When we buy eggs at the market, we don't want a broken one. When we order food at a restaurant, we want it to taste good. A high quality experience in economy class is when the flight attendant offers you a glass of complimentary wine just "because you look like you need it" (I recently had this experience, and it resulted in my writing a glowing satisfaction report for the flight).
What is poor quality?
Every egg carton has broken eggs. The food is too salty in the restaurant. The flight attendant was not warm and friendly. All have different root causes, but each of these can make or break a quality situation.
How do we define quality when it comes to instructional material? How do you know if what you have produced is high quality before you delivery the training?
In order to answer these questions, I have decided to treat instructional material as a product. It is, in a sense, a product. It is painful to me, as both the daughter of academics and a trained academician, to admit this, but the plain fact of life in America is that everything can be productized. All our experiences are at some point commodified. This includes the very act of acquiring information. When you design instructional material, you are really designing a product. A learning product.
Even though it annoys me, working on this assumption eases the search for answers because there is a mountain of literature and information about quality (but how good is it?).
One seminal work that I'm going to start with is David Garvin's (1984) work titled, "What Does Product Quality Really Mean?". I am looking at this one closely because it is a review paper that summarizes ideas on quality (until 1984, obviously). One glaring point here is that in 1984, software quality was in its infancy. Therefore, software training was not even born yet. However, I'm going to argue that the ideas of quality, as a concept, are somewhat ageless, and that there is some hope that we can apply the ideas in Garvin's work to the present questions: What are the key attributes of high quality instructional material, and how can an instructional designer strive to product high quality material?
My ultimate goal is to answer these two questions, and also produce a checklist that helps instructional designers determine whether or not they have met a basic quality standard. this is probably going to take more than one post!
References
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