Today was sort of a watershed for me in terms of coming to grips with instructional models. I'm out actively looking for employment again, having been a "house Dad" for a year and a half. Earlier today. Many, if not most of the positions out there in distance education are citing the need for deep understanding of a model of one sort or another. ADDIE comes up frequently, as does ARCS and some variation on Merrill's component display theory (or at least some portion of it) in the advertisements. I'm familiar with, and have used these. My problem with them in the past is that they are fairly rigid and do not necessarily account for the organic nature of the teaching and learning processes, or with the individual idiosyncracies of the instructor or the content? So I have been pondering whether or not I am the only person finding these inadequate for the way I work.
So I am reading the materials in BLENDKIT2014 and I run across this statement:
"Brent Wilson (1995), a pioneer in e-learning, has been cautioning online course designers about the downside of a systems approach for the past decade: An environment that is good for learning cannot be fully prepackaged and defined A more flexible approach will open the doors to more possibilities based on learner goals and needs. However, as pointed out by Bates and Poole (2003), “a flexible approach requires a high level of skill to be effective”."
Yes! That's it. A model is simply a set of guidelines, and a set that may not be completely applicable in every situation. So what can we do to make the model more closely fit the organic nature of the educational process?
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