Mariejas@bigpond.com

Moving Online 11: A conference to explore the challenges for Workplaces, Colleges and Universities
Southern Cross University, Queensland Australia, September 2001.

Abstract

A diverse range of instructional design and facilitation strategies are emerging as alternatives to content-focused courseware designed for self-paced independent learning. This paper explores improvisation as one such emergence. We have been using improvisation as a fast, cheap and effective strategy to adapt, re-use and continually improve over 20 instructional templates. Designed for technologies like email, forums and chat, these templates aim to facilitate different types of collaborative learning across a broad range of contexts.

Keywords

Email games, online learning, instructional design, content free, open platform design, improvisation, collaborative learning, design jamming

Introduction

Outstanding successes in online learning are being showcased and certainly live up to the flexible delivery catch cry of “just-in-time, just-enough, just-for-me, where-I-am”. They provide short response times, customisation and small chunks of learning to meet specific needs.

However, well out of the spotlight is a whole library of online products gathering dust on virtual shelves. They haven’t worked so well and may deserve another catch cry: “just-wait-a-while, just-too-much, just-one size, where-am-I?” More often than not, these products focus on content provision, are pre-structured and designed for self-paced independent learning. While they may be the result of early efforts, uncomplimentary descriptors like “shovelware”, “pour and snore”, “spray and pray” and “electronic books” challenge us to explore alternative instructional design and facilitation models.

While these products will always have a place, the lesson is that content is not enough. Solitary learning through a pre-structured program doesn’t suit all types of learning needs, contexts and preferences. To provide a better balance between content and process, a diverse range of strategies aimed to make content more meaningful to learners, are fast being added to the toolboxes of instructional designers, teachers and facilitators working in online environments.

This paper explores one such strategy: the use of open platform design and improvisation to design and facilitate e-games.

Email games: content free, context specific

In an attempt to shift focus from content to the process of learning, my colleague Dr Sivasailam “Thiagi” Thiagarajan and I have designed, field-tested and evaluated over 20 email game templates with over 1,500 players worldwide (Jasinski & Thiagarajan, 2000a, Jasinski & Thiagarajan, 2000b).

The design and facilitation of email games is based on our belief that adult learners learn most effectively through people-to-people collaboration and construction of knowledge.

Email games are templates (or frames) for facilitating dialogue about different problems and issues and for encouraging the construction and sharing of new knowledge, understanding, perspectives and insights. The core of most email game templates contains real-world problems and issues that are salient to the players. An email game engages participants in interactive discussion of these problems and issues. Participants bring a variety of diverse experiences and previous knowledge to the task. The facilitator selects and implements appropriate structures for different rounds of the game to encourage collaborative problem solving.

Different email game templates are designed to facilitate different types of learning domains (including facts, concepts, principles and procedures) and different outcomes (application, analysis, synthesis, problem solving, creativity, abstract thinking and metacognition).

Open platform design and the emergence of improvisation

Our work with email games has been accelerated by our practice of open platform design, where we provide a growing community of colleagues with access to our templates to use, improve, update, customise and return. We have found the distributed process of open platform design to be powerful in rapidly improving design and facilitation processes and confirming the usability of the games in a range of contexts. Through this iterative and dynamic process, what has also emerged is the concept and practice of improvisation as an instructional design framework.

Improvisation is an eclectic mix of ad-hockery and know-how. This technique mixes together a fresh way of doing things with lessons previously learned.

Improvisation involves reworking precomposed material and designs in relation to unanticipated ideas conceived, shaped and transformed under the special conditions of performance, thereby adding unique features to every creation. (Berliner, 1994 p.241)

The concept of improvisation is perhaps more familiar in the contexts of theatre and jazz than in instructional design and online learning. Yet the fluid, fast, irregular, spontaneous and unpredictable online world is undoubtedly an expressive medium and lends itself to the creative, responsive, nimble and spontaneous approaches associated with improvisation.

We have found improvisation to be an excellent strategy to enable a fast transition from the conceptual to the operational.

While improvisation is not a wild child that runs amok, it does contain an element of spontaneity and ‘winging it’. Like improvisation in jazz, instructional design using improvisation is a disciplined craft that works creatively within a planning framework, yet can take advantage of the unexpected. In short:

Improvisation does not involve the complete discarding of planning, but a change in how planning is done and in how the plan is viewed (Isenberg, 1987, p. 92).

