My story begins
Let me give you the setting for this story. A few years ago I left my job as an ER Nurse to work on a master's degree in Community Health. My thoughts at the time were to have more regular working hours, and less stress. If a good job opportunity arose I would grab it regardless of where the job was. I needed a change.
I ended up moving to the Puritan Springs Memorial Hospital to be a trainer in the
Community Health Outreach program. Although I would start in a mid-level position, the job and future looked exciting. Star, who conducted my interview, seemed very positive about my Master's degree and felt I would be a great addition to their department.
Puritan Springs Memorial was only one year old with state of the art training facilities.
The simulations training room was awesome. Five centers had been established and in each center a computer screen was embedded into the desk. All you had to do was sit
(in the ergonomic chair!) and look down. What looked like a placemat was actually a computer. From there a series of high-end multimedia case study simulations could be accessed. All I had to do was touch the computer screen and use voice commands to activate the training.
The training department itself took up the entire west end of the fifth floor of Puritan
Springs Memorial. My office stares directly into the mountains. I noticed a bike path running from the edge of the highway to the office when I interviewed. During the interview I was thinking about that bike path --
It would be easy to ride to work – if I could figure out how to get my clothes there without cramming them into my backpack. There was an incredible gym and shower in the building though.
I hate to say it but it was probably the fact that the office had that gym and the city had bike trails everywhere that had the most influence in my taking the job. I think I'll start consulting my journal from that time.
Late August
Despite the panoramic mountain view I see in front of me now, there are some adjustments that I am making. I am in a cubicle! I miss the size and excitement of the operating room. I used to walk all over the entire hospital! I have never worked in cubicles! People dart in and out of these things like prairie dogs. In the first week alone I have heard terms like action-items and deliverables enough to last a lifetime.
Today was the first day I met Alex. Alex (short for Alexandra) is in charge of my work group – the community projects team - the profit center for Community Health
Outreach. Alex has been located in a Boston sister hospital for the past month working on another project. She is OK, I guess. Seems a little stiff with me and does not talk much, must be because she is busy.

I have to go through this orientation experience to learn about the Puritan Springs
Memorial Hospital (PSMH) instructional design process. So far these are the new words in my vocabulary:
Mid-September
I am not too sure about Alex. She seems to resent that I am working on the Millard project. I did not know until I met her that I was working on the Millard project! She is in charge of it and has said little more than "Millers loaded. Just remember that. He owns several companies, has money to burn. He will want more contracts – if you do a decent job."
I wondered why she questioned my doing a good job. So I asked her.
"Well you do not really have the background. Teachers and Nurses don't cut it."
Great, I thought.
"The work you do for Millard is critical, I would be all over it if Streamline Billing were not tying me up."
I guess Streamline must be the project she was working on in Boston. Alex then said something about Bolt being involved with Millards. Alex drops Bolts name a lot. Bruce
Bolt is a PSMH training division VP. Alex and Bruce belonged to the same mountain

bike group and do long Saturday rides together. (Saturday rides seem to be the new golf.) I have hinted a few times that I am a biker too, and Bruce and Alex have seen me lock my bike outside the building. But they have not asked me to joint them yet. I guess it is still pretty early, maybe you have to hit some type of time requirement to be part of the Saturday ride group.
The weird thing is that Alex will not tell me anything about the Millard project. The
Streamline project is running over I guess and she just does not have the time to communicate with me. I am tired of waiting.
"So. What is the Millard's job about?" I asked Alex to ease my way into the topic.
"Millard wants some customer service training."
I was still confused. Who is Millard?
Alex seemed incredulous. "The department store? Your kick-off meeting is in a week or two. In the meantime just focus on your Orientation training. You will be using Star's so-called model."
OK, Millards is a department store, I get that. What is Star's model? Whatever it is,
Alex does not like it much. Star was the person I had interviewed with. I did not want to hear anything negative about her because she was nice during the interview and really one of the reasons I decided to take the job.
"She uses a four step approach, about as behaviorist as you can get."
"What does you mean by behaviorist?" I asked.
Alex explained as if to a high school kid -- "About as boring as you can get. You know, short units, boring practice questions as feedback. If the learner gets it they move on.
If they do not they go back through it."
That sounds good to me, I thought.
"Constructivist is less structure. The learner is in charge of learning. They work on what they are interested in, constructing their own knowledge" Alex said.
I must be a behaviorist, I thought. Panic is rising. How do I not be a behaviorist? I taught fairly prescribed lessons before. There had to be constructivist elements in most instruction though – like when you ask people to do projects on their own, or write papers.
Alex did not even seem to notice my reaction. "Guess we will find out when you do your first prototype" she said, sarcastically.
Prototype??? What the heck is a prototype? A question mark must have been hovering over my face.

