for a very different sort of task.

Moreover, priming academics in this way will probably only make our job as professional ED's harder. Isn't it reasonable for an academic to expect that we are the best people to do the customisation? We built the thing. Surely, we know best how to get it to work! We might need some information from them in order to do that, but wouldn't it come as a surprise to find that we expect them to do any design themselves? In fact, I'd suggest this already describes the experience of a good proportion of EDs. The uphill battle we constantly face is getting academics to be involved in the design, or to understand that design is anything other than a technical process itself.

III.

If not a toolshed and not simply replicatable, then what is an educational design template? What do we want out of a such a thing? What should it do? What's it's relation to the process of building teaching materials, i.e. educational design? Does it minimise it, provide assistance like a guide, or simply offer a starting point? What's it's relation to teaching tools, like blogs, quizzes, etc? Is it concerned solely with form, or can it engage with content? How does a template come to be imbued with learning objectives, i.e. how is it transformed from another copy of the template into an actual course?

In this range of questions, I see the possibility of coming to grips with our own role as educational designers. Perhaps this shouldn't be surprising, giving that a template can be  understood as embodying our expertise. That's how it's received, in any case. Could that be too much to ask? Do we need a more modest objective for a template?

Or do we perhaps need to be more ambitious about the possibility of teaching design through templates? In that case, we need to think very carefully about how you actually teach design, since it isn't simply a matter of teaching a method. A good place to start might be with a reflective exploration of the way we EDs ourselves relate to the tools we use. 

In any case, we can't continue to pretend to know what we mean when we talk about building an educational design template. If we aspire to be reflective educational designers, then it seems to me that this is one thing we need to reflect upon.