EDDE 806 - Post XI - Get your Waldorf on...

Statler & Woldorf, muppet critics

This past week the presenter of the week was Angie Parkes of Cohort 3, who is a fellow instructional designer!  Angie was presenting to us  her (potential?) dissertation proposal which as to do  with testing the hypothesis that the DACUM process can be done effectively online.  More specifically, her three hypotheses are that (1) an online asynchronous DACUM can produce a comprehensive and rigorous competency analysis; (2) the online asynchronous DACUM can be completed in less than 6 months (2 financial quarters); and (3) the online asynchronous DACUM can be completed for less than $1000.

Angie is coming at this problem from a corporate instructional design lens, where a lot of money is spent in corporate environments for training, however 50%-90% of this training is deemed ineffective.  Because of this training departments are one of the first things that get cut when a company needs to tighten the budget (explains a lot of the angst that friends who are corporate IDs feel).  I do wonder though what about corporate training makes it ineffective.  Being a bit of a Waldrof (or am I more of a Statler?), it seems to me that fellow instructional designers in corporate settings do what's expected of them to do (self-paced, drill & kill interventions), but those don't work because they are usually compliance (and everyone seems to hate that).  If instructional designers were more integral in the talent development cycle, the interventions might be more effective.  Anyway, I think I digress.

So, one might ask, what is DACUM?  DACUM was new for me, and it is defined as:

Developing a Curriculum (DACUM) is a process that incorporates the use of a focus group in a facilitated storyboarding process to capture the major duties and related tasks included in an occupation, as well as, the necessary knowledge, skills, and traits.  This cost-effective method provides a quick and thorough analysis of any job.   

It seems to me to be one of the tools used by instructional designers in the needs analysis phase to determine what is needed to be accomplished by the learning intervention. Apparently DACUM is only done in person at the moment, which can be quite expensive when done face to face, and synchronously, for the same reason that training is deemed expensive at times: you need to pull employees away from their work to do this thing.  Angie is looking at employing Design Based Research (DBR) with a Delphi approach. Her expert informants will be 6 PhD Psychometricians at her company, distributed over a geographic distance (some are in the same office, but some are not). She will have one group of senior psychometricians and one group of junior psychometricians (it will be interesting to see if there are differences between those who are more senior).

On another note, it's interesting that this is not Angie's first idea.  She's had several over the years, but opportunities dry up and doctoral students are left trying to pick up the pieces.  I often wonder what happens if you've passed your dissertation proposal defense (and hence you are formally an EdD candidate), but that opportunity dries up and you need to do something else.  Does you committee ask you to re-defend something new?  Do you try to salvage what you have with what little is left?  Do you put together a new proposal with just your advisor?  With coursework it's pretty cut and dry - you do the work, you get a good grade, you pass.  The dissertation can be a year long project (or longer) after you defend the proposal.  What happens when stuff hits the fan when you're in the thick of it?

If any cohort 1 or cohort 2 folks are reading this, advice is definitely welcomed :-)