Table of Contents
- Part I: Define Andragogy as Opposed to Pedagogy
- Part II: Malcolm Knowles' Adult Learning Theory Principles
- Part III: Ruth Clark, the Content Performance Matrix, and Content Types
- Part IV: Find the Relevance of Clark’s Content Types for eCornell Designers
- Part V: Gagne’s Nine Events of Instruction and Us
- Part VI: eCornell ID Answers to Commonly Heard Faculty Questions
- Part VII: Universal Design
The Pocket Guide to Instructional Design Thinking at eCornell
Updated
by Jason Carroll
- Part I: Define Andragogy as Opposed to Pedagogy
- Part II: Malcolm Knowles' Adult Learning Theory Principles
- Part III: Ruth Clark, the Content Performance Matrix, and Content Types
- Part IV: Find the Relevance of Clark’s Content Types for eCornell Designers
- Part V: Gagne’s Nine Events of Instruction and Us
- Part VI: eCornell ID Answers to Commonly Heard Faculty Questions
- Part VII: Universal Design
Part I: Define Andragogy as Opposed to Pedagogy
Term | Definition | eCornell Relevance |
Pedagogy from the Greek: "leading boys/children" | Pedagogy is a teaching approach that centers the teacher as the holder and deliverer of knowledge; teachers impart information to an audience of receivers. Pedagogy views education as a “transmittal of knowledge and skills that had stood the test of time" (Knowles, 1980). Pedagogy emphasizes rote memorization of facts, lectures, information delivered at quantity, as well as quizzes and examinations. The teacher (or governing body) determines the curriculum and metes out information for the student to memorize. It's a teacher-student dyad; the student needs the teacher in order to learn. |
We sometimes call this the "sage on the stage." It dates to a time when most people were illiterate and/or had little independent access to information. This is how most of us were taught in school, and it’s how most Cornell professors conceptualize their teaching: teaching is what they plan to say. |
Andragogy from the Greek: "leading men/adults" | Andragogy is adult learning theory. It says that adult learners are different than children; adult learners want applicable knowledge that's relevant to their lives and their work. Adult learners tend to resist traditional pedagogical approaches requiring them to absorb long lectures filled with information and memorize or recite facts. Adults are driven by their own need to know or their own need to perform more effectively. The term has been around since the 19th century, but it went mainstream in the 1970s with the work of Malcolm Knowles. *Eduard Lindeman and Martha Anderson popularized the term among educators in the 1920s and laid the groundwork for Knowles and others. | As soon as you explain this idea to people, they will immediately say it makes sense. |
Heutagogy from the Greek "heuriskein": "to discover"; traced to the same root as "heuristic" and "eureka" | Heutagogy is self-centered learning. Heutagogy is advancing the idea of a world where information is easily accessible and rapidly evolving, and adults need to continually adapt and learn. It focuses on learning to learn, more than studying any prescribed curriculum. | You'll often see heutagogy discussed alongside pedagogy and andragogy. |
Part II: Malcolm Knowles' Adult Learning Theory Principles
Malcolm Knowles was an educator who advanced the concept of andragogy. A lot of our instructional design thinking comes from his work. Knowles said that adult learners, unlike children, are self-directed, intrinsically motivated, and will benefit from applying their own experience – previously acquired knowledge – into their learning. Knowles also emphasized the importance of the “WIIFM” - adult learners always need to know, “What’s in it for me?” They will retain information best when they use it to solve relevant problems and also practice skills that they can use immediately.
