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Understanding Distinctions of Worth in the Practices of Instructional Design Teams
Abstract
In this article we report our research into the concerns and other matters of significance for members of instructional design teams. Specifically we studied how members of a design team depicted the quality of their own motives while participating in team pursuits. This is a type of self-evaluation known as drawing distinctions of worth. Our research took the form of a case study, focusing on an instructional design team at a university in the United States. Based on interviews with team members and observations of their work, we developed an account of our research participant’s distinctions of worth organized around three themes: (a) distinctions of worth could guide their decision-making more than did the goals of the project; (b) competing distinctions of worth could be difficult for them to reconcile; and (c) their distinctions of worth could be accompanied by unanticipated costs. Overall, these themes reflect that distinctions of worth were a real aspect of our participants’ team involvement, and not merely their subjective responses to situational factors. This has implications for those managing teams or otherwise helping teams improve, which we discuss. We also discuss how research into instructional design teams that only focuses on external dynamics team members experience, and not on factors such as their distinctions of worth, cannot fully account for what it means for people to contribute towards team outcomes.
... So, it is important to understand how designers "participate in the culture of instructional design-which entails issues of trust (e.g., Campbell et al., 2009;Schwier & Wilson, 2010)-as much as it is to understand "what instructional designers do when they carry out a project" (Kenny et al., 2005). Neglecting such topics means "the field's understanding of its own practices [remains] incomplete" (McDonald et al., 2021(McDonald et al., , p. 1642. ...
This study reports research on instructional designers’ experiences of trust in the context of online course design in a university setting. Through semi-structured interviews with designers, we explored how trust showed up as a meaningful phenomenon in their experience and how they went about increasing trust in their relationships with faculty members. Our analysis of interviews suggested two major themes related to how trust fit into designers’ working experiences. First, designers experienced at least three different forms of trust: (1) self-trust; (2) trust in faculty; and (3) organizational trust. Second, designers pursued at least two strategies to nurture trust in design work: (1) cultivating trusting relationships; and (2) building trust through buy-in. Given the various ways in which trust was experienced, and the complicated interconnections between forms of trust reported by participants, we conclude by discussing the significance of trust as a key aspect of instructional design practice.
... Because such processes alone do not help designers know how to constructively incorporate emotion into their work (cf. Gray & Boling, 2016;McDonald et al., 2021), we recommend further research into forms of design practice explicitly guided by affective judgment and values in context, along with how that relates to issues of quality. ...
In this qualitative study we investigated the experiences of instructional designers as they sought to build quality into online courses. Through semi-structured interviews, we explored what enabled and hindered their pursuit of quality, how they experienced their efforts in this regard, what mattered to them, and complexities that accompanied this pursuit. Our analysis of participant experiences suggested four themes: (1) connections between quality and designers’ ability to act autonomously; (2) connections between quality and collaborative, team-based relationships; (3) ambivalence due to tensions between autonomy and collaboration; and (4) ways of coping with limits on autonomy and collaboration. We conclude our report with implications for instructional design practice, suggesting that the pursuit of quality often requires creative work arounds and is informed by affective judgements that lie beyond the purview of traditional instructional design processes.
... Forms of excellence have not traditionally been a focused topic of inquiry within LDT research. While there are some exceptions, including the Gray and Boling (2016) study referred to above as well as others (Matthews & Yanchar, 2018b;McDonald, Jackson, et al., 2021), forms of excellence are often revealed as one pays attention to the standards, statements of value, or competencies championed either by individual researchers or by institutions within the field (for an example, see Yanchar, 2018). However, it would be to the field's advantage if researchers more intentionally studied such topics. ...
My purpose in this chapter is to offer a reimagined view of theory in the field of learning design and technology (LDT). Instead of viewing theory as an external storehouse of knowledge, or a rule-like system for professionals to apply, in this framework theory is viewed as an orienting aid that supports practitioners as they refine their personal capacities for perception, discrimination, and judgment. Theory plays this orienting role as it offers insights into LDT-relevant practical knowledge, productive heuristics, points professionals towards opportunities to act, or identifies significant patterns and forms of excellence to which they can pay attention as they attempt to improve their craft. The chapter concludes with some implications for this framework for future research and practice in the field.
... Learning Designers (LDs) also have a strong pedagogical focus but engage more with educational technologies as they work with academics to design and develop learning resources and activities (Altena et al., 2019). LDs are often also involved in training academics in TELT and often report providing more technical assistance with institutional learning technologies (McDonald et al., 2021). The general pedagogical orientation of LDs means that their work is also somewhat well represented in research literature. ...
