Discovering Instructional Design 6: Developing Objectives

Continuing this E-Learning Curve Blog series on Instructional Design. In this article, I'm going to discuss:

1. Describing the Target Audience
2. Objectives Writing

Target Audience Description
The Target Audience Description describes the key characteristics of the learners that you're designing instruction for. It assists in the selection of objectives, examples, terminology, typical work practices, and cultural issues.

Typical headings include:

• Age
• Gender
• Culture - organizational / ethnic / socio-economic
• First and other languages
• Education
• Existing skills and skill sets
• Professional and life experience
• Values
• Motivators
• Interests
• Taboos
• Current job
• Career history

An effective approach to elicit this information is to ask the SME to describe someone he knows who would be a typical audience member: what kinds of things would that person relate, react, and respond to?

Understanding organizational culture is important from the perspective of gaining learner acceptance when developing customized training. The instructional designer should find out about vocabulary/argot, typical topics of conversation, clichés, conversation buzzwords, TLAs, corporate beliefs, do’s and don’ts, examples of successful and unsuccessful people and performance; speed of organizational feedback, and symbols (logos, mission statement, mottos etc). Considering these factors will help paint a realistic picture of the people in the examples, scenarios and problems covered in the learning program.

Similarly (and particularly in e-learning and web-based training) there will likely be a need for a visual depiction of the audience profile – age, sex and particularly dress code (i.e. customer-facing organizations typically wear formal business clothes or uniforms, clean room production workers bunny suit).

Objectives Writing
Objectives are the key learning outcomes desired from the instruction. They emerge from the previous analyses – performance, task and goal – to provide the objectives that learners need to have mastered to perform the associated tasks competently.

Classically, instructional objectives have three elements: conditions, performance, and standards (see Table 1):

Table 1 Instructional Objectives

“Given that you are in a high-pressure job,	CONDITION
reduce workplace stress	PERFORMANCE
and lower your blood pressure by 10%”	STANDARD

It's quite common to find aims disguised as objectives in training materials. However, there is a fundamental difference between the two. Broadly speaking, we can say that an aim (or goal) is a general statement of intent. They are not especially helpful for deciding an appropriate (1) teaching strategy or (2) assessment procedures.

Examples of aims include:
• An awareness of the types of breakdowns electric motors are prone to.
• An understanding of how silicon chips are produced.
• An appreciation of potential hazards in an industrial plant.

Objectives are precise: both learner and instructor know exactly what is required to master the learning activity. An example of an aim translated into an objective might read as follows:

The learner will, without using reference materials, draw and label accurately a use case which shows all the stages involved in a human-computer interaction.

Conditions
A performance of any kind will always have important conditions surrounding it. The nearer these conditions can be to the actual work situation, the more accurate the objective will be. For example, it is one thing for a worker to be able to repair a piece of equipment in a workshop with every sort of tool available, but quite another to expect him to repair the same piece of equipment somewhere on-site, far from home base.

Conditions must be realistic. Learners must be asked to carry out the performance objectives under normal conditions. For example, use the Hitachi Chip Etching Tool to set as a condition 'using an electric drill', would be pointless (and irrelevant) if there was no silicon blank, no fabrication facility, or the person concerned did not have a cleanroom space suit.

Performance
A statement of actual performance is of primary importance and is central to writing of good objectives. This performance must be an observable action of some kind. Words and phrase such as "understand," "appreciate," "feel a sense of pride," "know," "feel deeply about," are irrelevant when deciding learning objectives. If you have any doubt about the appropriateness of a verb to describe a performance, just place the phrase "Watch me..." at the start of a sentence containing the verb.

For example,

• Watch me appreciate this piece of hardware (!)

or

• Watch me etch this 45 nanometer silicon chip processor core.

It is obvious which is the observable performance (the second one).

Standards
When developing courseware, instructional designers must consider the level or standard of the performance - how well must it be done?

For example a performance objective describing an activity relating to some aspect of workplace safety demands a 100% standard. If a serious accident occurs, an employee won't get a second chance to do the task more carefully.

Just as the conditions need to be defined with real, everyday situations in mind, so too do the standards. When setting the standard for an objective, always consider the level of performance required in that particular situation.

Next Time: Objectives Analysis

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Knowledge Worker Information Processing - an Overview

The goal behind this series of posts about knowledge working and knowledge workers is to understand something of the audience that most of the efforts of organizational learning and development professionals are targeted at; the knowledge workers (KWs) themselves. Today, I'm will wrap up the series by concluding my analysis of the William P. Sheridan's How to Think like a Knowledge Worker (2008).

