Systematic, Specific, and Scalable Instructional Design
One of the things I enjoy the most about my job in Learning & Development is designing new training programs. I love researching new topics, coming up with ways to present information, and teaching that information to students. There are few things more rewarding than teaching something to a student, seeing the lesson *click* in their minds, and watching them engage with their newfound information in their own unique way. At heart, I’m a creative person, and instructional design is my favorite art.
Over the course of over a decade of teaching, I’ve learned that instructional design requires as much systematic thinking as it does creativity. One of the most useful tools I picked up in the Army is the PADDIE+M Model of instructional design. This model is comprised of seven phases: Planning, Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, Evaluation, and Maintenance. Many people drop the Planning and Maintenance phases of the model, so you’ll often see it called the ADDIE Model (seen below). But I like to keep these phases in my design processes to ensure the programs I design are creative, systematic, specific, and scalable.
I learned to used PADDIE+M when I was developing communications and counter-IED training for military personnel, but I’ve also applied it to my work designing curriculum for college students and healthcare workers. Throughout my time teaching and training, I’ve seen people (myself included) treat instructional design like it required little more than creatively transferring information from a book or a manual onto a PowerPoint presentation. If they’re really ambitious, they’ll use Prezi or Articulate Storyline to make visually appealing and interactive lessons.
But crafting effective learning opportunities is more than simply making a really good slide deck or eLearning lesson. The best curriculum is also goal and objective oriented, clearly connected to a wider strategic plan or mission, executed with precision and detail, reproducible, and cohesive. In other words, designing excellent curriculum is systematic, specific, scalable, and creative. Here’s what I mean…
Bringing Logic and Order to a Creative Process
According to the PADDIE+M Model, instructional strategies must be systematic. This means lessons should be designed and presented in a logical and orderly method that allows the student to easily understand how each piece of new information relates to a wider learning strategy. When we say lessons should be orderly, we mean content and activities should be presented in a sequence that makes sense.
For example, it isn’t enough to design an entertaining and aesthetically pleasing lesson about the Second Defenestration of Prague — you also have to teach the student why this event is significant and how it relates to the overall goals and objectives of the program. And you certainly wouldn’t present this information immediately after a lesson about the Delian League. That would be preposterous! Harrumph!
Simply put, knowledge presented unsystematically is trivia.
Establish the Rules of the Game
PADDIE+M also asserts that instruction should be specific, or every curriculum element should be executed according to a detailed design plan. Think of a class or eLearning module as a game. When program goals are specific, students learn better because they understand the rules and the boundaries and limits of the playing field. Specificity also helps the instructor craft focused, accessibly, and efficiency learning opportunities. Curriculum without rules can easily devolve into a teacher killing their students with 90 minutes of slides and anecdotes about that time he went to Poughkeepsie with their grandparents.
Specifying rules and following a detailed plan during the Design phase of PADDIE+M also helps teachers measure learning outcomes and improve their curriculum design. When you design lessons in a specific and systematic way, everything in the class can be related to a rational and planned strategy. As a result, unplanned occurrences can be measured and contextualized, lesson plans can be iterated, and value-added can be quantified. In a world where Learning and Development professionals need to justify their services to efficiency-minded executives and administrators, our ability to demonstrate context, continuous improvement, and value is paramount to our success.
Crafting lessons that are creative, systematic, specific, and scalable help me quantify the largely qualitative nature of learning, and therefore advocate more effectively for myself and my team. This is where the P in PADDIE+M really helps. A well-executed Planning phase makes it easier to build systematic and specific curriculum during the Design phase. Even more, the Planning phase forces me to connect my programs to the organization’s wider strategic goals and mission and, therefore, demonstrate a greater return on investment to various stakeholders.
Design with a Wider Audience in Mind
Finally, instructional strategies must be scalable. This is where the M in the model comes into play. It seams like every large research grant I’ve ever applied for as an academic historian required some sort of public-facing aspect to my final project. To successfully earn a grant, I had to ensure my work benefited a wide audience. In other words, it had to be scalable beyond the 30 historians in my field who were interested in mental health hospitals during Reconstruction.
The same is true now that I design curriculum for large, multinational companies and organizations. To be truly successful in my field, I need to design lessons that can be packaged and distributed to students all over the globe. More importantly, these lesson have to be designed in a way other instructors can easily learn and teach. It’s one thing to design an emotional intelligence course for 30 people in Palo Alto, California. It’s quite another to design one that can be taught by 30 people across 6 continents.
Your ability to designing scalable curriculum can exponentially increase your effect as a thought leader and teacher. It might even help you earn more money. But it isn’t easy. Every time you start designing learning opportunities, you have to make sure scalability is part of your process. If you do, it’ll be much easier to standardize, maintain, improve, and scale your program for a wider audience.
I never design instruction with the intention of using it once and discarding it. Following the PADDIE+M method allows me to build training programs that can easily be scaled up or adapted to new situations. This makes my work easier in the long run (I don’t have to invent the wheel over and over again) and it also allows me to distribute my lessons to peers, which in turn helps me expand my influence and build my professional reputation.
In conclusion, if you’re someone who spends a lot of time designing lessons and training programs, I really encourage you to take a look at the PADDIE+M model. It will help you enhance your students’ learning outcomes, advocate for yourself, and make your work easier when it comes to scaling and improving.
Allan Branstiter is a Learning & Development program manger at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System specializing in leadership and employee development. He is a veteran of the Iraq War, historian, and blogger with over 15 years of experience designing curriculum.
