I once worked with an Ady and he was a thoroughly nice chap. Every school should have one.
Every school should also have an ADDIE.
So what is an ADDIE?
Originally developed in 1975 by Florida State University for the U.S. Army, ADDIE is the default instructional design process for many organisations.
ADDIE is a five phase process used to organize and guide all learning product development activities. ADDIE is the basis of a systematic, cyclic, iterative approach to conceive, plan, organize, and document all Army learning products. It supports the production of Army learning products to meet learning requirements, focus on critical job and/or function requirements, provide assessment and/or evaluation feedback, identify alternative learning methods, and gain efficiencies by providing information that helps to focus resources on critical learning requirements.
The five main stages are:
- Analysis
- Design
- Development
- Implementation
- Evaluation
All five phases are equally important.
This model is certainly something schools could use to ensure effective and efficient production of learning products to meet the learning needs of its students and staff.
This is particularly relevant now with online learning taking centre stage and it is extremely valuable for large and complex teaching designs.
In fact, ADDIE has been the standard for professionally developed, high quality distance education programmes such as those offered by the Open University.
Five Steps of ADDIE Explained
1. Analysis
Here you identify all the variables that need to be considered when designing a course, such as learner characteristics, learners’ prior knowledge, resources available, etc.
2. Design
The design stage focuses on both the design of the learning experience and materials needed to support the experience. And good design builds on the results of the analysis.
This stage focuses on identifying the learning objectives for a course and how materials will be created and designed including the selection and use of technology.
3. Development
Once the learning has been designed, the development stage focuses on creating and developing content including whether to develop in-house or outsource.
4. Implementation
The implementation stage consists of the execution and delivery of the designed content including any prior training or briefing of learner support staff, and student assessment.
5. Evaluation
The Evaluation stage is used to assess the quality and effectiveness of the entire instructional design process and feedback and data is collected in order to identify areas that require improvement.
Remember that this is not a sequential process – the E might come at the end of the acronym but evaluation is part of every stage.
ADDIE is an ideal framework for designing measurable learning programmes; it can be used with any size teaching project but can particularly help teachers systematically construct a curriculum.
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash