© Flexible Learning Australia, 2014
Click on the graphic for the interactive version © Flexible Learning Australia, 2014

Chapter 5 of my open textbook, ‘Teaching in a Digital Age‘, is now published. In Chapter 5, I developed the concept of a learning environment.

I am now working on Chapter 6, ‘Models for Designing Teaching and Learning.’ In my last post I discussed the appropriateness of the classroom design model for a digital age. In this post, I explore the same issue for the ADDIE model.

What is ADDIE?

ADDIE stands for:

Analyse

  • identify all the variables that need to be considered when designing the course, such as learner characteristics, learners’ prior knowledge, resources available, etc.  This stage is similar to describing the learning environment outlined in Chapter 5.

Design

  • this stage focuses on identifying the learning objectives for the course and how materials will be created and designed (for instance, it may include describing what content areas are to be covered and a storyboard outlining what will be covered in text, audio and video and in what order), and deciding on the selection and use of technology, such as an LMS, video or social media

Develop

  • the creation of content, including whether to develop in-house or outsource, copyright clearance for third party materials, recording videos or audio, loading of content into a web site or LMS, etc.

Implement

  • this is the actual delivery of the course, including any prior training or briefing of learner support staff, and student assessment

Evaluate

  • feedback and data is collected in order to identify areas that require improvement and this feeds into the design, development and implementation of the next iteration of the course.

The interactive infographic above provides an in-depth, step-by-step approach to the design of learning, with lots of online resources to draw on. There have been many books written about the ADDIE model (see for instance, Morrison, 2010; Dick and Carey, 2004).

Where is ADDIE used?

This is a design model used by many professional instructional designers for technology-based teaching. ADDIE has been almost a standard for professionally developed, high quality distance education programs, whether print-based or online. It is also heavily used in corporate e-learning and training. There are many variations on this model (my favourite is ‘PADDIE’, where planning and/or preparation are added at the start). The model is mainly applied on an iterative basis, with evaluation leading to re-analysis and further design and development modifications.

One reason for the widespread use of the ADDIE model is that it is extremely valuable for large and complex teaching designs. ADDIE ‘s roots go back to the Second World War and derive from system design, which was developed to manage the hugely complex Normandy landings.

The Open University in the United Kingdom heavily uses ADDIE to manage the design of complex multi-media distance education courses. When the OU opened in 1971 with an initial intake of 20,000, it used radio, television, specially designed printed modules, text books, reproduced research articles in the form of selected readings that were mailed to students, and regional study groups, with teams of often 20 academics, media producers and technology support staff developing courses, and with delivery and learner support provided by an army of regional tutors and senior counsellors. Creating and delivering its first courses without systematic instructional design model would have been impossible, and in 2014, with over 200,000 students, the OU still employs a strong instructional design model based on ADDIE.

Although ADDIE and instructional design in general originated in the USA, the Open University’s success in developing high quality learning materials influenced many more institutions that were offering distance education on a much smaller scale to adopt the ADDIE model, if on a more modest scale. As distance education courses became increasingly developed as online courses, the ADDIE model continued, and is now being used by instructional designers in many institutions for the re-design of large lecture classes, hybrid learning, and for fully online courses.

What are the benefits of ADDIE?

One reason it has been so successful is that it is heavily associated with good quality design, with clear learning objectives, carefully structured content, controlled workloads for faculty and students, integrated media, relevant student activities, and assessment strongly tied to desired learning outcomes. Although these good design principles can be applied with or without the ADDIE model, it is a model that allows these design principles to be identified and implemented on a systematic and thorough basis. It is also a very useful management tool, allowing for the design and development of large numbers of courses to a standard high quality.

What are the limitations of ADDIE?

The ADDIE approach can be used with any size of teaching project, but works best with large and complex projects. Applied to courses with small student numbers and a deliberately simple or traditional classroom design, it becomes expensive and possibly redundant, although there is nothing to stop an individual teacher following this strategy when designing and delivering a course.

A second criticism is that the ADDIE model is what might be called ‘front-end loaded’ in that it focuses heavily on content design and development, but does not pay as much attention to the interaction between instructors and students during course delivery. It has been criticised by constructivists for not paying enough attention to learner-instructor interaction, and for privileging more behaviourist approaches to teaching.

Another criticism is that while the five stages are reasonably well described in most descriptions of the model, it does not provide guidance on how to make decisions within that framework. For instance, it does not provide guidelines or procedures for deciding how to choose between different technologies, or what assessment strategies to use. Instructors have to go beyond the ADDIE framework to make these decisions.

The over-enthusiastic application of the ADDIE model can and has resulted in overly complex design stages, with many different categories of workers (faculty, instructional designers, editors, web designers) and consequently a strong division of labour, resulting in courses taking up to two years from initial approval to actual delivery. The more complex the design and management infrastructure, the more opportunities there are for cost over-runs and very expensive programming.

