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(Stephen Downes) So, hello everyone.
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I'd like to state and for the record,
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I love the blue dots.
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(LAUGHTER)
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I've been sitting there
watching the blue dots.
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So, I've been cast in the role of
the person who finds the problems
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with the topic that we're all praising.
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I do like agile design, I like it a lot.
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And I like the concept of
agile learning design,
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I like it a lot.
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But, you know, I've been in the field
of programming for many years.
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I've been in the field of learning design
for many years.
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I've worked on small projects,
I've worked on big projects,
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I've been the peon
at the bottom of the pile
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and currently I'm the program leader
responsible for producing outcomes.
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So I've seen it from different angles.
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And there's so many ways it can go wrong,
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especially when we move from the
fairly static domain of software design
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to the far less static domain
of learning design.
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That's learning design.
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It's the least agile thing
you'll ever see.
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That's actually a graphic from IMS
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which produced the learning design
specification.
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That's supposed to be
pretty open and flexible,
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It's like a play with a director and roles
and all of that.
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But, you know, once you're into the thing,
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there isn't a whole lot of flexibility
happening
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and it leads to questioning just
what is it that we're up to
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when we are talking about
agile learning design?
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Are we talking about
agile 'learning design'
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or are we talking about
the design of agile learning?
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Two different things.
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And it seems to me that
it doesn't make sense
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to give the instructional designers
all that freedom and flexibility
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if we're going to march students
lockstep through
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a predefined kind of process.
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Here's what agile learning design
ought to look like.
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There's a flow.
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This is agile design generally, right?
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And it's an iterative thing,
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and yet people don't talk
about that so much
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but it's an iterative thing.
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Each iteration is like designing a full
and complete product,
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and then you might spin off
some side things, some prototype things
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as you need to, but, you know,
version 1, version 2,
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you're doing the same thing over again.
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No course in the world,
well, maybe not no course,
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but few courses in the world
are designed that way.
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Courses progress from Lesson 1,
Lesson 2, Lesson 3, Lesson 4.
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They don't cover all of geometry
and then all of geometry in more detail
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and all of geometry in more detail.
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It's a different way of thinking
about the process.
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So, one of the major concepts
in agile learning design,
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in agile design generally, is the Scrum.
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The Scrum is basically
a self-organizing development team.
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It is originally drawn from the idea that
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programmers are the smartest people
in the world and do not need management.
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No, I'm just kidding, but there is
the idea here that
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the programmers know how to program, and
they know how to produce the outcomes,
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if they're left to do the job for
themselves, to organize for themselves.
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And indeed, in the Scrum meeting,
as you are mapping out the task,
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each of the tasks, in the Scrum,
is self-selected by the programmer.
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So, they're volunteering to jump in,
to do these things.
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They're taking commitments on themselves,
they're specifying how much time,
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how much effort will be required
to produce the commitment.
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So, OK: that's good
but this doesn't happen by magic.
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It takes time, and agile
is typically employed
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in larger software development projects.
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But when we're doing learning design,
we're doing something a lot smaller
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and a lot more precise.
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The question came up earlier, you know:
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"What about, you know, high-volume
instructional design?"
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Well, high-volume in instructional design:
you don't have time for 3,4,5,6,7 weeks
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of your development team
organizing itself.
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Another problem:
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as your projects get bigger -- and we've
worked on some very large projects --
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your teams get very large.
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If you think about
all the different people who can,
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and eventually will get involved
in the design of your learning,
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or in the delivery of your agile learning,
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you've got designers, you've got
subject matter experts,
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you've got programmers, you've got
human interaction specialists, etc.
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Then so (check) you get a very large,
very complex team.
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As you get larger teams, you will not
generate more efficiency, it's well known:
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you generate less efficiency.
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So, what's the solution?
Split the teams.
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OK. Now you have competing development
teams working on the same project.
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This sounds, like, you know, OK,
we've split the task, it's great.
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But when you split the task,
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you now have two different groups
of people with different objectives,
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different responsibilities.
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They're competing often for resources,
they're competing often for priority.
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We have a project where we had
two agile teams.
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We ended up with two versions
of the thing that we were developing.
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Basically, they had -- they didn't split
into functional groups,
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they -- what's the word for it?
errh one-cell devide: mitosis --
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So basically, we got two small versions
of the project we were trying to create.
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Another pitfall:
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if you try to organize your groups into,
you know, OK,
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this group will do this part of it,
this group will do that part of it,
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you get specialized Scrums.
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So now, nobody's working on
the final project and the final product.