People sit at the heart of digital transformation in Higher Education. Often, they are ‘Third Space’ support staff, including Learning Designers, Education Technologists and Academic Developers, broadly defined here as ‘edvisors’ – educator-advisors. Edvisors share their expertise of pedagogy and technology to support, guide and lead change in teaching practices but they can be hampered by numerous factors that diminish their ability to contribute meaningfully. While the work that some types of edvisors – largely academic developers and learning designers – do is well represented in research, there has been little consideration of these underlying challenges. This paper reports on a survey of 58 edvisors in 24 Higher Education institutions in Australia relating to their perceptions of how their work is understood and valued by their direct managers, edvisors in other roles in their institution, academics and other managers in the institution. The data were analysed to look for variations by role type, job title, academic/professional classification, gender, and qualifications. Results show that edvisors feel their work is more valued than understood overall but relationships between different edvisor role types can be more fractious than those they have with academics. Improving understanding and valuing of edvisors is vital to their contribution to transformation.
As artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tools become increasingly integrated into highereducation, universities must reimagine their institutional operations to achieve greaterefficiency, enhance practice, and ensure responsible usage. This paper investigates thepotential of generative AI (gen-AI) as a "partner" in collaborative course development,focusing on the changing dynamics and implications of integrating gen-AI into thedevelopment process. Drawing on a case-study approach that combines education and AIliterature with the authors' experiences as learning designers, we examine the shiftingdynamics of third space professional (TSP) and academic relationships when introducinggen-AI as a partner. We unpack current collaborative course development practices andillustrate how gen-AI can enhance existing processes, create efficiencies, and offer newpossibilities. We also highlight the importance of academic capability-building opportunitiesand address the risks associated with an AI-partnered future. This case study contributes toour understanding of gen-AI's potential in transforming collaborative course developmentand provides practical insights that may positively shape emerging partnerships betweenacademics and TSPs.
After a period of “emergency remote teaching” precipitated by COVID-19, academic medical centers are moving into a second, more mature phase in online education. This article offers guidance to institutions planning for this second phase. In it, we advocate a reorientation towards “instructional teams;” outline typical roles and skill sets on instructional teams; discuss the hardware, software, and space required to develop high-quality online courses; and describe common pitfalls experienced by instructional teams along with strategies to avoid them. Our objective is to help institutions hoping to develop high-quality, sustainable online programming to set realistic and informed expectations, allocate resources intelligently, hire appropriately, and work productively.
Many approaches have been employed in the creation of educational technologies. One of the lesser explored approaches is that of participatory design when it includes children as direct contributors. In such cases, specific strategies for supporting the effective participation of software developers and children are necessary. This article discusses a participatory design project that was initiated to support the learning of music students, aged 11 through 17, as they practiced the piano. To design this educational technology, these students worked with a team of piano teachers, their parents, researchers, and software developers over a two-year period. This paper describes challenges that arose as the developers and students worked together to create a new application that supported student learning. The findings include practical strategies that were adopted throughout the design process for building trust, balancing power, and aligning values. Implementation of these strategies is discussed as a way to provide effective support for software developers to empower them to work successfully as part of a participatory design team that includes children. The implemented strategies and suggestions should help others to integrate children and developers as active contributors to the design of educational technologies.
The purpose of this research was to study what university faculty valued when working with instructional designers and instructional design teams to develop educational simulations. We did this through a case study of three faculty, where we analyzed what they discussed among themselves or communicated to other team members about what mattered to them about their team relationships or the design processes they employed. We structured our case report around three thematic issues that expressed how our participants depicted good relationships and processes. Our report concludes with a discussion of how instructional designers could use our findings in their practice.
This case study documented the critical reflective practice of an instructor in a higher education context related to teaching and learning approaches. In particular, the reflections unveiled ways of seeing teaching and learning, learning through sharing experiences, developing technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK), and nurturing professional growth. Cultivating this reflective practice was possible through guided mentoring and collaboration with an instructional design team. Implications for cultivating reflective practice are discussed in light of enhancing the understanding of the complexities that teaching and learning encompass in higher education. Recommendations for cultivating critical reflection through mentoring and collaborating are presented.
We develop and test a theoretical model that explains how collective psychological ownership—shared feelings of joint possession over something—emerges within new creative teams that were launched to advance one person’s (i.e., a creative lead’s) preconceived idea. Our model proposes that such teams face a unique challenge—an initial
asymmetry in feelings of psychological ownership for the idea between the creative lead who conceived the idea and new team members who are beginning to work on the idea. We suggest that the creative lead can resolve this asymmetry and foster the emergence of collective psychological ownership by enacting two interpersonal behaviors—help seeking and territorial marking. These behaviors build collective ownership by facilitating the unifying centripetal force of team identification and preventing the divisive centrifugal force of team ownership conflict. Our model also proposes that collective ownership positively relates to the early success of new creative teams. The results of a quantitative study of 79 creative teams participating in an entrepreneurship competition provided general support for our predictions but also suggested refinements as to how a creative lead’s behavior influences team dynamics. The findings of a subsequent qualitative investigation of 27 teams participating in a university startup launch course shed additional light on how collective ownership emerges in new creative teams launched to advance one person’s idea.
