ISD, ADDIE, HPT relevant?

In his blog's Big Question for November, 2007 Clark Aldrich, author of two books on Simulations and Learning, asks:

"Are ISD/ADDIE/HPT relevant in a world of rapid elearning, faster time-to-performance, and informal learning?"

head spinning... fingers itching... so many places to go... where to start...

Short answer: Yes

Longer answer:
We must first learn what the rules are, why they exist and how they work before we can break them. More models will emerge, but they'll only be improvements on existing models.

We'll always take shortcuts, but it's important to know what the original route was in case you get lost.

For instance, how many times does a client tell you, "Audience Analysis? No need to take the time and expense, I'll tell you all you need to know." Sometimes they do a good job. Sometimes you have to backtrack to learn a little bit about your audience.

Recent events have led me to many a discussion with current and former colleagues on the "simulation design process." Is it any different than solid Instructional Design? At the detail level, maybe... you ask different questions, there could be an additional client review here, you may take the SME interviews in a different direction there, but in the end, you're just following good design principles...

In other words, you may need to develop different skills, but the macro-level process is the same.

I often tell my students at Philadelphia University that one of the best books they can read to be an ID is "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald Norman. It's one of the bibles of Industrial Designers, yet it speaks so much to what we do... Industrial Designers follow ADDIE as well... so do architects... so do chefs... anyone who builds things that people use follow ADDIE. They may have come up with a different acronym or call the phases something different, but in the end that's what they do.

The pressures that we experience from our clients: faster, cheaper, better - may look like they fly in the face of ADDIE, but only to those who think the phases in any process are distinct and must be completed before you start the next... practices like Rapid Prototyping allow us to evaluate before the development is done. Does that mean that ADDIE is useless? No. It means it's not a linear process... Architects use drawings and models to test their designs... Chefs constantly taste their dishes...

So, will our models stay relevant in the future? Sure.

Will there be a new model? My guess is that someone looking for guru status will come up with a new model... but when you take off the wrapper and look at the creamy center, it'll strongly resemble something you've tasted before.

...hopefully the new model will have a fancy acronym.