TECHNOS—Phillip Harris, Executive Director of AECT

July 27, 2008

. . . with Phillip Harris, Executive Director of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology, AECT.

AIT’s Director of Education, Elaine Larson, talked to Dr. Harris before AECT’s International Convention, October 19–23, 2004.

EL: As you prepare for your 2004 convention in three weeks, what do you think is the number one issue in instructional technology? What are people talking about most?

PH: It seems to me that it’s hard to identify one single issue with respect to instructional design. There is no single instructional design model that has dominated the field. We have probably seven or eight major models that are most often utilized in instructional design activities. I don’t hear this as an issue as much as I see the absence of it in the literature and presentations. We don’t have any serious comparison to look at, whether following instructional design method 1 versus 2 versus 3 produces more efficient learning. Does it do it a shorter period of time? Is there greater retention? Are there certain kinds of learning settings that would support the use of particular models? There are a variety of ways an evaluation could be done to try to identify if there are certain conditions in which some models work more effectively than others. So I see the absence of this as a key area in the instructional design field.

Will this be a topic of discussion at the convention?

There’s a bit more of it that’s beginning to creep into the program, and I think as we develop a broader evaluation, we can find ways to legitimately make comparisons across different design models.

You have one special session in the convention that’s titled “Where are we going in instructional technology….” Is instructional technology at a crossroads or critical point? Or is this an ongoing discussion?

I think this is just an evolution of the conversation and a broadening of the directions and the theory of learning that’s driven instructional design. A second issue that I think the convention really reflects is how the shift from behavioral learning theory to cognitive theory is really having a profound effect on how instructional designers think about how people learn. Right along with this is a greater interest in how the brain works. So I see instructional designers actually paying more attention to areas that they haven’t paid attention to for probably the last 40 years. And that is that the field of learning theory has changed, and as the learning theory changes instructional design changes. I asked a group of presenters at the last conference, “What would a learning theory sound like based on what we now know about how the brain works?” Knowing more clearly how the brain works has increased the interest in cognitive theory of learning. That’s a major shift I am seeing in many of the presentations. Another phenomenon is the number of times I’m seeing the term “problem-based learning” show up in presentations. Problem-based learning is a real student-centered instructional approach, and to see this have an impact in the design of instructional materials and programs I think is a major breakthrough.

Can you describe “problem-based learning?”

Problem-based learning is an instructional practice developed out of medical schools and has grown into law schools. Basically, students are presented with a real, live, messy problem — and they’re supposed to plan how to get solutions. The messier the problem, the better. In a med school setting students are given a set of symptoms and have to figure out what’s wrong with the patient. And in figuring what’s wrong, they determine their curriculum. They are planning their learning.

You’re talking about primarily the higher education level. Do you see this happening in the K–12 setting?

I see encouraging signs that problem-based learning is finding an appropriate home in K–12 learning—at all levels.

Let’s talk about AECT. How has the mission and role of AECT changed and why?

I’ve been Executive Director of AECT now for five years, and I can say that as a result of a major meeting in summer 2004, we have learned a lot about ourselves as an organization. One thing we’ve learned is that the membership really values the diversity of our membership. About 60 percent of our membership is college/university faculty and graduate students. About 20 percent are public school folks in a wide variety of positions from librarians to technology coordinators. The other 20 percent are in the private sector in training and development or in the military sector. In talking about whether AECT should limit its membership, the one item for which there was unanimous agreement is that we benefit from this diversity. Although this may sound trite, AECT is changing from focusing on the technology to focusing on the learning. That learning is taking place in a variety of settings and contexts and is being done by a variety of people.

In what other ways is AECT changing?

Our major growth area right now is our International Student Media Festival. This has been an activity of AECT for about 30 years, but in the past three years we have begun to recognize that it has probably the greatest potential for growing AECT—as well as for creating some new excitement in education reform.

How does the International Student Media Festival tie to education reform?

We’re seeing teachers who are discovering that students can get engaged in producing a multimedia project, whether it’s at the second-grade level or at the college or university level. And getting students engaged in a hands-on, direct experience gives them enormous confidence and enormous opportunity to really provide input into their own learning. We’ve doubled the number of competition entries from 300 to 600 in a three-year period. We also have seen the growth of people attending the AECT international convention from approximately 300 people to 1000. This growth is made up of students, teachers, and parents, and we have created a program track for teachers and students that offers them an opportunity to learn to do more of what they’ve started doing. We’re seeing teachers recognize how important it is to put a camera in a youngster’s hands to tell a story. That youngster might not be able to write it, might have trouble speaking it — but like a lot of artists, can really tell a story. We’ve also had some teachers describe the experiences of their students in planning full-length movies. We have an English teacher describe an eighth-grade class that produced a Tom Sawyer movie. The teacher said, “When I’d assigned the story [previously], I’d get a lot of groans and the students didn’t have much interest in it. But to start off with, ‘We want to make a movie. How many would like to make a movie?—now, what are the things we have to do to make the movie?’” Well, top on the list was to read the book. I didn’t have to assign the book,” the teacher said. But the research, the scripting, the planning—all became part of the process. This teacher had a group of 30 students spend every weekend for most of 12 months in planning, filming, editing, marketing, and having a grand showing of this movie.

This teacher said she did more in this project in working on state standards than if she had addressed them in a direct way. The students didn’t have to be forced to write, to read, to study, to plan, to practice. They had a compelling reason to want to do it. And working in cooperative groups was another side benefit. We have the teacher describe different teams that she had, and I’ve heard this from other teachers as well. We’re trying to put together an electronic publication as an added benefit—asking the teachers engaged this year to tell us their stories and their students’ stories. We’ll also ask some of the parents if they’ve observed any changes in their children as a result of this activity. We’re exited about the potential that the International Student Media Festival provides us in expanding the use of technology.

The second area of growth we are experiencing is our international component. We are seeing great interest in being part of AECT as the importance of technology is recognized worldwide. We are part of an organization called Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation. They have formed this cooperative as a way to expand their technology capability as a prerequisite to economic development. This is a 13-nation organization that has selected AECT as the only professional organization to affiliate with. It’s our research, training, and instructional design emphases that have attracted this group. We have developed an electronic membership capability, and as our Web site develops and accessibility of material on site grows, we can provide a membership to any number of people from these member countries. They want access to the wealth of print material we have collected over the years. We will have a representative at an international meeting this fall to help the group find out how to most effectively access the resources we have. We have international relationships in many countries. We have a greater growth potential internationally than we had envisioned, and we will be exploring this potential. There’s a need, there’s an important service dimension, and the Internet allows us to provide it.

One last question: What advice would you would you give about instructional technology to a new teacher?

Well, I’ve had an opportunity to observe the textbook selection process that goes on in K–12 from three sides: from the publisher side, as a senior author on a reading program; from the administrative side, for the selection of reading materials; and from classroom teacher side, using those materials. And one of the things I never appreciated was how important it was to understand what instructional design really means. We don’t prepare our teachers to think about instructional design. We talk about designing lessons and talk about that in terms of organizing information—but that’s only part of instructional design. I would encourage teachers at any level to decide to become fluent and literate in instructional design terminology. Take the seven or eight models that are widely used, immerse yourselves in them, understand what they’re really saying. When they talk about, for example, setting an objective as a learning outcome as a first step, what does that really mean? Once you’ve familiarized yourself with instructional design principles, what would happen if we were to apply those to how instructional materials and curriculum are created and selected?

See Joann Flick’s article in Tech Notes, “Learning from Video Is NOT Watching TV!”