Instructional designers list one of their primary obstacles as collaborating with faculty (Intentional Futures, 2016). Additionally, instructional designers experience a high degree of role misperception and struggle to advocate for clear and defined roles (Drysdale, 2018). In order to address these challenges, I created the Collaborative Mapping Model (CMM), a model of instructional design for higher education instructional designers that puts relationship at the center of design and addresses issues of scale, quality, and empowerment. I first identified four primary roles of instructional designers in higher education by evaluating the industry standard models of instructional design, comparing their structure and usage for relevance to the consultative role designers assume in higher education. The collaborative designer role had no associated model of design, and led to the development of the model. Development was informed by several key theories, including authentic leadership theory (Kiersch & Byrne, 2015), shared leadership theory (Bolden, 2011), and appreciative inquiry (Kadi-Hanifi et al., 2014). After several years of implementation and refinement, I developed an action research study to determine the effectiveness of the model. I administered a mixed methods survey to a group of 50 faculty who had designed a course in partnership with an instructional designer through the CMM. Among other results, 92% of respondents (n=37) indicated an improvement in the quality of their courses and 73% (n=37) saved time by working with an instructional designer in the CMM. Key themes from the qualitative survey question included value and respect for the expertise of the instructional designer, a significant improvement to the online courses designed and developed through the CMM, and enthusiasm for continued collaboration with instructional designers. This study describes the development of the model, an overview of theoretical influences and processes, and the effectiveness of the Collaborative Mapping Model of instructional design.
Keywords: instructional design, instructional design models, collaboration, faculty partnership, advocacy, leadership, course mapping, curriculum design, professional roles
In this manuscript we discuss the consequences of methodological choices when studying team processes “in the wild.” We chose teams in healthcare as the application because teamwork cannot only save lives but the processes constituting effective teamwork in healthcare are prototypical for teamwork as they range from decision-making (e.g., in multidisciplinary decision-making boards in cancer care) to leadership and coordination (e.g., in fast-paced, acute-care settings in trauma, surgery and anesthesia) to reflection and learning (e.g., in post-event clinical debriefings). We draw upon recently emphasized critique that much empirical team research has focused on describing team states rather than investigating how team processes dynamically unfurl over time and how these dynamics predict team outcomes. This focus on statics instead of dynamics limits the gain of applicable knowledge on team functioning in organizations. We first describe three examples from healthcare that reflect the importance, scope, and challenges of teamwork: multidisciplinary decision-making boards, fast-paced, acute care settings, and post-event clinical team debriefings. Second, we put the methodological approaches of how teamwork in these representative examples has mostly been studied centerstage (i.e., using mainly surveys, database reviews, and rating tools) and highlight how the resulting findings provide only limited insights into the actual team processes and the quality thereof, leaving little room for identifying and targeting success factors. Third, we discuss how methodical approaches that take dynamics into account (i.e., event- and time-based behavior observation and micro-level coding, social sensor-based measurement) would contribute to the science of teams by providing actionable knowledge about interaction processes of successful teamwork.
Teams are complex and dynamic entities that face constant changes to their team structures and must simultaneously work to meet and adapt to the varying situational demands of their environment (Kozlowski and Ilgen, 2006). Agencies, industries, and government institutions are currently placing greater attention to the influence on team dynamics and teamwork as they are important to key organizational outcomes. Due to increased emphasis being placed upon the understanding the maturation of team dynamics, the incorporation of efficient methodological tools to understand how teams are being measured over time becomes critical. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to present a review of relevant academic articles detailing the science behind methodological tools and general approaches to study team dynamics over time. We provide an overview of the methodological tools used to understand team dynamics with accordance to specific temporal elements. Drawing from Kozlowski et al. (1999) process model of team development, we highlight relevant emergent team constructs within each stage. As well, for each stage, we discuss the what and how to measure team dynamics. Our analyses bring to light relevant, novel and complex approaches being used by researchers to examine specific constructs within different team developmental phases (e.g., agent-based simulations, computational modeling) and the importance of transitioning from a single source methodology approach. Implications and future research are also discussed.
Teams have been a ubiquitous structure for conducting work and business for most of human history. However, today’s organizations are markedly different than those of previous generations. The explosion of innovative ideas and novel technologies mandate changes in job descriptions, roles, responsibilities, and how employees interact and collaborate. These advances have heralded a new era for teams and teamwork in which previous teams research and practice may not be fully appropriate for meeting current requirements and demands. In this article, we describe how teams have been historically defined, unpacking five important characteristics of teams, including membership, interdependence, shared goals, dynamics, and an organizationally bounded context, and relating how these characteristics have been addressed in the past and how they are changing in the present. We then articulate the implications these changes have on how we study teams moving forward by offering specific research questions.
