The 5 Steps to Better Technical Education: A Framework for Instructional Design

By John Farrier

The 5 Steps to Better Technical Education is a concise, usable and pragmatic guide to building your framework for better instructional design. The book provides all the steps education needs and explains the outcomes if a step is skipped – as well as the results to expect if the steps are completed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483537931

Book preview

Education

INTRODUCTION

The 5 Steps to Better Technical Education is intended for those who create technical education material and for those who deliver the education. It is targeting the organization that creates or delivers education as their core business. It is also intended for the department within all organizations that involve instructional design.

HOW DID I GET HERE?

While in college we did a study of Root Cause Analysis to try to understand the root cause of various business problems. We were trying to find if there was any commonality between disparate business issues. The outcome of the study was very revealing and had an effect on me that would influence my entire career. We were able to assign root cause to more that 80% of business problems to the lack of knowledge. That lack of knowledge could further be traced to two causes. One was lack of education. The other was the lack of communication. Because of what I learned at that time I set my goals to become the best communicator I could be and, when given the opportunity, to be the best educator I could be.

Participating in that study has affected my approach to communication and education. My plan was to become a teacher, the best teacher I could be. Then while doing that, observe what qualities people responded to. I would then apply what I learned from teaching others and the communication skills required to do so in the business environment.

I consciously applied continuously improvement practices to my communication skills of speaking, writing, and listening. Combining all would certainly help make me a success in the business career chosen. To this day I continue to look for better ways to educated and better ways to make the complex simple. I continue to this day to try to improve my communication skills.

So, the foundation for this book was laid while I was still a student in college. Navigating through my career as a teacher then into business and being able to marry these two skills of educating and communicating has been most rewarding.

I had the opportunity and foresight to document what was effective and also document what was disastrous. In addition, I had some direct responsibility in sales and marketing. Adding those sales and marketing skills really allowed me to polish my triad of basic business skills.

1. Teaching:

Teaching at the high school level.

Teaching at the college level for more than 20 years.

Teaching in private industry for more that 30 years.

2. Sales and Marketing:

Lead a very successful (award winning) sales and marketing effort.

3. Information Technology Professional:

More than 30 years of continuous IT work involving every facet of IT and the IT Industry. (While doing that, educating literally thousands of co-workers on IT systems and applications.)

I believe that business can be divided into two groups, doers and managers. Doers do things.

Managers manage. They manage doers and they manage things. In regards to the outcomes of education, the organization can be drawn as two triangles with horizontal lines separating Information, Knowledge, and Wisdom for both groups.

In the diagram described, the goal of most organizations is to drive the intelligence of the group toward the top of the triangle from just having information through the knowledge area to actually acquiring wisdom. As the doer group attains doer wisdom they may move into the management group where an entire new set of data must be turned into information and the drive toward management wisdom begins.

This intent of this book is to help organizations build the framework on which they can apply their plans to drive the organization from information workers toward wisdom workers at a faster rate. The outcome will be an inverting of the triangle and having the wisdom portion wider