:"... like draft? Prototype = draft of project. " Alex was rolling her eyes!
"Oh." I said, not too sure.
The only positive part of the interaction was that I did learn a little about the topic of the training I would create.
"Gerontology and the concept of ageism - Prejudice towards the elderly." Alex said . "A strange topic. Normally we teach about employee health issues. You are teaching sales people to respect old customers, probably really OLD folks." she said, in a way that did not make the lesson sound promising.
I do remember learning from my (now criticized) Master's degree program that one of the first things I should think about when about to teach something was its potential cognitive load. What about the content might be difficult for people to understand? It seems that if ageism would be an issue the content might be somewhat difficult for people who are young and unlikely to feel empathy towards people unlike themselves.
I began to think about cognitive load and ageism or prejudice in general. How could prejudices be a cognitive load?
Learning points
It is time to stop the story for a while. I will tell you why I am sharing this part of the story.
First, to point out that settings where you create instruction for other people are political. There are always things that are below the surface that you will not know about. Some people are like Alex and make you wonder if they just want you to fail to make themselves look better.
Second to share the whole whose model are you using orientation many people have. The behaviorist/constructivist issues that Alex brings up, is somewhat simplified, but it shows that there is dissatisfaction with models of instructional design because they do have a behaviorist element. What is more important though is the ability to see that behaviorist and constructivist can both be part of any instructional approach. These are not really as exclusive of each other as Alex makes it sound.
Knowing what you as a designer believe will be a great assett when you create instruction. If you believe that people learn more by doing than reading, you might set

up an environment like the one I have set up here. A case study is one way to get people to make decisions in a relatively "safe setting." If you too believe that learning takes place within a context where the learning is meaningful, you may want to choose an instructional strategy (for your research paper later this semester) that focuses on learner action and activity in realistic settings. Case studies, and learner generated stories, pictures, tables/ charts, role plays, and many other strategies have more of a constructivist nature. We get into those in much more detail in the Step 3: Making it Happen Unit.
If you believe that learners need to be presented with information first, and in very short units that are immediately followed by testing, you might favor instructional strategies that allow learners to practice with information right after it is presented.
Asking true/false and multiple choice questions, having students rephrase what they have learned, and asking students to identify similar examples are likely strategies.
Perhaps the best way to think of design is to skip the whole constructivist/behaviorist labeling and to think instead of cognitive load. What about your topic creates a cognitive load. What might you do to make information more germane? If you take this approach you turn design decisions towards the learner and how you anticipate they will react to the content. Your strategies are selected based on your analysis of load.
You end up being more learner-centered than designercentered. In other words, you pick strategies based on how you think they will facilitate learning in your particular situation. Designer-centered approaches focus instead on what the designer believes, but my not really address how the learner might best learn.
Third, in many instructional design jobs, you'll be just like the main character in the story, you will be waiting for someone to get back to you and you will be worried about meeting a deadline! Fortunately, the things you learn in this class will help you hit the

ground running. We will be learning a four-step process that helps you select optimal strategies.