Monthly Archives: January 2021

Thoughts on: The Organizational Structures of Instructional Design Teams in Higher Education: A Multiple Case Study (Drysdale, 2018) (Thesis)

I carried on a bit about how great Uibelhoer’s thesis was recently in covering some much neglected ground and offering some new ways to think about the research I’m doing in my own one. This thesis is one that I’ve had on the pile for a while but I did note that it was also well referenced in Uibelhoer’s. I’ve just finished pulling together some 7000+ words of notes and quotes and ideas from it, so this will not be a post at the same scale but I’ll mention some key reasons why this one is also great.

I’m not sure why I avoided the American literature for so long – I guess because my focus was on the work of edvisors in the Australian HE context. But really, there are so many common issues between the two sectors and I’ve found so much stuff (some written well after I started looking, to be fair) that speaks to things that I had thought to be major gaps in the literature that I am lightly kicking myself.

In a nutshell, Drysdale explores the question of what kind of organisational structures in HE institutions enable edvisors to have the most impact in the work they do supporting (in this case) online learning. I think that it is because many of the researchers that I’ve been reading lately are also Instructional Designer/Edvisor practitioners (rather than interested academics) that I’ve been finding a deeper understanding of some of the nuance in these situations. In particular, ask any edvisor and they will tell you that there are centralised teams and there are faculty based (using the Australian meaning relating to colleges/discipline areas, not faculty=teachers) teams and frequently never the twain shall meet. On top of this, some edvisors as classed as academics and report to academics and others are professional staff with other reporting lines. (To my knowledge, for the most part in Australia, few edvisor units report to IT or other administrative units but this is something that I do need to pursue)

Drysdale does three case studies of ID/edvisor teams supporting and/or leading online learning initiatives in 3 different unis with different structures:

“a centralized dedicated instructional design team with academic reporting lines and distributed curricular authority,
a centralized dedicated instructional design team with administrative reporting lines and distributed curricular authority,
a decentralized or blended-structure instructional design team,
with either academic or administrative reporting lines, and distributed curricular authority.”
Drysdale, 2020 P.54

Spoiler alert, he found that overall, IDs/edvisors working in a centralised structure, with academic reporting lines (I assume they also held academic roles) were the most effective and encountered the fewest barriers in leading online learning initiatives.

Obviously this is a relatively small study, interviewing an ID, an academic and a leader in each of the institutions and there could well be more at play (institutional culture for instance) but Drysdale does a decent job in allowing for this as much as possible in the work.

For now, I might just highlight some of the most valuable ideas that I found in the thesis. Lots of great new literature resources for one – again, I don’t know why I didn’t look beyond Australia for the most part in my earlier scans. That said, it’s interesting that in all the US theses that I’ve read recently, nobody seems to be aware of Whitchurch’s work on Third Space workers in Higher Ed. So maybe we can all be a little insular at times.

I have a few new theoretical frameworks to explore – Systems theory (Patton, 2015) which explores how organisational systems work. There are also a few takes on leadership – Transformational Leadership, Authentic Leadership and Shared Leadership. The idea that leadership practices are influenced by organisational structures makes a lot of sense but is something I haven’t considered in depth until now. (Sometimes I do really wonder how much my thesis is actually about education at all compared to sociology and organisations and power)

There’s a lot to think about as well in terms of where control of curriculum and course content sits and what impact this has on institution level learning and teaching initiatives. Building on that, something that I don’t think anyone has really explored but which I do hear regularly as an argument for faculty/decentralised edvisor units is how disciplinary needs and focuses do necessitate discipline specific learning designer (etc) approaches. I can appreciate that there are truths to this but unpacking that from the need to feel special is a job of work. (One that absolutely needs to be done though)

Role clarity – more accurately the lack of it – absolutely came up. Holding academic positions with parity to “standard” academics in these cases did certainly seem to minimise that though. I have many conflicting positions about academic vs professional roles. I’ve always held a professional role and believe that the skills and knowledge of the edvisor should be recognised regardless, but at the same time, I understand that people in organisations can live in any number of tribes that are important to them.

A few other things came to mind that I haven’t yet seen covered but which are absolutely emerging in the sector – where do edvisors/IDs from external (often corporate) providers sit in this picture?

Questions about what it actually is that IDs do are perennial and there is some nice work in here exploring what the literature has to say and some of the practitioners. This is absolutely something that I am also focussing on. An interesting stat to emerge was that most IDs spend <50% of their time actually doing instructional design. Much of the rest of administration, training and tech support. (I’ll leave the bigger question of whether those things are also design in essence to another time). The kinds of training that IDs/edvisors provide is touched on, referring to work by Meyer and Murrell (2014) showing that it is a mix of tech and pedagogy training, with the tech side valued less but perhaps done more.

