I have been a teacher and instructional designer for nearly a half century. I have seen so many innovations and changes throughout the decades, particularly in the last few decades with the integration of technology. We are now experiencing a tremendous challenge with the Covid-19 and the need for online and blended learning. Teachers are searching for ways to use technology that they have been discussing for years but might not have had the push to implement. Now they are scrambling to put their curriculum online for students and to create a much different learning environment than we have ever known.
The big question is how do we make these changes and how many of these changes are needed for the long term and not just for this pandemic period. We need to have a very serious conversation about how we can introduce blended learning into our educational system and how should we use technology to help us with our goals. But I think that we now also need to take the time to start the conversation to replace our early 20th century educational goals with 21st century goals. The old goals were framed around children as potential factory workers who needed to follow orders and to recite back information. During the last few decades, we have added more and more curriculum demands on the knowledge level for each grade. We don't remove curriculum items as much as we just keep piling on more to require students to regurgitate.
But the problem is that we have not taken a systematic approach to designing our own educational system. We have taken the "just pile it on" approach and now we have a huge mess that we call a curriculum. We need to take a step back and redesign the entire curriculum. Sometimes, it is better to tear down and start over rather than keep on trying to patch things up. In this case, we need to start all over with new goals that reflect mankind's 21st century goals. Of course, we will need to agree upon what those new goals will be.
The Instructional Systems Design (ISD), or often just Instructional Design (ID), approach is an approach to design systems, which might mean organizations, businesses, schools, corporations, etc. The educational system is a system. The human system is also a system. Duh, you think, but we need to examine these two systems much more than we do. ISD should be used to help us set new goals for our educational system. We need to use a very methodical approach in designing our schools. I have worked as an instructional designer for many years and I have used ISD to design and to develop hundreds of educational and training projects and instructional materials. ISD provides a thorough analysis of a system and then recommends solutions to any system problems. Problems within a system would be anything that might deter the system from meeting system goals.
ISD will help a company identify areas in which the company needs to improve and determine if any of these areas for improvement are related to a need for education or training of some kind. ISD process can also be used to help identify the goals for our educational system and then determine the instructional solution for obtaining those goals. I maintain that the goals of the educational system must be in alignment with the goals of human beings. It is our children who go through our created educational system and these children are humans. I know that sounds dumb, but we often forget that we are creating a system that is not a corporation or business that needs training programs for specific needs for their employees. We are talking about an education/training program for the needs of every child and therefore every human being in our nation. There is not a specific need to fill any more. We do not need to train children to work in factories or to get a job. There are many, many training programs for specific work related skills and so getting training for a job is always possible for everyone and training will become even more easy for adults to get to prepare for good paying jobs that have immediate need in our society.
But we are now talking about creating the environment in which we will require all humans in our society to live. That is a much different set of goals to consider. We must consider what are the goals of our children. Are the goals of every child the same or different? How much? Children are like us. Humans who are growing up into becoming adults who will become us. What are the goals of children? What are our goals as adults? What are our goals as human beings? How can we create an educational environment in which all children learn to obtain their individual goals? The goals for this educational system should be the same goals for each individual human.
We need to decide on the goals of the human system. Determine the goals of humans first and then make them the goals of the educational system.
What do you say are the goals of humans?
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