While manufacturing production can benefit from quality management principles, there are some questions how much instructional design can benefit from the same. While it is true that production process analysis can streamline courseware development, control errors, and generally make it a more profitable enterprise, there does not appear to be a correlation with learning, at least on the surface. Two qualities are of paramount importance when building an instructional intervention: effectiveness and efficiency. Effectiveness deals with how well the student was able to learn the information and how well they were able to put it into practice. Efficiency deals primarily with how quickly the student was able to learn the information. Of course, from this perspective, we are talking about the end product. What quality management deals with, on the other hand, is the efficiency of the methodology one uses to get to the end product.
While manufacturing industries were among the first to implement quality management principles in their production, service industries are beginning to get on the bandwagon. Quality management principles and courses are even being taught in graduate business schools as part of the curriculum. Government agencies are strongly recommending that potential contractors be able to show that they can operate under quality management principles in order to substantiate their claims of a quality product. Rumors in the industry indicate this may become a mandatory requirement in the near future in order to be able to bid on a government contract.
Many proponents make claims that using quality management principles can improve instruction in many different forms, including eTraining, distance education, computer assisted instruction, and the like. However, there appears to be little of substance with respect to hard data. Mostly, one is either an avid proponent or an ardent detractor, based more on personal philosophy than metrics.
Which is another issue that goes along with the problem. Much of quality management revolves around metrics: the time it takes to build a deliverable item, the number of comments against the item from internal and external reviews, the number and types of mistakes that have to be corrected per count item, etc. All of this is done in an effort to promote objectivity, and yet whenever one deals with data, one is always constrained by the choices made concerning what is important to count and how it shall be counted. Even deciding who will decide these things will have an impact on the final product.
The most common principle in instructional design is the ADDIE principle: Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation. Every instructional design model has some or all of these elements in its structure in one way or another. However, by law with regard to federal government contracts, the company that does the front end analysis for the project is prohibited from doing the rest of it. Also, typically, government entities are reluctant to spend money in the contract on evaluation. Hence, the process begins to resemble the Crawford design model, The Eternal, Synergistic Design Model (see next post). It consists of a large ball of evaluation (which is really just internal and external reviews) surrounded by a large circle of design and development in the shape of an infinity symbol. The model depicts a common scenario where the curriculum is stipulated by the customer and the contractor begins "designing" the product according to the customer's wishes, then develops it (usually in a rapid prototyping tool) and performs internal quality reviews before shipping it off to the customer. The customer in turn performs a quality review and sends the product back for correction or further development in the cycle.
In this scenario, quality management is very useful, even necessary in order to support profitability. However, there is little data to support the effectiveness of the product in terms of student pass rate, high-miss test items, low miss test items, or even if the courseware is really teaching them what they need to know to be able to do their job. So while many claim that quality management is helpful in building strong training, I question the verity of their statements. Essentially, my problem statement sounds like this: "It is not known how or to what extent quality management principles impact effectiveness and efficiency when applied to instructional design efforts."
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