Principle | Description | eCornell Relevance |
Self-concept | Adult learners have a self-concept. This means that they are autonomous, independent, and self-directed. | eCornell instructional design methodology (PARSETM) asks us to focus specifically on what the students need to do. eCornell short courses are designed to be completed on the learner's chosen time frame/cadence; we try not to impose rigid structures when we don't need to. |
Learning from Experience | Experience is a rich resource of learning. Adults learn from their previous experiences. Experience is a good repository for learning. | We lean on this all the time, beginning at charter when we ask questions about the target students: what level of relevant experience do they have? Think here of standard course elements like: ● Discussions ● Projects ● Self-reflective questions/ activities/journals |
Readiness to Learn | Adults tend to gravitate towards learning that matters to them. Their readiness to learn new things is highly correlated with their relative uses. | PARSE tells us to: ● Limit the information to that which students need to complete activities. Cornell professors, experts in their field, will always have more knowledge they could impart. We help them make thoughtful choices about what to include. ● Make course content relevant to students' work and needs. ● Create activities in response to the question: what does the learner need to do, better or for the first time? ● Leave out irrelevant or extraneous information. |
Immediate Applications | The orientation of adult learning is for immediate applications rather than future uses. The learning orientation of adults tends to slant towards being task-oriented, life-focused, and problem-centric. | If this sounds familiar, good! We think and talk about it a lot in our instructional design approach. As much as possible, we steer towards practical immediate applications. Think here of standard course elements like: ● Projects ● Practice activities ● Discussions ● Action plans |
Internally Motivated | Adults are more motivated by internal personal factors rather than external pressures. | We define the audience: Why is the target student taking this particular course at this time? What is it they need to practice, better or for the first time? We think of the “WIIFM” - What’s In It for Me?- and make that WIIFM explicit to learners. It matters to our students. We begin the discussion of students’ internal motivation with faculty partners at charter. Think here of standard course elements like: ● Projects ● Practice activities ● Discussions ● Self-reflective questions ● Course journals ● Action plans |
Need to Know | Adult learners have the need to know the value of what they are learning; they need to know why they need to acquire new knowledge.
The opposite of "Need to Know" is "Nice to Know." IDs should be vigilant for Nice-to-Know information that creeps in. | We ask this key question of the authoring faculty: Why do students need this [this information, this activity, this video]? We make the “need to know” explicit in standard course elements like: ● Module introductions ● Course home page description ● Watch page introductions ● Context setting in projects and activities
Again: We leave out irrelevant or extraneous information.
ASK: Do students NEED to KNOW this, or is it NICE to know? Examples of NICE TO KNOW can include ● storytelling when it's not relevant to student practice ● decorative motion graphics / decorative art ● music ● jokes
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Part III: Ruth Clark, the Content Performance Matrix, and Content Types
We’re not creating technical training, per se, but a lot of our work reflects the widely accepted best practices of technical training, especially relevant for STEM content or when you're making choices about how a piece of content is best presented. Ruth Clark was a leader in the field of technical training and her work has applications for us. She furthered a concept of M. David Merrill called the Content-Performance Matrix, which said there are five specific types of content and two ways to learn them: Remember or Apply. They'd argue that information should be classified by designers as one of the five content types so that you can make sure you're presenting the information most appropriately for learners. Here’s their Content-Performance Matrix, in brief:
Type | Description | eCornell Relevance |
Facts (Remember) | A fact is a "unique, specific, one-of-a-kind object, event, or symbol." It can only be held in the memory, not applied. |
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Concepts (Apply) | Groups of objects, events, or symbols designated by a single name; a mental representation or prototype of objects or ideas that include multiple specific examples. Concepts come in two types: Concrete concepts have defined parts and boundaries that you can draw and label. Abstract concepts are “less tangible and cannot be directly represented using graphics.” |
Concrete concepts:
Abstract concepts:
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Processes (Apply) | "A description of how something works" | Examples:
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Procedures (Apply)
| "A series of steps that result in a completed task."