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And there is the danger -- I've seen this
and we've had this:
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in effect, I'm living this
at this very moment
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where everybody, all the teams
want to do the analysis bit,
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or the rapid prototyping bit.
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But we're trying to bring a product
to actual users, at the end.
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We want it to be a deliverable product.
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Nobody wants to do the last stage
of error testing, of hardening the code.
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That's the least popular scrum.
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So they go back to they are wanting
to do prototyping again.
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Finally -- well, not quite finally
but we're getting there --
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who is the product owner?
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In the Scrum process,
you're delivering outcomes
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and the idea is that,
as you go through each spring,
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which is short-term cycle
through your development process,
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you're producing outcomes,
you're producing deliverables
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and these deliverables
are delivered to the product owner
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who will set the deliverable,
and even more importantly,
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define the conditions for the completion
of that deliverable.
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Did you do it or not?
How do you know?
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Well, you have to have certain criteria:
pass this test, reproduce this function.
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It has to be really solid
and ........ (check)-free.
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Well, that good in education -- Sorry,
that's good in software development,
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your product owner is your client,
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perhaps your architect,
somebody like that.
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They know what they want.
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Education is completely different.
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In education, there is
no product owner per se.
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Think about it, think about the different
populations that are involved in learning.
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There is the end user,
also known as the student,
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who, in the typical instructional design
process, does not show up until
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after the instructional design
has been done.
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It makes it very hard to be agile.
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There is the subject matter expert,
also known as the professor.
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The professor has his or her own ideas
of what this deliverable must be.
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Then there is the administrator,
the dean or the president,
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or the Department of extended learning,
or whatever,
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who have other objectives of, then
revenue objectives,
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or course completion objectives:
they have their own definition.
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All of these definitions are different.
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I guarantee you they are conflicting
and they are competing.
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You can't just pick one,
because if you pick one,
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you're not being agile for the others.
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What's worse?
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To have not only competing interests,
to have different levels of expertise.
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We're designing this system right now,
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where we're trying to create
agile learning itself.
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This is -- I'm not going to talk
about that,
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that's not the purpose
of this particular talk --
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but but the ideas here is that
as the learning is unfolding,
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the process, the outcomes,
the deliverables and all of that
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can change
as the needs of the learner change.
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Very ambitious, really hard.
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We have to think about learning
differently, in order to do that.
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Well, we've got our development teams.
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Our development teams were raised
in the traditional educational system.
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Their idea of education
and online learning is:
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create some videos, put them online.
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Well, if we're iterating old world project
the first version of the project,
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also known as
the minimally viable product,
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it's going to be pretty simple and it's
going to be something that you could do
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with fairly traditional methods.
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And your programmers and developers,
all other things being equal,
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will fall back on the traditional methods.
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Because they're not being challenged
with the minimal viable product.
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The end goal where you want to get to
is something really flexible and dynamic,
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but by the time you get to stage 5 or so,
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they've built many, many
static structures,
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because that's what it took to
the minimally viable product
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at each release, at each iteration.
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So you have to start over.
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And you start over and everybody agrees,
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OK the project is about something
a lot more flexible than that
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and you start developing again
and the same sort of problem happens
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because your developers and your designer
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did not acquire that expertise
in the meantime.
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So they go back on what they already know.
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So there's a difficulty here.
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In instructional design, we're attempting
to create an outcome
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that is not part of the skill set of the
people producing the product
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that results in the instructional design.
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Finally, learning objectives.
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This is the madder thing, right?
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And I get this one all the time: we do
connectivist-style MOOCs,
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the connectivist-style MOOC, we say
there is no curriculum,
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it's not about acquiring a certain
predefined body of content,
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because we want to meet
participants' needs
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as they go through the course, and
these needs are different for every person
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and these needs change over time.
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And it should be up to the participant,
who ought to be the product owner,
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to define what success is and
define what the outcome should be.
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It's a moving target.
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Nobody who funds education
wants to deal with that. Nobody.
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Every last one of them wants to see
course completions, certificates,
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competencies, curricular outcomes.
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They want them defined ahead of time,
they want them approved
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by the curriculum board or
the school board or whoever is in charge.
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All of this must be set ahead of time.
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And then you're supposed to go on ..... (check)
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It is two very contradictory perspectives
at work here.
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It's not possible to do agile learning,
much less agile learning design
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in an environment where the structures
and the outcomes are predefined.
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That's meek (check), that's my short talk
and I thank you very much.
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(LAUGHTER - APPLAUSE)