My main criticism though is that the model is too inflexible for the digital age. Adamson (2012) states:

The systems under which the world operates and the ways that individual businesses operate are vast and complex – interconnected to the point of confusion and uncertainty. The linear process of cause and effect becomes increasingly irrelevant, and it is necessary for knowledge workers to begin thinking in new ways and exploring new solutions.

In particular knowledge workers must deal with situations and contexts that are volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (what Adamson calls a VUCA environment). This certainly applies to teachers working with ever changing technologies, very diverse students, a rapidly changing external world that puts pressure on institutions to change.

If we look at course design, how does a teacher respond to rapidly developing new content, new technologies or apps being launched on a daily basis, to a constantly changing student base? For instance, even setting prior learning outcomes is fraught in a VUCA environment, unless you set them at an abstract ‘skill’ level such as thinking flexibly, networking, and information retrieval and analysis. Students need to develop the key knowledge management skills of knowing where to find relevant information, how to assess, evaluate and appropriately apply such information. This means exposing them to less than certain knowledge and providing them with the skills, practice and feedback to assess and evaluate such knowledge then apply that to solving real world problems.

This means designing learning environments that are rich and constantly changing, but enable students to develop and practice the skills and acquire the knowledge they will need in a VUCA world. I would argue that while the ADDIE model has served us well in the past, it is too pre-determined, linear and inflexible to handle this type of learning. I will discuss more flexible models later in this chapter.

Over to you

1. Have I given enough information about what ADDIE is, by using the infographic, or do I need to cover this more fully in the text? Do I need to say something about rapid course development here?

2. What are your views on the ADDIE model? Is it a useful model for designing teaching in a digital age? Do you agree with my criticisms of the model?

3. Any suggestions about other, more flexible models that could be used?

What’s next

So far I have done drafts of the following (as blogs)

  • What is a design model?
  • The classroom model
  • Classroom models in online learning
    • LMSs
    • lecture capture
  • ADDIE

Still to come:

  • Competency-based learning,
  • Connectivist models, including Communities of practice and cMOOCs
  • Flexible design models
  • PLEs
  • AI approaches.
  • Conclusion

My next post in this series then will be on the appropriateness of competency-based learning for teaching in a digital age.

References

Adamson, C. (2012) Learning in a VUCA world, Online Educa Berlin News Portal, November 13

Dick, W., and Carey, L. (2004). The Systematic Design of Instruction. Allyn & Bacon; 6 edition Allyn & Bacon

Morrison, Gary R. (2010) Designing Effective Instruction, 6th Edition. New York: John Wiley & Sons 

6 COMMENTS

  1. Finally someone has clearly identified the major weakness in the ADDIE approach. As a social constructivist online art teacher educator I concur with your criticisms. I can see you are working toward workable solutions. Thanks Tony.

  2. Thank you for this valuable blog post. I have a problem with the ADDIE model too. I support your views but would like to add the following:
    – The “Design” stage as explained in the model, should perhaps be called “Problem Statement” or “Briefing”. “identifying the learning objectives for the course and how materials will be created and designed” does not fit the stage title “Design”. Design is a creative problem of formulating solutions to any given problem or challenge, in an innovative and sustainalble way”. “Design” cannot be just one of the stages, “Design” encompases the larger process.
    – The ideation stage is missing.
    – The (design) exploration stage is missing.
    – The focus is on product rather than process.

    • Excellent comments, Jolanda.
      As I mentioned, I think there needs to be a planning stage even before design, and I agree that the model isn’t really sequential but different parts of the process overlap and loop back in actual practice. I have seen learning objectives identified in the design stage for instance completely re-written once assessment questions have been developed!

  3. Hi Tony,

    While I have participated in a lot of (mostly) successful team projects using ADDIE, I prefer a more iterative approach that is closer to many software user experience/UX design processes.

    For the past couple of years, I’ve been practicing and promoting SAM (Successive Approximation Model, http://www.trainingmag.com/content/criteria-ideal-instructional-design-process-model) as a possible alternative to ADDIE, which brings some aspects of a more Agile approach to the overall instructional design process.

    While I’ve been very happy with my own projects roughly based on SAM, I’d be very interested to hear about how the approach has worked for larger, team-based efforts.

    I’ve been enjoying and learning lots from your open textbook project!

    All the best,
    Paul

  4. I addressed this issue in a paper a few years ago: http://www.guyboulet.net/site/docs/Rapid_prototyping.pdf.

    The main problem with ADDIE is that it is a cascading model where each phase depends on the results of the preceding phase, assuming that the deliverable of the preceding phase are complete and accurate.

    What if an assumption made in the analysis phase is incorrect and this leads to incorrectly targeted design and thus to development and implementation of a solution that aims at the wrong target? You might only find it out at the evaluation phase, at the end of the project.

    Because of that, I believe that iterative models such as SAM or Rapid Prototyping are more efficient for elearning development as they offer early detection and correction of problems.

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