Two forms: Linear Procedures have clearly specific, observable steps completed in the same sequence every time Decision Procedures direct the person to make decisions along the way and decide how best to proceed in context | Linear Procedures:
Decision Procedures:
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Principles (Apply)
| "Guidelines that result in the completion of a task; cause-and-effect relationships" |
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Part IV: Find the Relevance of Clark’s Content Types for eCornell Designers
Content Type | Relevance for eCornell | How Does an eCornell Designer Treat This? |
Facts
| In Clark's methodology, facts can be held in the memory, but not adapted to apply to new circumstances. Students need to remember them, but they can’t apply them. Students will retain facts best when they need to know them, so during design, including video planning, you want to ask: Do the students need these facts? Will they need to recall them? Why? When planning video, you can think about Clark and content types. If you’re presenting a fact, like a mathematical formula, would the students find it most helpful to receive it from a professor saying it out loud in a video, or from a reference tool that they can refer back to? You might choose multiple ways of presenting it. IDs make choices about how best to present information, as well as how much information to present. | An eCornell ID would:
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Concepts
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Whenever concepts come up, ask yourself and your SME: what does the target student need to do with this concept? The target audience and the behaviors they need to practice will help you determine the level of complexity regarding concepts. Common error with concepts: professors will launch into a discussion of the concept with storytelling and talking around it, but will inadvertently neglect to give the concept’s definition and critical characteristics. IDs have to ask: are we sure the target students are familiar with this, or should we include a definition and critical characteristics? You might need to guide them to refer back to charter and review the audience again. Consider the example of vaccinations as a concept. Think about how this concept might have different target audiences and different behaviors to practice. If the audience is healthcare professionals, they might need to administer vaccinations, while public health officials might need to make policy about vaccinations, and the general public might need to make informed decisions about receiving vaccinations. Those three audiences will need different levels of detail and complexity. General note: for concepts, think about including examples, but make sure those are in addition to a definition of the concept and its critical characteristics. If you can include multiple examples of it, you know it’s a concept and not a fact. You can choose to include non-examples, but these should be in addition to, not instead of, examples. | Within an eCornell course, applying a concept might look like asking students to:
Describe the concept Label, map, or draw its parts Identify, examine, list its critical characteristics Recognize/find additional examples of the form DIscuss their own relevant experience with the concept
An eCornell ID would:
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Processes
| A process has predictable steps that are applied within different contexts. If it's a process, you need to include the steps, clearly articulated, so that students can both practice the process in the course and adapt the process for their own purposes. Ask your SME questions to drill down to the critical process steps for clarity and precision in teaching. (A common error in teaching processes is missing the mark in how much detail the target student needs or assuming "they know this already.") What's simple on paper is not necessarily easy to implement. Ask your SME questions like:
| An eCornell ID would:
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Procedures
| A procedure will be exactly the same steps regardless of who's performing it or why they’re performing it. Students might make decisions along the way (as in a decision tree) but the steps of the procedure themselves won't change. When you're writing procedure steps, you have to be meticulous in documenting all the steps and presenting them in a consistent manner. Example: 1. From the tool bar, Click File 2. From the drop-down menu, Click Print Non-example: 1. Click Print 2. If you need to find the Print option, look first to the File option, within the tool bar
| An eCornell ID would include:
(A procedure probably would not be a Watch page by itself; students will need to have the steps documented) |
| Q. When have you personally experienced procedure steps that were not well designed? Examples could be:
It’s the same in an eCornell course, only the stakes are often higher for our students. | |
Principles
| Principles are recommended guidelines. Faculty partners will often be able to draw principles out of their pure research, but they may need discussion with you to get there. IDs may need to ask a number of questions to draw out the principles. | An eCornell ID would:
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Part V: Gagne’s Nine Events of Instruction and Us
Robert Gagne's ideas were popularized around WWII and still have applicability for the classroom. You'll see faculty authors using elements of Gagne's nine events of instruction, consciously or not. Our best practices ask us to think about Gagne's ideas, apply them where they make sense, and even to avoid some of them, as noted here.
