Replacing ADDIE?

Well since this is the second time this week I have seen this post, which I addressed on both forums where I saw it posted, I thought I would post it here too:

Here is the article

My take is that the article is wrong – it tells me nothing. No info why ADDIE is ‘bad’ and no info on how they would change it. In fact, the only thing I get from the article is that the people who wrote it are using ADDIE incorrectly and do not understand the process.  Here is my response to this article in a linkedin forum:

“So why use another process? What does it do differently than ADDIE? I have seen many people try to replace it and yet they cannot – for good reason. ADDIE works. While a systematic process, ADDIE is not linear. If you are using it in a linear or limiting way, you are using it wrong. Additionally, these two bullet points in the article contradict one another and show you would be using ADDIE wrong if you developed training that has little impact:

* departments spend too much money and time on training that has little, if any, impact on the performance of the learners.

* is in the constant cycle of allocating ever diminishing budgets which are not adequate to build training that has any return-on-investment.

And this bullet point shows me you are not doing a proper learner analysis or using the right instructional strategies (again not using ADDIE correctly):

* are becoming disillusioned and unmotivated by the boring, lifeless click-through training to which they are subjected.

And to address your points, if your ISDers are not using ADDIE correctly or doing proper instructional design and you are running into these types of issues, why blame ADDIE? It seems that the problem is that you are using it incorrectly. In fact, you are probably cutting corners somewhere. I usually see this when reviewing training which looks like flash cards – boring and not effective. Why? The ISDers did not actually design the instructional strategies to match the learning objectives and then did not asses properly (i.e., they did not use ADDIE correctly).

I guess my question for anyone getting rid of ADDIE for another model is, how are you ensuring quality? Because if you are cutting something out of ADDIE then you are cutting quality somewhere. If you are adding to ADDIE then I could understand because ADDIE by itself is missing a PM and Communication piece but its understood that its not meant to have them either.”

Posted in Instructional Design, technology and tagged .

Leave a Reply