What improvisation allows is concurrency: an opportunity to design, act, learn, reflect and renew as parallel and complementary undertakings rather than as linear and competing activities (Weick & Westley, 1996).

Improvisation as an instructional design concept does not lock into the order and stability of the predictable associated with the Instructional Systems Design (ISD) model. Instead, improvisation exploits and works with contradictions and paradox: stable and unstable, structured and flexible, predictable and spontaneous, planned and random, content and process.

As an instructional design framework, it aims to continually re-invent new ways to respond in order to achieve the right blend for specific learning needs. Improvisation creates more vibrant, adaptive, innovative and flexible designs that match - and indeed exploit - the technology to give a wider and more appealing range of learning options.

In our design process, we often refer to Weick’s metaphor of design as improvisational theatre (Weick in Huber & Glick, 1991, p. 347). Using this metaphor, Weick provides the following assumptions that offer practical guiding principles for the design process:

• Redesign is a continuous activity
• Responsibility for the initiation of redesign is dispersed
• Interpretation is the essence of design
• Resourcefulness is more crucial than resources
• The meaning of action is usually known after the fact
• Little structure goes a long way.

We hope that unlike ISD, …improvisation is not exacting, but based on sufficient agreement …so that people retain the capability to make individual adjustments to local irregularities (Weick, 1998 p.347).

What provides extra power to improvisation as an instructional design framework is that it reclaims and re-introduces the craft of teaching and the special relationship between teachers and learners. The loss of classroom teaching and face-to-face contact is one of the expressed regrets of a move to online learning environments. In a pre-structured and product focused e-world, teachers often have no input into the design of the resources they are required to use.

Email games are one small way to reclaim some spontaneity and the aspect of performance that is characteristic of teaching face-to-face.

Improvisation: dimensions of complexity

The power of improvisation is that it can be both an all-or-nothing spontaneous process and also incremental, thus catering for both the novice and the more experienced practitioner.

Weick (1998) offers a particularly useful insight that is both conceptually and practically relevant to the context of improvisation as an instruction design framework: improvisation can be a developmental process with varying dimensions or levels of complexity.

This staged approach requires…increased demand on imagination and concentration (p. 544). These stages range from interpretation (taking minor liberties with the original), embellishment (reworking parts of the original without changing it drastically) variation (new aspects are inserted but align with the original) to improvisation (transforming the original to create a drastically different version).

From an instructional design perspective, the most exciting aspect of Weick’s staged approach is that improvisation can be trainable. This supports the experience we have had with coaching practitioners to adopt and adapt our email games to their own context.

Interpretation: taking minor liberties with the original plan
In interpretation, practitioners work with a constant, but add some variables.

Once practitioners experience a game as a player, many take the design and facilitation template and follow the procedure systematically as their first step in professional application. The templates have been deliberately designed to facilitate this first step, for while the content can be changed, the process stays the same. First timers can simply plug in their own content and with some skills in facilitation, can feel confident that the process will work. It is not only effective, but also convenient and quick.

Embellishment: reworking parts of the original without drastic change.
In embellishment, there is greater balance between constants and variables.

Customising scenarios and contextualising the tone and language are ways practitioners seem to embellish the templates.

Variation: new and often unplanned aspects are inserted, but align well with the original.
In variation, the variables begin to emerge as the leading force, but the integrity of the original game template remains.
This is where questioning of the templates and suggestions for re-working the procedure to suit specific contexts start to appear.

Improvisation: transforming the original to create a drastically different version.
Many colleagues have taken the game concept and through experience as players, adopters and adapters, become fully fledged improvisers in their own right and create new games as a result of their prior experience.

This staged approach facilitates improvisation as a design model on two fronts:

1. It is permissive and flexible. The acknowledgement of subtle as well as radical variations is aligned to the law of small effects proposed by chaos and complexity theory (Stacey, 1996). Wherever one starts along the improvisation continuum, there is potential for impact.
   