Gagne’s Nine Events of Instruction | What Gagne meant: | How We Think About It (sometimes differently from Gagne) |
1. Gaining the attention of the students | Students arrive in the classroom distracted. It's the teacher's job to grab their attention. Try fun facts, trivia, a joke, a loud noise or other stimulus, visual effects, or a challenge question. | Adults students arrive at online learning with a clear purpose and for "selfish" reasons - selfish in the most positive sense. They want to benefit. Again, they always want to know the “WIIFM” - what’s in it for me? We do strive to gain and hold learners' attention, but we do so by identifying the audience carefully and making sure the content is relevant to that audience. We don't distract with trivia, fun facts, music, etc. If content is not critical to the student practice and mastery, we leave it out. |
2. Informing the learner of the objective | You sometimes hear this described as: "Tell them what you're going to tell them before you tell them, and then tell them, and then tell them what you told them." We might call that approach dated in terms of adult learning; people now are quite used to receiving small chunks of information very quickly. | We state objectives in writing on the course home page ("What you'll do") and fulfill those promises directly in student practice (projects/activities). We provide measurable criteria to prime the students for what they'll do. Examples include module introductions: You will participate in a discussion, you will complete several problem sets, etc) and the context setting for projects: Now you will complete an analysis of… |
3. Stimulating recall of prior learning | "Previously on The Bachelor..." Gagne advocated that classroom teachers remind students what they explored previously: "Last week we spoke about X." or "You'll recall from your intro classes.. ." This might also be summary information presented upfront or a quiz to refresh the memory. | In synchronous settings, yes. This works less well in asynchronous online learning where we're designing reusable assets that can be deployed in multiple ways over time. We think of the assets we're designing as discrete pieces, so within an asset, we don't refer backwards or forwards within the learning experience. Here are some common no-nos for us, and we want to listen for these when faculty are recording video:
Many times, students will have practiced a skill in the first part of a certificate and they continue adding on to that skill as they go. We make a fundamental assumption that the adult online learner already knows how to learn, so we're not adding in these little reminders along the way. You do need to be mindful of whether we’re requiring courses to be taken in sequence, and if not, think about how to mitigate the risk that someone’s going to be left behind in learning. (And if you have a Discussion seed that asks students to reflect on their previous life/work experience, Gagne would be pleased.) |
4. Presenting the content | Gagne recommended that teachers carefully plan their lectures out and include multiple ways of presenting content, including demos, visual aids, discussions, hands on practice, and time for questions. | Yes, and during design we think carefully about what's the best way to present a particular piece of content. Video lecture is not always going to be optimal. Sometimes a Read page or an Activity or Tool serves better. We try to think though: how is the student going to use this information? Is it a fact they need to remember? (In that case, they’ll want a reference tool.) It is a procedure with necessary steps, or a principle and they need adaptable guidelines? Example: Think of cooking a dish. The student wants hands-on personal practice (Project) but they also want to observe a demonstration (Watch page) and they may need supplementary information such as common pitfalls to avoid (Read), and a reference doc with the ingredients list and steps to follow (Tool). |
5. Providing learning guidance | "Examples of suitable outcomes" | An eCornell ID would include:
(In other words, the feedback is not just "Incorrect," but feedback telling the student why this answer is incorrect without revealing the correct answer.)
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6. Eliciting the performance | Student practice: offer some way that they can demonstrate mastery. | This is where we put our emphasis. Includes whatever the student will do in the course to practice: any kind of assessments that can be evaluated, practice problems, projects, quizzes, discussions, their own uploaded work, results of an experiment, and (mostly in executive master's courses) synchronous sessions and group projects. |
7. Providing feedback | Self-explanatory | Multiple ways we do this including: Confirmatory feedback (Autograded quiz, confirms "You answered all the questions") Evaluative feedback (Autograded quiz with score, "You got 8/10 questions correct") Remedial feedback ("Incorrect, and here's why it was wrong, but we're not giving away the right answer"); this is our standard assessment writing. Descriptive feedback (from an eCornell facilitator: "I've reviewed your work and here's what I think you could do better"). This is a hallmark of eCornell’s approach and a valuable differentiator in the marketplace. This could also include peer feedback, but we don't do a lot of that in eCornell short courses due to the logistical complexities of organizing our students' participation. |
8. Assessing the performance | At the end of the learning experience, can the student meet the objectives without support? | Multiple ways we do this including:
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9. Enhancing retention and transfer | Ask the question: can skills be retained over time? | We know adult learners retain information best through practice and when the content is relevant to them, so these are two hallmarks of our approach. |