Contemporary expert organizations rely heavily on cross-border, often temporary teams typically working through virtual means of communication. While static aspects of teams are well researched, there have been considerably fewer studies on team dynamics and team processes. Existing process studies tend to take a cautious, entity-based approach, emphasizing team structure as much as (or even more than) processual aspects. This article represents a shift from studying teams as entities and structures changing over time to studying teams as an on-going process. Participants engage in teaming and thus in the continued making and sometimes unmaking of teams. We report on a study of three anatomically similar, self-managed teams performing the same set of complex tasks with radically different teaming processes. With more or less successful shared sensemaking, the team members collectively create (or fail to create) not only team task outputs but also the team itself.
Instructional design has continued to change and undergo metamorphosis. A key component of this process in higher education is the collaboration between an instructional designer and one or more faculty members to create a robust, quality online course. In this collaborative process, instructional designers are clearly the design expert, while the faculty member is the content expert. However, problems occur when roles are not clearly delineated. Conflict is often reported by instructional designers who feel they are not respected by faculty. Conflict can also occur when instructional designers cross the line and try to influence content instead of providing guidance on content delivery. In order to decrease conflict, the roles of instructional designers and the faculty they collaborate with must be clearly defined. Both the instructional designer and the faculty member should clearly articulate their expected roles in the collaborative course creation process. In addition, written policies and procedures for the instructional design process are crucial to the success of these collaborative relationships.
This study employed a hermeneutic investigative approach to determine instructional designers’ underlying views of learner responsibility for their own learning, and how those views informed design practice. Prior research has examined how instructional designers spend their time, make decisions, use theory, and solve problems, but have not explored how views of learner responsibility might inform design work. Based on intensive interviews of practitioners in the field, this study produced themes concerning how instructional designers balance their own and their learners’ responsibility for learning. Overall, these results suggest that designers feel largely responsible for learning to take place, but are seeking ways of sharing that responsibility with their learners. Other conclusions are discussed and future directions for research are offered.
This study concentrated on individual and team traits of an instructional design team in the presence of a robust relationship between the team members and faculty at a southeast state university in U.S.A. Three exploratory themes emerged from the interpersonal dynamics observed in this qualitative inquiry: (1) expertise, (2) work motivation, and (3) team culture. Preliminary results first suggested that professionalism with a mix of task mental models, assertiveness, and proactivity be implanted in the instructional designers. Then, instructional designers’ growth and survival needs allow for active learning and continuous reflection on curriculum development and instruction delivery in the e-Learning business. Next, loose-tight leadership, collective cognition, and collegiality are rooted in the team culture as the instructional design team becomes established. Implications and recommendations were discussed in the research study.
Drawing and sketching are known to have been immensely beneficial to the design process in many domains, especially those in which the focus is on a tangible product, like a car or a building. In contrast to these design fields, educational designers deal with abstract ideas and concepts – with learning processes which are not easily visualised – either in the imagination or in design drawings. This may be one of the reasons why educational designers are lagging behind other domains in utilising drawing practices during the early conceptual phases of design. This paper presents an exploratory investigation of how three small design teams created and used drawings (inscriptions, in this study) in support of their face-to-face design activities. It presents a new perspective on studying the process of educational design and has implications for the design and development of educational design tools and environments, as well as for training educational designers.
An instructional designer’s values about instructional methods can be a curse or a cure. On one hand, a designer’s love affair for a method may cause them to use that method in situations that are not appropriate. On the other hand, that same love affair may inspire a designer to fight for a method when those in power are willing to settle for a less effective, efficient, and appealing method. The purpose of this research is to explore instructional designers’ values about methods and their willingness to sacrifice those methods in situations involving both lean and rich conditions. We asked 33 instructional designers to rate the usefulness of 31 instructional methods for No Conditions (values), Learning Domains (lean conditions), and Scenarios (rich conditions). The results show that instructional designers readily sacrifice their values for both lean and rich conditions. Furthermore, the precision of designer judgments about useful instructional methods increase as conditions become richer. Overall, the results provide evidence that supports the core principles of instructional planning theory, specifically associated with the interaction between conditions and values. The results also provide instructional designers guidance in selecting the most useful instructional methods.
There have been efforts to re-define instructional design (ID) competencies, model, curricula to reflect complex and dynamic real-world contexts. As part of such efforts, this paper conceptualizes instructional design practice as negotiation between an instructional designer and under-stated constraints that multiple stakeholders bring in. A conceptual framework that connects ID and negotiation process is offered along with implications for ID training programs.
Students complete courses or entire programs in instructional design (ID) and enter the professional arena confident they are prepared to wrestle with the complexities and demands of ID. What many of those fresh to the profession discover is that in addition to applying what they learned in school, they are called upon to carry out a number of additional tasks, often in areas where they have no training or previous experience. This paper reports on the results of an investigation carried out with 22 instructional designers practicing in post-secondary institutions in Canada and the United States. The purpose was to reveal the aspects of professional practice that instructional designers felt were important, but that were outside the traditional boundaries and training of instructional design. Through focus groups and e-mail discussions, we identified several roles that instructional designers described as important, but were peripheral to the traditional standards of practice and competencies in instructional design.