It’s been fantastic looking at the recent work being done in this space – I can still see that mine is adjacent but aligned, so I’m not concerned about not bringing something new to the party. Many of the issues that we as edvisors face do appear to be fairly global and it’s great to be a part of the conversation surrounding it.

Thoughts on: Leading the way: A critical narrative about the creation of an online professional development program (Wilder, 2020)(thesis)

I really struggled with this thesis at first because it is written in a very conversational, narrative style. I realised that this was a significant part of the point of the research – the first research question is actually:

How does the format of this dissertation address the accessibility of knowledge created for instructional design and curriculum development practitioners?
Wilder, 2020

So it is clearly a very deliberate and mindful approach that is being taken, with the aim of questioning the dissertation/thesis model and its accessibility to “average” readers. There is some worthwhile discussion of this throughout the thesis and also in a related conference paper in the appendix. Wilder uses a Narrative based approach drawing on Invitational Rhetoric (Fass & Griffin, 1995) and Invitational Learning Theory (Purkey & Novak, 2015). Questions about scholarly writing conventions are valid and I think there is much to think about overall, so I may well come back to this at a later time. My first impression, perhaps as someone that has learnt to parse academic writing, is that it was hard to take the work as seriously as it deserves.

So I’ll focus on the things that I was able to take away of particular relevance to my own work. The perspective of an Instructional Designer is always welcome to me and particularly descriptions of how they are working in their contexts.

“The designer and their expertise is always secondary to faculty design choices, even when those choices are at odds with best practices”
Wilder, 2020 P.39

“In fact, faculty must become certified to teach online at my university by Spring 2021”
Wilder, 2020 P.39

“On a less cynical note, my department has made significant inroads by establishing
relationships with our faculty. We have made conscious efforts to professionalize our online learning department by providing professional development, presenting at regional and national conferences with faculty, and doing research in online learning directly with faculty. I believe our approach has yielded positive results. As the number of online courses has increased over time, faculty have become more informed and experienced in online learning, fundamental design principles, and best practices. The requests for consultation have more frequently become focused on refinements and more advanced topics in learning design, learning activities and
assignments, as well as assessment.”
Wilder, 2020 P.39-40

Again, I see that edvisor involvement in research in the U.S. is not seen as the big deal it seems to be in Australia. Raising the profile and prestige of the ID unit also appears to have enhanced the sophistication of the collaborative work they do with academics. (Mandatory certification to be allowed to teach online probably doesn’t hurt though)

The nature of edvisor units has been a common theme in this space but for some reason I’ve never explicitly identified that the size of the unit greatly affects the nature of the work being done. Similarly, changes in organisational structures might mean that professional development work suddenly becomes the responsibility of another team.

“Since we are a smaller group compared to most major research universities, we wear more hats than most”
Wilder, 2020 P.41

One final section really stood out for me, not the least because it let me catch up with the work of someone in this space that I lost contact with a few years back.

A few years back, Carnegie Mellon University invited a researcher to investigate why the professoriate at the university failed to implement its own leading research on how students learn best (Herckis, 2018). Despite having access to the best research in the world, fellow academics at Carnegie Mellon consistently resisted employing that knowledge. The author found faculty were generally enthusiastic when implementing their own ideas but balked at adopting what others tried and tested. Faculty also had personal views of what constituted good teaching that were often the product of their own experience as a student. This example speaks directly how important it is for practitioners to produce knowledge that is contextual and is designed for the audience it is intended to reach. In this case, even academics well versed in the idea of searching literature for new knowledge are resistant to applying theoretical knowledge in their practice.
Wilder, 2020 P. 126-127

There’s much to consider about this on the epistemological side of things – most clearly why some forms of knowledge are valued and others aren’t. I have a whole theory about the hierarchy of knowledge in Higher Ed institutions – discipline > pedagogy > technology in a nutshell. We (edvisors) are often advised to present academics with evidence based research in support of the learning and teaching approaches that we advocate. Personally, I’ve found this to be wildly variable in effectiveness. In some cases it is embraced and in others I have seen people whip up and disseminate terrible and self-serving research of their own to avoid having to make small changes to their preferred practices. Definitely an area for more exploration at least.

Thoughts on: Practicing what they preach: A case study exploring the experiences of Instructional Designers as educators of an online teaching certificate program (Uibelhoer, 2020)(Thesis)

Of all the theses that I’ve read recently, this one has been the most valuable – for several reasons. Chiefly, it fills a gap in several areas of the literature around edvisors relating to edvisor perceptions of how they are supported by their institutions (and the support they need), the impact of having faculty/college based and centrally based edvisor units, faculty autonomy/academic freedom, the pedagogical and design frameworks used by edvisors and the ways that organisational structures and reporting lines impact edvisor effectiveness.

