(Stephen Downes) So, hello everyone.
I'd like to state and for the record,
I love the blue dots.
(LAUGHTER)
I've been sitting there watching the blue dots.
So, I've been cast in the role of the person who finds the problems
with the topic that we're all praising.
I do like agile design, I like it a lot.
And I like the concept of agile learning design,
I like it a lot.
But, you know, I've been in the field of programming for many years.
I've been in the field of learning design for many years.
I've worked on small projects, I've worked on big projects,
I've been the peon at the bottom of the pile
and currently I'm the program leader responsible for producing outcomes.
So I've seen it from different angles.
And there's so many ways it can go wrong,
especially when we move from the fairly static domain of software design
to the far less static domain of learning design.
That's learning design.
It's the least agile thing you'll ever see.
That's actually a graphic from IMS
which produced the learning design specification.
That's supposed to be pretty open and flexible,
It's like a play with a director and roles and all of that.
But, you know, once you're into the thing,
there isn't a whole lot of flexibility happening
and it leads to questioning just what is it that we're up to
when we are talking about agile learning design?
Are we talking about agile 'learning design'
or are we talking about the design of agile learning?
Two different things,
and it seems to me that it doesn't make sense
to give the instructional designers all that freedom and flexibility
if we're going to march students lockstep through
a predefined kind of process.
Here's what agile learning design ought to look like.
There's a flow.
This is agile design generally, right?
And it's an iterative thing,
and yet people don't talk about that so much
but it's an iterative thing.
Each iteration is like designing a full and complete product,
and then you might spin off some side things, some prototype things
as you need to, but, you know, version 1, version 2,
you're doing the same thing over again.
No course in the world, well, maybe not no course,
but few courses in the world are designed that way.
Courses progress from Lesson 1, Lesson 2, Lesson 3, Lesson 4.
They don't cover all of geometry and then all of geometry in more detail
and all of geometry in more detail.
It's a different way of thinking about the process.
So, one of the major concepts in agile learning design,
in agile design generally, it's the Scrum.
The Scrum is basically a self-organizing development team.
It is originally drawn from the idea that
programmers are the smartest people in the world and do not need management.
No, I'm just kidding, but there is the idea here that
the programmers know how to program, and they know how to produce the outcomes,
if they're left to do the job for themselves, to organize for themselves.
And indeed, in the Scrum meeting, as you are mapping out the task,
each of the tasks, in the Scrum itself, selected by the programmer.
So, they're volunteering to jump in, to do these things.
They're taking commitments on themselves, they're specifying how much time,
how much effort will be required to produce the commitment.
So, OK: that's good but this doesn't happen by magic.
It takes time, and