ADDIE - The Generous Generic

Amun dropped the plumb line and checked the wall. It was vertical and there was no doubt about it. Now he had to check whether the side of the pyramid was completely horizontal or not, he placed the two equal legs of the triangular frame on the surface and checked the plumb line again. It dropped down straight, aligning with the centerline of the frame. The pyramid was going to be completely symmetrical – after all it was going to be the abode of the pharaoh in his afterlife. Amun’s job was to make sure that the pyramid deserved to be the resting place of Pharaoh Khufu, and to achieve this feat; he had the tool crafted by the gods themselves – the plumb line!

We the instructional designers and the content creators too have our plumb line, which can help us ensure that our content development processes don’t go awry – it is called ADDIE. To make a process efficient and smooth, we don’t need an array of sparkling new, deliberately complex models – we just need the sweet, simple, and supple ADDIE!

Let’s understand ADDIE.

A: Analysis

The first phase of any content development process should comprise Analysis. Analysis is a term with a wide scope. Analysis, in the context of content development, usually means gathering audience and learning related information and then classifying it so that it could be used to make content more relevant and effective.

Put yourself in the shoes of an instructional designer who has been asked to create a course/training on human behavior for Martians. How would you proceed? You’d probably want answers to the following questions:

1. Is there a need for this course? (Well, there must be otherwise why would someone ask you to make a course? Right? Wrong. Organizational slack often results in demands for training programs/courses that are not “needed.” A confirmation of a training need IS required.)
2. Why is the goal of the course? (The answer could be – they’ve got a negative attitude for humans – they consider them uncouth and ill-educated, and barely up to the Martian standards. This incorrect notion (?) has to be rectified.)
3. What kind of people the Martians are? (What are their attention spans? Which medium, online/on-ground, are they comfortable with? What do they like...and hate? What is the demographics – eg: gender distribution: males/females/androids/machines?)

The three points above sequentially refer to the Need, Task, and Audience Analyses. These Analyses are essential to the success of your courses/training programs; and any content development lifecycle should include an Analysis phase.

D: Design

The next phase is classified as the Design phase. This is the phase in which you begin to makes sense out of the information that you have with you. In the Design phase, you use the instructional design theories and models to give shape to the content that you wish to present to your audience.

The Design of a course should tell us “how” the learning would be transferred. In context of our course for the Martians, the design process would include activities such as: writing the course goal, breaking it down into smaller, more manageable objectives, determining the kind of activities required to provide, reinforce, and assess the learning on the basis of the medium, the audience, and the content.

Thus, if our analysis tells us that Martians have a maximum attention span of 2 minutes, none of the activities could be of more than 2 minutes – and if they hate eLearning, we’d have send a brave trainer to Mars for some on-ground stuff.

D: Devlopment

The Development phase is more relevant to content development in the eLearning scenario. Classroom training material too is “developed” – however, classroom trainers who are also the Subject Matter Experts seldom develop their material in detail.

Let’s understand development through a mouth-watering analogy. When you decide upon the ingredients of cake, depending upon the occasion and the palate of your guests, you design – however, when you actually make the batter by adding the ingredients, and bake it at the right temperature (and when the aroma begins pervading the house and also the street, and when neighbors begin to wonder) – you develop.

So development pertains to the preparation of content for final consumption. In the case of our dear Martian audience, you would develop the content by giving it, its final shape – by writing the trainer’s manual, the student’s manual, and the PowerPoint presentation (all in Martian...of course!)

I: Implementation

When our content is ready, we implement. For on-ground trainings, implementation occurs in the classroom, and for eLearning, it happens at the learner’s computer. Understand implementation as the interface between the learner and the content.

In the case of classroom implementation, the trainer should be adept at using the instructional design principles to ensure that the transfer of learning is complete and effective. Our Martian audience with their short attention spans, for instance, could be a real challenge for our trainer who is used to seeing eternally patient earthlings in her classroom!

E: Evaluation

Evaluation. Well. You know how we’ve got this fetish for evaluating everything – including courses and trainings. The competitive spirit of humans wouldn’t let us exist without the grand finale – the evaluation!

Evaluation comes in two variations (I love the first kind – the second is a bitter medicine – it isn’t easy to take.)

The first kind of evaluation is known as the formative evaluation, which is done to figure out the glitches in the content development effort. This is a pre-implementation activity (sometimes, a mock implementation is done for formative evaluation.) For the course that we created for the Martians, we could’ve had a formative evaluation; by a. asking Mars returned Earthlings to take the course or b. finding a group of Martians who’d want to take it for us (for a payment, of course!)

The second kind of Evaluation is the Summative or the final evaluation, where the real audience somewhat mercilessly takes apart the learning experience, and we gather all the data (including their sighs and yawns) and then work out the kinks in the subsequent rollouts!

That’s all about ADDIE. Now don’t you think that this is the most logical, most generic, and more adaptable of all the content development models around! Get creative, use your logic and carve out your own development model from ADDIE. Don’t worry – ADDIE is generous – it’s always ready to show you the way.

Author: Shafali R. Anand

(Read other articles by the author in Wavelength's Articles Section)