Despite on-going debate about credibility, and reported limitations in comparison to other approaches, case study is an increasingly popular approach among qualitative researchers. We critically analysed the methodological descriptions of published case studies. Three high-impact qualitative methods journals were searched to locate case studies published in the past 5 years; 34 were selected for analysis. Articles were categorized as health and health services (n=12), social sciences and anthropology (n=7), or methods (n=15) case studies. The articles were reviewed using an adapted version of established criteria to determine whether adequate methodological justification was present, and if study aims, methods, and reported findings were consistent with a qualitative case study approach. Findings were grouped into five themes outlining key methodological issues: case study methodology or method, case of something particular and case selection, contextually bound case study, researcher and case interactions and triangulation, and study design inconsistent with methodology reported. Improved reporting of case studies by qualitative researchers will advance the methodology for the benefit of researchers and practitioners.
Prescriptive stage models have been found insufficient to describe the dynamic aspects of designing, especially in interdisciplinary e-learning design teams. There is a growing need for a systematic empirical analysis of team design processes that offer deeper and more detailed insights into instructional design (ID) than general models can offer. In this paper we present findings from two case studies of team design meetings involved in the development of fully online courses at two well-established European Distance Universities. We applied an activity-based approach to an extended verbal protocol dataset. This method proved to be adequate to describe the emerging team design process by taking into account both cognitive and social aspects of team activity in this specific context. Our findings provide evidence that design is more than problem solving, mainly because the design process is strongly related to the communication process in a team. Some useful patterns of designing emerge, which shed light on the still implicit nature of ID performed by teams. We conclude by presenting guidelines for team designing in the complex field of e-learning.
The purpose of this literature review was to determine what evidence there is that instructional designers apply ID Models, as well as to establish what other activities and processes they might use in their professional activities. Only ten articles were located that directly pertained to this topic: seven reporting on empirical research and three case descriptions recounting development experiences. All ten papers pertained to process-based ID models. Results showed that, while instructional designers apparently do make use of process-based ID models, they do not spend the majority of their time working with them nor do they follow them in a rigid fashion. They also engage in a wide variety of other tasks that are not reflected in ID models.
If we want to empower and re-enchant social scientific research, we need to do three things. First, we must drop all pretence, however indirect, at emulating the success of the natural sciences in producing cumulative and predictive theory, for their approach simply does not work in any of the social sciences. (For the full argument see Flyvbjerg, 2001.) Second, we must address problems that matter to groups in the local, national and global communities in which we live, and we must do it in ways that matter; we must focus on issues of context, values and power, as advocated by great social scientists from Aristotle and Machiavelli to Max Weber and Pierre Bourdieu. Finally, we must effectively and dialogically communicate the results of our research to our fellow citizens, the ‘public’, and carefully listen to their feedback. If we do this – focus on specific values and interests in the context of particular power relations – we may successfully transform social scientific research into an activity performed in public for publics, sometimes to clarify, sometimes to intervene, sometimes to generate new perspectives, and always to serve as eyes and ears in ongoing efforts to understand the present and to deliberate about the future. We may, in short, arrive at social research that matters.
This article aims to review teamwork and the creation of effective teams within healthcare.
By combining research material found in management, psychology and health services research the article explores the drivers increasing the importance of teamwork, reviews the current knowledge base on how to build a team and focuses on some of the barriers to effective team performance.
The simultaneous inflation of healthcare costs and necessity to improve quality of care has generated a demand for novel solutions in policy, strategy, commissioning and provider organisations. A critical, but commonly undervalued means by which quality can be improved is through structured, formalised incentivisation and development of teams, and the ability of individuals to work collectively and in collaboration. Several factors appear to contribute to the development of successful teams, including effective communication, comprehensive decision making, safety awareness and the ability to resolve conflict. Not only is strong leadership important if teams are to function effectively but the concept and importance of followership is also vital.
Building effective clinical teams is difficult. The research in this area is currently limited, as is the authors' understanding of the different requirements faced by those working in different areas of the health and social care environment.
This article provides a starting place for those interested in leading and developing teams of clinicians.
This paper offers an emerging interpretive framework for understanding the active role instructional designers play in the
transformation of learning systems in higher education. A 3-year study of instructional designers in Canadian universities
revealed how, through reflexive critical practice, designers are active, moral, political, and influential in activating change
at interpersonal, professional, institutional and societal levels. Through narrative inquiry the voices of designers reflect
the scope of agency, community and relational practice in which they regularly engage with faculty in institutions of higher
learning.
