Reflective Synthesis Paper

It would be reasonably straight forward to describe an instructional designer as a systems analyst; there are many similarities in the tasks they do. I have created several systems in the schools I have been employed and the process has followed the ADDIE model on each occasion. I said straight forward but I have decided to take a different route: an instructional designer is the player manager of any competitive sports team.

I play Ultimate Frisbee and I am the captain, coach and manager of a team. Each year/season is a new iteration of the ADDIE model, when it comes to identify our goals for the year and how we, as a team, will go about achieving our goals. My team is currently ranked 6th in the country; our goal each year is to maintain, or improve our ranking. This may sound simple, but my team is made up of professional types with families, who cannot commit to training regularly.  It is very important that I make the best use of our training time together and target tournaments that will allow us to field our best squad.

The analysis of the player resources available to me throughout they year is the first step: who can I use, when, and what positions are they proficient in. Not only do I analyze my own players, but I analyze the other teams’ players and their strategies. The information I acquire from the analysis allows me to design a strategy that will work against the other teams and be within the capabilities of my players. To coincide with the strategy, training sessions are designed in order to maximize the skills of the player resources I have available; the analysis and design of the strategy usually identifies a player resource that we need to "acquire" and this is when we try to recruit a tall, fast, basketball player who can help our defense! In my ID role, I try to make use of the resources that are already available to streamline the development, but there are times I need to build something new or buy in a new resource.

The development of the team strategy and individual skills occurs during the training sessions with a constant eye on evaluating each player's capabilities and the strategy. Managing the player dynamics to ensure the best combinations are working together is a vital part of team chemistry; having all the most skilled players on the field at once does not necessarily lead to the best outcomes, and it doesn't help develop the other players as the team progresses toward its goal. In my ID role, I have had to carefully manage and lead the SMEs toward collaborating with each other successfully.

Testing of the new strategies and player resources are implemented at friendly matches and small tournaments which would be considered enabling objectives. These friendlies allow me to evaluate and iteratively analyze the players and strategies I have designed and developed; I also get to see the strengths and weaknesses of our opponents and how they react to our strategies. Friendly matches are an opportunity for captains to evaluate their performance and I use these opportunities to get evaluations from the captains of the teams we play, they are subject matter experts after all!  In my ID/Learning Technology coordinator role, I have attended various conferences and aim to see how other schools have designed and implemented similar projects.

The ranking tournament is the final release of the product that has been developed over the year. All the resources have been built, tested, and fit together effectively to meet the needs of the shareholders involved i.e. the players themselves. How the team does in each round of the tournament requires fast iterations of the ADDIE model in order to adjust our strategies and players in order to meet the challenges of each team we face. In reality, the ADDIE model is being used during every game as I attempt to counteract problems on-the-fly, just as teacher would do if something unexpected occurred during a lesson. Each class is another “team” to face and each brings its own challenges.

“I found out that if you are going to win games, you had better be ready to adapt.”  William Scott Bowman, retired National Hockey League head coach.

The final evaluation of the team's performance after the tournament allows the whole team to review how they performed and whether they did what they were "designed" to do. The strategies used can be evaluated by how well the team performed in the tournament; improving our rank or defeating teams we normally don't is evaluated to have been a success for the team.  The success of the team is due to the processes employed by the instructional designer!

"Fast, cheap, good: pick two", this quote from Larson & Lockee (2013, p227) rings true for me not only in the process of this final project but also in my Ultimate team. Fast, cheap and good aren't the words I'd use for my team, more like "skills, experience, numbers: pick two." In regard to this project, scope was always going to be an issue and as a result the development of the video resources was done fast and cheap! I wanted to use Adobe Captivate 7 and waited for a copy of this software as I have used the previous versions of it. It was my intention to to use the new YouTube export features to create and upload to my YouTube channel; unfortunately, the resolution of the videos produced was too low and I had to use Screencast-o-matic instead. I purchased the pro version to gain better editing quality but time had already run out; clearly, an analysis of the production software should have been carried out too to avoid wasting time.

My past experience with instructional design has mostly been in relation to developing schemes of work that my colleagues and I will use to teach. After completing this course, I see that I have been following my design model that would be described as linear. I have felt in the past that I don’t have the time to constantly look backwards; my colleagues don’t have time for this either, but this leaves me to do the evaluations as I go along. Evaluations from the teacher SMEs only occurs when they are preparing to teach, or after they have taught; these summative evaluations without the formative causes the completed instruction to not be as well crafted as it could be, or as well differentiated if the students of the other teachers need this. The diagram above is the model I submitted early in the course. While I realised then that I was building it in a linear format that didn’t permit backward looking evaluation out of time constraints, I have come to realise that projects that I do not have a complete stake in, like the one I am currently building for the Target Setting and Enrichment Diary, require the SMEs and other stakeholders to review the ongoing progress of the project and possibly alter the whole design if a new element of the analysis appears; this has occurred twice in my project already! As a result of my new learning and appreciation of instructional design and the ADDIE model, I have re-evaluated my model and re-designed it; I believe it now more fully represents what I do in small classroom based projects where I am the key SME, and larger projects where there are multiple stakeholders and SMEs: