Participatory Instructional Design: A contradiction in terms

1
Participatory Instructional DesignA
contradiction in terms?

• Rema Nilakanta
• October 3, 2006

2
Agenda

• Research question
• Motivation for my research
• Literature review
• Research design
• Qualitative analysis, context, and participants
• Findings and discussion
• Contribution of dissertation
• Future research
• Limitations
• Acknowledgments and questions

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Research Questions

• What happens when participatory approaches are
  integrated in instructional design?
• What activities and processes were generated
  during the participatory ID process?
• How are these activities classified as PD?
• How did user-designers use language to negotiate
  their way through a successful participatory ID
  project?
• What linguistic forms did user-designer
  negotiations assume in the participatory ID
  project?

4
Motivation

• Instructional Design (Merrill, Braden, Dick
  Carey, Gustafson Branch, Reiser, Mokenda,
  Reigeluth, Jonassen, Wilson) of dominant
  discourse in Instructional Design
• PD (Schuler Namioka, 1993, Greenbaum, Bodker
  Braetteteig,

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Theoretical Frameworks

• Invention Convention (Goodman, 1986)
• From literacy education
• Based on socio-constructivist learning theory
• Participatory Design (Schuler Namioka, 1993)
• Democratic end-user participation in technology
  design
• Work-oriented design
• Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 1995)
• Moves beyond description and interpretation of
  language use to explaining what language does
  and how does it do it (Rogers, 2004, p. 8)

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Research Design Analysis

• Qualitative - case study (Yin, 2003)
• Data
• Weekly meeting transcripts (primary)
• Individual member interviews, documents, email
  (secondary)
• Glaser Strauss (1967) constant comparative
  method for coding
• 5 cycles of coding - from 23 to 8 transcripts

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Analysis sample

• Purposeful sampling (Miles Huberman, 1994)
• choices of informants, episodes, and
  interactions were driven by a conceptual
  question, not by a concern for representativeness
  (p. 29)
• 8 weekly meetings (September 9, 23, 30 October
  7, 21, 28, 2003 January 20, and April 6)

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Coding Process

• insert graphic

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Reliability and Validity Check

• Two colleagues unconnected with the project
  verified my coding (reliability)
• An outside professional from a non-education
  background checked my case report (reliability)
• Member checking to enhance reliability and
  validity of my interpretations

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Context

• CIT Ph.D. program
• Large U.S. university in the Midwest
• In-house funding for one year
• Part of a larger electronic portfolio design and
  development project involving different
  departments
• Limited resources
• one systems analyst and one web design staff for
  all the larger project
• Volunteer design team with other work commitments
• Partial faculty support

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Participants

• Graduate students (8)
• 5 ISU CIT, 2 international, and 1 from the
  English department
• Familiar with educational technology
• Relative familiarity with instructional/software
  design processes
• CIT faculty member (1)
• Systems analyst (1)

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Findings

• 5 major features of the participatory ID process
• Transparency (revoicing, reframing)
• Design Ethos (revoicing, reframing, cohesion, and
  modality)
• Community
• Contextual Design
• Recursive Design

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Data Snippet

• NICK Rema, I think when Dr. D was discussing
  about the grid thing, she was more concerned
  about the Prelim portfolio. Because in the final
  portfolio, your committee is interested in seeing
  how you covered all this criteria and how is your
  level of covering? I remember her saying that
  this particular student needs to address at least
  one of these criteria on an expert level. And
  others should be advanced. So, in the annual
  portfolio, these novice, advanced, expert won't
  be so necessary.REMA so, do you think we won't
  need the grid for the annual portfolio?Nick
  yeah, we may need the grid to show what criteria
  were addressed by what artifact, but not level, I
  don't think it will be necessary..Jakob I'm
  not an expert at how you do things, not at all.
  but I'm thinking perhaps this will be useful
  for the annual portfolio because it'll be a way
  of discussing what your progress is and what
  Nick why don't we let our committee members
  decide on that.Jakob yeah, there's another
  thing I just want to mention is that by designing
  this portfolio we're also shaping somehow the way
  things will be done from now on. If there's a
  grid like this in the annual portfolio then
  Nick it'll provide consistency, yeah I
  understand that.Jakob no, but then it would be,
  it would probably be a part of practice.RICHARD
  so, this is continuous - does the matrix show
  your continuous progress like including two years
  annual portfolio, or just the current annual
  portfolio? If it includes the progress you've
  done in two years then it's good. But, if it only
  shows each year I think it has no function. (CIT
  eDoc weekly meeting, October 7, 2003)

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Transparency Making work processes transparent

• Design meeting conventions such as presenting
  reports took on the form of narratives
• members experienced events vicariously through
  the reporter (experiental learning Dewey)
• Enhanced groups transactive memory (Wegner,
  1989)
• Members knew what each one brought to the table
• Members created a shared history, which helped
  establish a sense of group identity

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Data Snippet

• NICK Rema, I think when Dr. D was discussing
  about the grid thing, she was more concerned
  about the Prelim portfolio. Because in the final
  portfolio, your committee is interested in seeing
  how you covered all this criteria and how is your
  level of covering? I remember her saying that
  this particular student needs to address at least
  one of these criteria on an expert level. And
  others should be advanced. So, in the annual
  portfolio, these novice, advanced, expert won't
  be so necessary.REMA so, do you think we won't
  need the grid for the annual portfolio?Nick
  yeah, we may need the grid to show what criteria
  were addressed by what artifact, but not level, I
  don't think it will be necessary..Jakob I'm
  not an expert at how you do things, not at all.
  but I'm thinking perhaps this will be useful
  for the annual portfolio because it'll be a way
  of discussing what your progress is and what
  Nick why don't we let our committee members
  decide on that.Jakob yeah, there's another
  thing I just want to mention is that by designing
  this portfolio we're also shaping somehow the way
  things will be done from now on. If there's a
  grid like this in the annual portfolio then
  Nick it'll provide consistency, yeah I
  understand that.Jakob no, but then it would be,
  it would probably be a part of practice.RICHARD
  so, this is continuous - does the matrix show
  your continuous progress like including two years
  annual portfolio, or just the current annual
  portfolio? If it includes the progress you've
  done in two years then it's good. But, if it only
  shows each year I think it has no function. (CIT
  eDoc weekly meeting, October 7, 2003)

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Design Ethos Repeated invoking of groups
desiderata

• Cuts across all activities
• While presenting reports
• Critiquing the evolving design
• Updating newcomers to the group
• Seems to have under gird the design process
• Became the guiding light and kept work on track
• Created a sense of group identity and community

Desiderata is the original expression of what
is desired. The designers role is to midwife
that desiderata, which could not have been
imagined fully from the beginning, by either
client or designer and to provide end results in
the form of an expected unexpected outcome
(Nelson Stolterman, 2003, p. 48)
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Dissertation Organization

• Three articles
• Participatory Instructional Design A new
  approach in Instructional Design
• Proposed Journal Educational Technology Research
  Development (ETRD). Springer.
• Participatory Instructional Design Study of an
  emerging paradigm
• Proposed Journal Journal of Educational
  Research. Heldref Publications. Or International
  Journal of Educational Research. Elsevier.
• Critical discourse analysis of user-designer
  negotiation in participatory instructional design
• Proposal sent to AERA session on Critical
  Discourse Analysis journal to be identified. Or
  Linguistics and Education. Elsevier.

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Dissertations Contribution

• Overall Impact
• Introduces and empirically examines a new
  approach to designing technology (software) to
  support learning
• Article 1 (Literature Review)
• Starts a dialogue on integrating PD in ID
• Article 2 (Case Study)
• Studies an authentic case of Participatory ID
  empirically
• Article 3 (Linguistic analysis)
• Introduces Critical Discourse Analysis, new
  research approach, in ID

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Application and Future Research

• How do these findings relate to educative
  practice? (classroom practice group work,
  curriculum design, research design participatory
  research)
• How can CDA be systematized?

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Limitations

• Non-generalizable
• Specific to higher education
• Specific to graduate program
• Specific to educational technology design

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Acknowledgments

• My committee
• CIT eDoc design team and my colleagues
• CTLT staff and faculty
• GMAP, ILET, and eDoc