Which is a lot.

I’ve had two opposing reactions to this – panic about how I will now find something new to say and appreciation that when I put my ideas out there, I can at least say “well Uibelhoer thinks so too”. (Honestly I’m not that worried and it has been fantastic to see how universal some of the challenges and possible solutions are)

A few other things that I’ve liked – just the clean readability of the thing. Uibelhoer doesn’t tie himself up in linguistic knots trying to sound clever, he simply tells the story in engaging, clear and direct language that moves the ideas forward and progressively builds a compelling case for them.

Personally there were a number of helpful new ideas and theories that I will be able to draw on and use to expand my thinking. I haven’t really given much consideration to faculty autonomy/academic freedom, there’s some nice stuff on collaboration and Collaboration Theory, and there’s also some valuable ideas on the impact of organisational structures, which draws on a thesis from Drysdale (2018) that I also have sitting in my to-read pile.

One other thing that I do need to flag is that there is a stellar overview in the lit review of the various pedagogical approaches in the last century and how they are applied in instructional design. From Behaviorism to Connectivism and beyond, this is something that I will highly recommend to anyone looking for a crash course in educational theory and its practical application.

There are a handful of areas where we have different perspectives – most significantly would be that where I see three distinct (though overlapping) edvisor type roles, the approach in the U.S. seems to be more of instructional designers as kind of a one stop shop for everything these people conventionally do. He does touch on specialisations though and the whole thing has got me wondering whether it is madness trying to foster understanding of 3 separate roles when we have problems doing it with just one.

I’ve glossed over the body of this thesis, which is a case study of development and delivery of pedagogical PD to academics in an institution. As a topic, I suspect this is stronger than my own because it starts from something that seems fairly straightforward but allows for wide exploration of many factors that shape this work and the people that do it. I’ve had an internal resistance to case studies for some reason (which I’ve been rethinking in recent months), possibly because it feels too small for the ideas that I’m trying to bring together. More thinking to do on this I’d say.

One final thought – I do think it would be great to have a global network of the edvisors (and academics) doing research on edvisors. This partially feels like one of those procrastinatory rabbit-hole ideas that I have in place of doing actual work but it’s at the very least something for the backburner.

Thoughts on: Project Management in Instructional Design (Allen, 2020)

Reading this thesis was valuable because it showed how stark the difference can be between them. Where Amparo took a very qualitative, narrative driven approach to the research going narrow but deep with 3 people and case studies, Allen goes shallow but broad with this quantitative research into the most valued project management competencies for instructional designers (IDs).

Allen takes a deep dive into a comparatively rich pool of literature relating to the project management skills that best serve IDs, generating a comprehensive literature review that sums up the last decade or so of research in this space very effectively. She builds on it by conducting her own two stage survey of 86 IDs in a range of sectors (Higher Ed, corporate, ID project team leaders) to gather some rich quant data.

Nothing overly surprising emerges in terms of the favoured competencies, with the data largely aligning with the studies that had come before (but at a larger scale) but it did spark a few thoughts for me about my own work. Some of the competencies across the literature I personally found a little nebulous – things like “attention to detail” which are certainly valuable professional attributes but, coming from a competency based education background, I was curious about how that might be meaningfully measured or taught. This brought me back to realising that I need to think carefully about what practices, attributes and competencies mean in the data I am gathering.

The painstaking detail in the writing about the work undertaken, from the lit review to the data collection and analysis offered a useful benchmark for my own future writing.

It was also useful to scan the references and find a few promising leads that I’ve previously missed. These include:

Kenny, J. (2004). A study of educational technology project management in Australian universities. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 20(3), 388–404.

Allen, M. (1996). A profile of instructional designers in Australia. Distance Education 17(1), 7–32.

I don’t think I had thought to search for IDs in the Australian literature.

Thoughts on: Three Blended Librarians’ Narratives on Developing Professional Identity (Amparo, 2020)

When I started my PhD, a common piece of advice was to read some other people’s theses to better understand how they work and what might be expected. I glanced at a couple but couldn’t find any that seemed particularly relevant so I moved on to other things. I wish I’d searched a little harder because recently I’ve come across quite a few that have been immensely helpful. In the four that I’ve looked at, I’ve found new theoretical frameworks and ideas and some descriptions of methodology that have helped a few things click into place.

The first of these is from Adonis Amparo, of the University of Southern Florida. While it focuses on a group of people that I’m not covering in my own research (blended librarians), the challenges they face and the work they do aligns nicely with the edvisors that I’m looking at. To paraphrase, Blended Librarians are librarians whose work includes the role of instructional technologists. I take this to equate to educational technologists in the Australian context, based on the description in the dissertation.