In this paper we offer a call for the development and utilization of originary theory in instructional design. Originary theory, which is generated by scholars within the field of its intended application, can be contrasted with imported theory, which is formulated in one field and later moved or “imported” into another for new purposes. In making our argument we first review the use of theories imported into instructional design and address limitations that might arise if these theories are overly relied upon, such as if they are treated as the primary source of insight for supporting the work of practitioners. Next, we define originary theory and argue that it should be emphasized within the field of instructional design because of the central role it can play in facilitating the field’s work of designing and developing excellent learning experiences. We further explore how originary theories can support instructional design practice by considering two examples of recent theoretical work that speak to the values, and challenge the assumptions, of instructional designers, disclosing aspects of the field that can help them better accomplish their work. First, we consider originary theory that conceptualizes instructional design as a design discipline; and second, we review originary theorizing that provides alternatives to common views about learners and learning. We conclude by considering what it might mean for the field to more intentionally develop and apply originary instructional design theory.
Was a problematic team always doomed to frustration, or could it have ended another way? In this paper, we study the consistency of team fracture: a loss of team viability so severe that the team no longer wants to work together. Understanding whether team fracture is driven by the membership of the team, or by how their collaboration unfolded, motivates the design of interventions that either identify compatible teammates or ensure effective early interactions. We introduce an online experiment that reconvenes the same team without members realizing that they have worked together before, enabling us to temporarily erase previous team dynamics. Participants in our study completed a series of tasks across multiple teams, including one reconvened team, and privately blacklisted any teams that they would not want to work with again. We identify fractured teams as those blacklisted by half the members. We find that reconvened teams are strikingly polarized by task in the consistency of their fracture outcomes. On a creative task, teams might as well have been a completely different set of people: the same teams changed their fracture outcomes at a random chance rate. On a cognitive conflict and on an intellective task, the team instead replayed the same dynamics without realizing it, rarely changing their fracture outcomes. These results indicate that, for some tasks, team fracture can be strongly influenced by interactions in the first moments of a team's collaboration, and that interventions targeting these initial moments may be critical to scaffolding long-lasting teams.
Digital transformation encompasses an organization’s ability to adapt, respond, and position itself for success in the face of rapid technology evolution. This article describes our findings from a multi-level study of the IT function of 60 companies, including fieldwork at 5 company sites involving more than 130 semi-structured interviews with senior level IT professionals. We identify three essential levers of IT culture that enable digital transformation. These include new governance structures, entrepreneurial processes, and specific leader behaviors. We describe how chief information officers (CIOs) are using these levers to move their IT organizations forward in the journey towards digital transformation.
With empirical research on team resilience on the rise, there is a need for an integrative conceptual model that delineates the essential elements of this concept and offers a heuristic for the integration of findings across studies. To address this need, we propose a multilevel model of team resilience that originates in the resources of individual team members and emerges as a team‐level construct through dynamic person–situation interactions that are triggered by adverse events. In so doing, we define team resilience as an emergent outcome characterized by the trajectory of a team's functioning, following adversity exposure, as one that is largely unaffected or returns to normal levels after some degree of deterioration in functioning. This conceptual model offers a departure point for future work on team resilience and reinforces the need to incorporate inputs and process mechanisms inherent within dynamic interactions among individual members of a team. Of particular, importance is the examination of these inputs, process mechanisms and emergent states, and outcomes over time, and in the context of task demands, objectives, and adverse events.
Practitioner points
• Team resilience as a dynamic, multilevel phenomenon requires clarity on the individual‐ and team‐level factors that foster its emergence within occupational and organizational settings.
• An understanding of the nature (e.g., timing, chronicity) of adverse events is key to studying and intervening to foster team resilience within occupational and organizational settings.
This breakthrough volume examines innovative stops on the journey from educational design to learning design, paralleling the shifting focus of education from teachers to learners. As part of the academic quest to understand how learning actually occurs, the book identifies technologies and processes most relevant to learning design so that designers can create products geared toward more meaningful experience. Fascinating case studies illustrate diverse aspects and applications of learning design, from new ideas in pedagogy and collaboration to designing a learning model for preserving the Kiowa language. In these pages, contributors model a future for education that is learner-centered, ubiquitous, and inclusive.
Among the featured topics:
• Promoting learner-centered instruction through the design of contextually relevant experiences.
• The multifaceted endeavor of online teaching: the need for a new lens.
• Mastery learning within accelerated nursing learning environments.
• Using ubiquitous learning techniques to build competency in science, technology, engineering, and math: a sySTEMic approach.
• Designing authentic educational experiences through virtual service learning.
• Instructional design as feminist practice.
The Design of the Learning Experience will find an interested audience among educators, education researchers, instructional designers, and others keeping up with the evolution that is educational design.
This book provides a comprehensive analysis of cutting edge research studies on contemporary instructional design practices. Written for instructional designers, instructional technologists and researchers in the field, it provides state of the art, practically focused information and guidelines for designing curriculum and professional ID practice. The author compares professional instructional design practices with the competencies established by the International Board for Training, Performance, and Instruction to evaluate and investigate their effectiveness and increase the efficiency of the entire instructional design process.
While several professionals, organizations and departments may be a part of the instructional designing process usually faculty, instructional designers, and administrators are key stakeholders and collaborators. Although there are some studies related to the process of instructional designing, there is little by way of research that has investigated the stakeholders’ perceptions of the key characteristics of effective collaboration within instructional designing projects. Thus, there is a gap in our understanding of the phenomenon of instructional designing project collaboration. This hermeneutic phenomenological study seeks to add to the literature by sharing the perceptions of seven stakeholders in different roles, who have collaborative instructional designing experiences within Midwestern higher education institutions. Practitioner and research implications are also discussed. The data revealed nine core characteristics perceived as crucial to effective collaboration within instructional design projects. These characteristics are discussed using the metaphor and associated acronym of CHAMELEON (Communication, Humility, Adaptability, Mentorship, Empathy, Looping, Engagement, Oscillation, Networking).
This chapter offers an analysis of the value of competency standards and other positions on the nature of instructional design practice. Drawing on practice theory as a philosophical perspective – including arguments pertaining to human agency, identity, moral realism, and practical involvement – this chapter suggests how competency standards contribute to the discipline’s broader moral ecology, understood as a practical context for work in the field that includes real moral goods and reference points as guiding values. This chapter suggests that these moral goods and reference points grant the profession direction and purpose, and provide a meaningful context for the development of instructional designers’ professional identities. Given the role that competency standards and related proposals can play in the moral ecology of the field, they warrant serious consideration and discussion. This paper also discusses the limitations of current competency standards and suggests how, from the perspective of practice theory, they could be usefully expanded.
The notion of designer empathy has become a cornerstone of design philosophy in fields such as product design, human-computer interaction, and service design. But the literature on instructional designer empathy and learner analysis suggests that distance learning designers are generally quite removed from the learners with whom they could be empathizing. We describe a qualitative study conducted with practicing distance learning designers across the United States. We selected designers in varying sectors within the workforce, and interviewed our participants via videoconferencing. Our inquiry uncovered important tensions designers live with regarding empathy in practice. Designers struggle to know how much learner analysis is sufficient, which of many stakeholders to empathize with, and navigating constraints. Future work in this area could help designers practice more empathically and, in doing so, improve the learning environments they create for learners.
Moral realism has been advanced as a central theme in contemporary hermeneutic thought. From this standpoint, participation in cultural practices is made possible and meaningful by ontologically real moral goods and reference points. Cultural practices thus constitute a moral referential totality for human action. This paper suggests that these and related hermeneutic insights offer a unique perspective for taking account of practical involvement in the world, and thus can form the basis of an interpretive frame for research that foregrounds this practice-based moral realism. An emphasis on moral realist concepts such as participation in practice, distinctions of worth, strong evaluations, and moral reference points can allow interrelated phenomena to show up as aspects of a moral ecology and reveal something about their moral significance within a form of practice. Moreover, inquiry of this sort can reveal something about that form of practice as a space of moral possibilities for action.
The exponential growth in technological capability has resulted in increased interest on the short- and long-term effects of designed artifacts, leading to a focus in many design fields on the ethics and values that are inscribed in the designs we create. While ethical awareness is a key concern in many engineering, technology, and design disciplines—even an accreditation requirement in many fields—instructional design and technology (IDT) has not historically focused their view of practice on ethics, instead relying on a more scientistic view of practice which artificially limits the designer’s interaction with the surrounding society through the artifacts and experiences they design. In this paper, we argue for a heightened view of designer responsibility and design process in an ethical framing, drawing on methods and theoretical frameworks of ethical responsibility from the broader design community. We then demonstrate the frequency of ethical concerns that emerge in a content analysis of design cases that document authentic instructional design practice. We conclude with two paths forward to improve instructional design education and research regarding the nature of practice, advocating for increased documentation of design precedent to generatively complicate our notions of the design process, and for the creation and use of critical designs to foreground ethical and value-related concerns in IDT research and practice.
To what extent does collaboration impact complex ill-structured design? This research project focused on design meetings held during the first year of a 5-year, grant-supported effort to develop an innovative, 6-day course that integrates cutting-edge radiation physics and radiobiology content aimed at physicians and researchers working in the field of radiation oncology. The data set included over 568 pages, 208,842 words of written transcripts of a total of 15 two-hour meetings held over 6 months. Results indicate that designers use collaboration to manage constraints throughout the design process, inclusive leadership and decisive leadership are both used to keep the design process moving forward and designers use collaboration to build and rebuild prototypes in order to envision and refine solutions.
In this study, we address the relative lack of rigorous research on instructional design (ID) practice via an exploratory study in which pairs of researchers observed design judgments made by eight practicing instructional designers in two consulting environments as they went about their normal work activities. In our analysis, we sought to characterize their practice on its own terms, rather than through superimposition of existing ID models or frameworks. A nonprescriptive, philosophical framework of design judgment by Nelson and Stolterman (2012) was operationalized and used to frame two phases of analysis: identifying and coding design judgments and creating holistic summaries of the observed practice. We found that design judgments occur quite frequently throughout design, often in clustered or layered ways, rather than in “pure” forms. These judgments appeared to be shaped by factors unique to the firm, the role or position of the designer, and project, client, or other external factors.