Part VI: eCornell ID Answers to Commonly Heard Faculty Questions
When the professor says: | The eCornell ID says: |
"Why do I need to limit my video teaching to 4 minutes?" | We recommend a 4-minute limit for a few reasons: 1) Research shows learner retention starts to drop after 4 minutes. Ask if they’ve observed this themselves when they want a quick YouTube video and it’s too long: do they skip ahead to the good part? 2) One obstacle to student success can be bandwidth issues on the user's end; as the videos get longer, there's a greater likelihood of bandwidth problems. 3) We're trying to help you be pithy for maximum impact and best learning retention. If you’re presenting a number of separate ideas at once, that’s harder for learners to absorb. We recommend chunking them out. 4) You can record multiple videos. Multiple short videos is more effective than one long one. |
When the professor says: | The eCornell ID says: |
"Online learning might be fine for some things, but it won't work for MY teaching." | What we know about adult learners is that they retain information best under certain conditions: 1) The learning is relevant to their work/their lives. 2) The learning is engaging; it keeps their attention and gives opportunities to engage. 3) The learning is action-oriented, with frequent opportunities for application/practice. Adult learners don't absorb information as well when it's merely told to them, vs. when they use it to solve problems on their own. 4) The learning is learner-centric, so it's focused on the student, their needs, goals, and practice, as opposed to what a teacher says. |
When the professor says: | The eCornell ID says: |
"I'm ready to start with video immediately! Let's go to the studio right away. Later on, I'll think about whether I'll add some quizzes or an exam at the end." | 1) Our instructional design model asks us to design student activities first, and identify what students need to practice, and second we identify the critical teaching that students need to complete those activities. 2) This is a best practice that comes from the world of technical training, but in our experience it applies to all kinds of content. 3) We have found that when we shoot video first, every time, then when we design the activities there are gaps in the teaching content that then require a reshoot in studio. People always think it will be an efficiency to shoot video first but we've found it's not. It leads to rework. 4) If those teaching gaps aren't spotted and remediated, then the student experience becomes a negative one: we're assessing them on material that was never taught. |
When the professor says: | The eCornell ID says: |
"I want to open my videos with a broad historical perspective. "
Example of what this sounds like during outlining: I'll begin my Intro to Accounting course with an overview of record keeping among the ancient Babylonians. | Does the student NEED that historical information to complete the activities? If the student doesn't NEED the information, our instructional design model would advise us to leave it out. |
When the professor says: | The eCornell ID says: |
"I want to add some specialty on-location video shoots with extra flair and I know you can do it, but I realize eCornell mostly cares about cost." | The primary consideration that drives our design decisions is: what does the learner need for best learning retention? We certainly do specialty shoots sometimes: when the student needs it for best learning retention. So we wouldn’t automatically say No, but we would ask, What best serves the learner? Examples of specialty shoots we’ve done include:
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When the professor says: | The eCornell ID says: |
"I want to tell this story about XYZ. It's so cute. My students love it." | Do our target students need this information to complete the activities? |
When the professor says: | The eCornell ID says: |
"I understand that for technical content there might be activities for students to practice, but my content is theoretical. I just want them to know this foundational material. My teaching is not technical training. What students do with it is up to them." | Some Cornell schools pride themselves on taking a theoretical approach to teaching, and indeed there are facts that can only be held in the memory that students may need to memorize. So we'd respond – not by arguing – but by asking more questions: Why do students need to know this content? How will it help the students to know this? Will students perhaps want to be able to: -Answer questions about it? -Converse with colleagues about it? -Advise clients, colleagues, or decision makers about it? -Summarize it in a memo? -Use it when conducting original research? -Use it when making a case for funding?
Notice that all of the above are behaviors that can be practiced. It may help you get to activity content if you talk about activities broadly, so professors can conceptualize interesting applications, as opposed to just thinking about online learning as a series of lectures plus multiple choice quizzes. |
Part VII: Universal Design
Universal design started life as a set of principles guiding construction of environments –
physical spaces – so they could be accessed and used by all people regardless of age, size, or ability. The principles of universal design have been extended to learning. Course designers should strive to meet the needs of all learners through accessible, inclusive instructional approaches and to remove barriers to learning.
About Universal Design for Learning
The UDL Guidelines
Cornell’s Center for Teaching Innovation (CTI) on Universal Design for Learning
