Advancing a New General Education Curriculum Through a Faculty Community of Practice: A Model for Intentional Design

Introduction

In the course of a few decades, the theory, methods, and approaches to instructional design in higher education have changed significantly. Broadly defined as the process of identifying a learning goal or objective, identifying instructional approaches to meet that goal, and developing media and other materials to support the instruction (Gustafson & Branch, 2007), instructional design integrates theory and methods from areas such as educational psychology, cognitive psychology, instructional technology, media, and communications (Brown & Green, 2006). The evolution of instructional design follows two parallel strands of progress: the rise of instructional media throughout the 20^th Century and research into learning theories and how they might be applied to training situations. The two strands came together with the military’s need to quickly train large numbers of personnel during World War II (Dick, 1987). During this time, psychologists and educators used both their knowledge of learning, along with media in the form of filmstrips, in order to develop training materials and procedures for the military services (Reiser, 2001). Implementing a number of approaches and forms of evaluation, psychologists were able to “significantly increase the percentage of personnel who successfully completed the program” (Reiser, 2007).

In higher education, instructional design first became relevant in support of the rise in distance learning. The ADDIE (analyze, develop, design, implement, and evaluate) model (Dick, 1978) quickly became the standard on which numerous models for instructional design in both the corporate world and higher education were built. Hannafin (1992) states, “Despite the proliferation of models and perspectives in systems approaches . . . the differences among models often are related to level of detail, terminology, and emphasis that clearly differentiated foundations, assumptions, and learning paradigms.” While ADDIE and similar models worked well with behaviorist and cognitivist pedagogies, by the 1990’s researchers began to focus on constructivism as a basis for new models of instructional design. One such model, authentic learning (Herrington, Reeves, and Oliver, 2007), contributed heavily to the study described here.

Today, instructional design is understood as both a discipline that has a body of research and a process through which instructional materials and learning experiences are developed. The success of any instructional design model must be investigated with an understanding of the context in which it is being applied. While research and the experiences of practitioners provide evidence of the effectiveness of extant instructional design models, in their work at a liberal arts college that is part of an R1 university, the authors struggled to anchor any of these approaches. Faculty did not see the process as relevant to or integrated with their disciplines. They had some skepticism about research from a field they were not familiar with. Perhaps most importantly, they questioned a process that reduced (they felt) the process of designing a course to a series of predictable steps, something that seemed to undervalue their own knowledge and experience in their fields. It was in an effort to elicit the most effective practices and methods of instructional design from the research and bring them to bear in this specific context that researchers developed the Learning Design Collaborative (LDC), a process that integrates instructional design with a faculty community of practice. In this chapter, the authors share the model underpinning the Learning Design Collaborative and point to future applications for it in higher education. Finally, we describe implications of this work for other practitioners and researchers.