This study focused on the role of collaboration in a comprehensive programme design process in inclusive education. The participants were six members of an inclusive education team and an educational designer who together comprised the design team. The study examined whether collaboration was evident in the practice of programme design and associated institutional processes. This was determined through an examination of institutional documents and reflections on collaborative practice provided by design team members in semi-structured interviews about their experiences. The study found that designing the programme collaboratively was more time intensive and at times challenging but ultimately produced a more coherent programme with transparent design, structure and content for students and teachers.
High-quality online courses can result from collaborative instructional design and development approaches that draw upon the diverse and relevant expertise of faculty design teams. In this reflective analysis of design and pedagogical practice, the authors explore a collaborative instructional design partnership among education faculty, including the course instructors, which developed while co-designing an online graduate-level course at a Canadian University. A reflective analysis of the collaborative design process is presented using an adapted, four-fold curriculum design framework. Course instructors discuss their approaches to backward instructional design and describe the digital tools used to support collaboration. Benefits from collaborative course design, including ongoing professional dialogue and peer support, academic development of faculty, and improved course design and delivery, are described. Challenges included increased time investment for instructors and a perception of increased workload during design and implementation of the course. Overall, the collaborative design team determined that the course co-design experience resulted in an enhanced course design with meaningful assessment rubrics, and offered a valuable professional learning and online teaching experience for the design team.
The idea that the human world contains moral properties, that is, moral values and goods, raises a fundamental challenge to the prevailing methodological paradigm in psychology, which is connected to a problematic metaphysical worldview that excludes values from the world. In contrast, this article conceptualizes the human world as a moral ecology; as a meaningful world with moral properties that present human beings with moral reasons for action. The concept of social practice is employed to understand the nature of moral ecology. Thinkers such as Aristotle, Heidegger and Dewey, who emphasize our practical dealings with the world as the basis of understanding, along with the perspectives on morality found in Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre, help provide the framework of moral ecology. The article concludes by addressing key problems related to the nature of psychology, relativism and identification of moral properties and practices.
Hermeneutic phenomenology sets out to describe human beings as they show up in “average everydayness,” prior to high-level theorizing and reflection. From this standpoint, human existence is found to be meaning- and value-laden, and so in need of interpretation in order to be properly understood. The description of everydayness leads to a critique of the “substance ontology” presupposed by many natural sciences, and instead characterizes a human being as an “event” or “life story” unfolding between birth and death. Working within this approach to understanding humans as events, the philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) gives an account of what he calls an “authentic” (literally, “proper” or “owned”) individual. This account gives us a distinctive way of understanding what it is to be a “person” in the fullest sense of this word. A person, on this account, is an individual who can assess her primary desires in the light of “higher” or “second-order” motivations concerning what sort of person she wants to be. As a participant in a social context, she is indebted to the historical tradition of a community for her possibilities of self-interpretation and self-evaluation. In a social context, she can be a “respondent,” answerable for what she does. And she is equipped to be an effective moral agent in facing situations demanding decisions. An authentic individual or “person” has a kind of freedom that makes meaningful choice possible.
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to examine the effectiveness of self-managed work teams in government organizations. The article discussed three distinct indicators to organizational effectiveness: participant satisfaction, goal attainment, and system resources.
Design/Methodology/Approach
Hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling (SEM). Data were collected from a national survey of 176 city government employees from 24 American cities.
Findings
Both self-management and teamwork were positively related to resource attainment. The study also found that teamwork related positively to job satisfaction as well as team performance. In addition, both self-management and teamwork were indirectly associated with team members’ job satisfaction through team resource attainment.
Implications
The central implication is that self-managed work teams can improve the effectiveness of organizational practice. However, the effect of self-managed work teams varies in terms of different indicators of effectiveness. Teamwork is a more powerful tool to increase organizational effectiveness than the self-management factor.
Originality/Value
The most significant contribution of this study comes in the investigation of complex causal relationships among the effectiveness indicators and factors about self-managed work teams. These findings offer a more realistic model of how self-managed work teams achieve effectiveness.
Participational agency is presented as a conceptual account of human action, volition, and possibility. Rooted in hermeneutic and narrative traditions, this view differs from other theorizing about agency (and most psychological theorizing in general) in that it makes no effort to explain human action by virtue of reified constructs. As an alternative to traditional theorizing in this area, participational agency is defined as meaningful engagement in the world and treats the experienced meaningfulness of practical human activity as its central feature. The concept of meaningful engagement is clarified through the presentation of four related themes—situated participation, existential concern, dispositional action, and narrative orientation. Finally, the author offers several implications of this view of agency for theory and research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)