Amparo, also a blended librarian, uses a mixture of autoethnography and ethnography in three case studies of himself and two others working in these roles. Additionally, he uses a Narrative Research approach, which makes use of something called “wonderments” instead of conventional research questions to create a little extra space to play.

“Wonderments allow for exploration in research, whereas research questions provide a more limited frame. In narrative research, narrativists design their questions around one or several “wonders” or “wonderments” rather than devise ‘A priori’ research questions (Clandinin, 2016). This allows for “a sense of a search, a ‘re-search’, a searching again,”…”a sense of continual reformulation” (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p.124) “
Amparo, 2020

I’m not altogether sure what the difference is or how this works or even if it suits the direction that I’m currently taking but I do like the broad idea of it.

There were a few other ideas that grabbed my attention. Apparently there is this concept of “identity stretch” in Celia Whitchurch’s seminal 2008 work on the Third Space in Higher Ed that I have completely missed until now and Amparo has a nice line when he says

As with any new position, the role must be created from the institutional space provided
Amparo, 2020

Another potentially valuable find was the use of Role Theory. According to Amparo, “Researchers use Role Theory to explain social interactions built on behavioral expectations and social positions defined by these behaviors (Biddle, 1986)” This is a concept dating back to the 1950s in social psychology, meaning that there has been plenty of time for a backlash but Amparo seems to navigate the criticisms of Role Theory well enough to extract some useful insights. Given that my work leans heavily on status and perceptions in institutions that seem tied to roles, I have to wonder whether there is something in here of value to me as well. It may be that my own use of Social Practice theory might knit with some of these ideas. At the very least, it seems to have some potential. The terminology alone, which includes role strain and role ambiguity seems relevant.

The second lens employed by Amparo is Identity and Social Identity Theory, which again is something new to me but which seems to offer some promise in terms of considering how edvisors develop the confidence in their abilities to ‘edvise’ academics.

A final point of interest in this work (spoilers) is that the three Blended Librarians examined all seem to develop or arrive at their professional identities from three relatively different perspectives. One from the objects they create, another from the work relationships they develop and the last from the service they provide to students.

Definitely worth a read if you’re working or researching in this space.

Research update #60: Previously on Colin’s PhD

Looking back, it appears that it’s been 6 months since my last confession – um, post.

A few things have happened since then, less tangible progress than I would’ve liked but at the same time I feel that I’ve unraveled a few knots that had been troubling me and I’ve set the stage to get things done in 2021. (Sure, why not tempt fate, what could possibly go wrong with that)

It’s basically impossible at this point to not talk about COVID-19, as much as I’m sick of the sound of that term. It’s had a handful of notable impacts on my research, in that one of my underlying assumptions that people don’t know much about edvisors and what we do has shifted as more academics than ever have been forced to engage with us in the rapid shift to online teaching and learning. This still doesn’t necessarily mean that they have the full or correct understanding of this but overall awareness at least has changed. At the same time, the shift has also had an impact on the way edvisors work with academics at scale, so my ideas about (collaborative) working relationships need to be reframed and reconsidered.

The loss of the international students that underpinned university finances has also had a significant impact on budgets and staffing levels. People in edvisor roles have perhaps been safer than some but I have still a number of friends and colleagues that have borne the brunt of cuts and restructures and there remains a nervous instability in many institutions. Speaking more selfishly, I think this will mean that institutions will likely be less willing to share information about edvisors numbers, roles and unit structures than they might previously have been.

On a more positive note, I was fortunate to add an additional supervisor to my team, Dr Jess Frawley, who also works in an edvisor role and has been invaluable in providing some new insights into this work. One big breakthrough discussion I have had with the whole supervision team has led to me rescoping this project from my initial “boil the ocean” idea of getting insights from edvisors, academics and institutional leaders to the somewhat more manageable and realistic focus just on edvisors. (I can save the latter two for post doc work maybe – but one step at a time).

I also learnt a lot about going through the ethics process last year – doing so another two times for minor changes to my methodology. I suspect that the less detail about the nuts and bolts that is included the better. In my case, I’d initially said that I’d put out a call for survey participants and they would need to contact me before I’d give them a link to the survey. On reflection, I felt sure that this would have significantly reduced engagement so I needed to submit a modification to fix this. Live and learn.

I’m now reading a bunch of highly relevant theses that all seemed to hit Google Scholar within a few days of each other and trying to fight off the urge to radically upend all my plans for something completely new. Stay tuned for a post or two about what I’ve taken from these soon.

I finally also got around to engaging more with my PhD peers in the lab at my school. COVID-19 has probably been a blessing in that regard as it has meant that there has been much more web based activity to support this group that I’ve been able to participate in. This can be a very lonely endeavour and I really do value the conversations I have both with my TELedvisors friends and study peers.

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