I believe that knowledge working is intimately bound within the organizational context: knowledge workers use their skills and experience to innovate solutions to real-world problems. One of the primary conditions of knowledge working is the social aspect – knowledge workers typically collaborate with their peers, whether they are individuals with similar skill assets, such as application development teams working in an agile software development environment, or in project teams which require knowledge workers from different disciplines (technical architects, business analysts, and product consultants, for example) to cooperate in the implementation of the solutions on a customer site.

Figure 1. Human Knowledge Mindmap (after Sheridan)

In this context, Sheridan uses the Human Knowledge MindMap (see Figure 1. to converge the skills and knowledge of domain experts to look at the internal processes a knowledge worker uses to codify and utilize information in a fashion to what Donald Schon calls reflection-in-action.

We can say that the purpose of the mindmap is to enable KWs to "think effectively" (p.13). Most peoples’ thinking, is not clear, focused, or systematic enough to perform knowledge work competently. The purpose of the Human Knowledge MindMap is one approach that enables users to do this. Whether during learning, or on a job, effective thinking consists of a set of components as characterized in the mindmap.

Table 1 Knowledge worker thought processes

Sheridan suggests that to carry out this activity, the worker should do the following:

• Pick a situation, problem, challenge, decision or choice of interest or concern (on whatever basis you regard as appropriate).

Then proceed with the following steps:

• Identify which aspects are of most interest or concern to you.
• Prioritize (rank) your interests or concerns.
• Using the Human Knowledge MindMap as a visual guide, apply the relevant concepts to the most important (prioritized) aspects of your interest or concern (limit it to the top three aspects on your list to begin with).
• If you don’t recall whether or nor a particular concept is relevant, refresh your memory by re-reading the one-page outline.
• From this point apply the methodology as outlined above (this may, in addition to other things, require reading more materials to acquire the necessary depth of understanding in the issues you are trying to deal with).

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References:

Sheridan, W.P. How to Think like a Knowledge Worker:A guide to the mindset needed to perform competent knowledge work. United Nations Public Administration Network, New York. [Internet] Available from: http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/unpan/unpan031277.pdf [Accessed 24 August 2008]

Thinking like a Knowledge Worker

Return again to a topic I looked at recently, here's some insights to thinking like a knowledge worker I discovered while undertaking my research on the subject. The concepts explored here are investigated in much more depth in a paper called How to Think like a Knowledge Worker by William P. Sheridan. I'd love to go into the level of detail that the author does, but to invoke the spirit of Star Trek's Dr. McCoy "For God's sake Jim, - I'm a blog, not a research paper."

"I'm a Doctor, not a blog..."

Moving on...

In his paper, Sheridan asserts that

Knowledge consists of concepts available to process information and guide action. Knowledge Management refers to "smart use of know-how." In a knowledge economy more and more tasks involved "think work."Thinking involves the separation of relevant information from irrelevant information. Therefore, "think work" is a component of "knowledge work," specifically the information processing part - the other part is just the "informed action" part.

(2008 p.5)

The author asserts that by assembling a "Human Knowledge Mindmap" (see Figure 1) we can develop a method to ensure the quality of knowledge worker outputs. He cites the example of W. Edwards Deming's methodology for quality control in industrial economies being "shunned" in the US, but being a key component in the growth of the Japanese automobile industry in the middle- to late 20th century as an example of how ignoring such approaches is done at organization's peril.

The central ideas of Sheridan's approach are Conceptual Pragmatism and Cognitive Economy.

If your question is "How do I know?" then [your answer] will involve some combination of empiricism, rationalism and constructivism. Such cognitive amalgamations do what makes "knowing" possible.

(p.9)

Figure 1. Human Knowledge Mindmap (after Sheridan)

We can say that there are three factors that characterize knowledge:

1. Empiricism (observable facts)
2. Rationalism (thinking things through)
3. Constructivism (formulating new ideas)

While we all undertake all three of these approaches, most people emphasize one of the trio; these "habits of emphasis" lead to partial or at best inadequate learning and knowing.

More...

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References:

Sheridan, W.P. How to Think like a Knowledge Worker:A guide to the mindset needed to perform competent knowledge work. United Nations Public Administration Network, New York. [Internet] Available from: http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/unpan/unpan031277.pdf [Accessed 24 August 2008]