2. Practice leads to growth in performance. If improvisation is a skill developed and refined through practice this suggests that improvisation can be progressively honed until proficiency is reached (Crossan et al., 1996, Weick, 1998). This makes improvisation a viable model from which to train people in instructional design for contemporary environments. Its emphasis on experiencing, experimenting and incremental development, lends itself to work-based methodologies that support ‘designing-by-doing’.

Additional aspects of improvisation

Improvisation also aligns well with learner-centred and adult learning principles. The master performers who take centre stage in an email game are the community of learners, not the teacher who becomes more of an orchestrator of the process. While the process underpinning the design of e-game templates is prefigured, generating and processing of the content is not. These need to be configured by the learners who work it out together in communities of practice. In communities of practice:

… individuals self-select into groups that share ideas. They self-select, at least in part, on the basis of whom they like to work with, and whom they can learn from (Crossan et al, 1996, p.29).

Improvisation also encourages a partnership between teacher and learner. In email games, while teacher and learners have specific roles to play, the game is a collaborative effort. Weick (1998) uses the term “equivalence” to describe a process which allows both coordination and individual expression to occur simultaneously.

As a result, people are able to accomplish collectively what they could not do individually, but also to cope individually with unexpected problems by virtue of their diverse capabilities. (p. 347)

Email as an enabling tool for improvisation

Thiagi and I are not technical experts, nor have we the desire to develop this expertise. We simply exploit technology for the purposes of designing and facilitating effective learning experiences. So we use technology that is familiar, available, cost effective and able to be used. More importantly, we recognize that email is readily available and used by the wider community, so has great potential to be exploited as a tool for the type of collaborative learning we aim to provide.

Email works well as an improvisation tool as it is flexible, available and self-reliant. Unlike multimedia and courseware development, we don’t need a production team to put email to use as a learning technology. We don’t need graphic designers, web authors, media specialists or editors; as teachers, we don’t have to struggle to learn HTML or be distracted by other technical challenges; we don’t have to wait for files to download; we don’t have to log in with passwords; we don’t have to rely on Help Desks. Nor are we tied to a delivery platform or a specific software package.

It is a technology for the independent of mind and those quick to action - and for the courageous and confident. The simple text-based method of email games cannot be masked by the glamour of new technologies, or the “bells and whistles” of multimedia. The games stand or fall on the basis of the robustness of the instructional design and facilitation process that underpins the game as this is what engages the players. If the players don’t participate, there is no game.

Design jamming: playing with the rules not by the rules

The construction of email game templates and their subsequent facilitation, involves what we call ‘design jamming’, a concept adopted from jazz improvisation and applied to the instructional design context. Based on improvisation, design jamming is a dynamic and iterative process of constructing, performing and adjusting instructional designs as a result of close contact with the learning audience.

The intimacy of the designer-learner connection is far removed from the more traditional role of instructional designer as product developer where any role in the product’s implementation or use is not usually expected (Gustafson & Branch, 1997). Driven by a commercial model, many online learning products are in fact designed to remove the teacher from the learner through a learning-from-computer model of self-paced individualised instruction (Reeves, 2000).

Design jamming reclaims the teacher-learner, learner-learner relationship. Like any jam session email games are temporal events, which for a specified time facilitate a creative flow of interaction between a group of people who come together for the purpose of sharing an experience. That experience is to collaboratively problem solve, role play, brainstorm or confront controversial issues.

The difference between traditional instructional design and design jamming can be likened to the difference between a jazz quartet in an intimate cabaret setting and a symphony orchestra in an auditorium:

… the (jazz) musicians absorb the mood of the audience into their creative process. During a more traditional performance, the symphony defines the mood for the audience (Crossan et al, 1996, p. 29).

Like a musical jam session, design jamming follows a recipe rather than a blueprint.

Weick (1993) differentiates between the two:

Architects may treat blueprints as givens, but people who improvise treat them as emergents. The givens for people who improvise are the recipes and routines by which they generate actions that could become any one of several different blueprints. (p.350)

Design, viewed from the perspective of improvisation is not an easy option.

Improvisation is more emergent, more continuous, more difficult to control, more tied to the content of action and more affected by what people pay attention to than the designs implied by architecture and more akin to an ISD approach. Even though improvisation may involve more uncertainty, it does thereby not become any less effective. Emergent, continuous designing is sensitive to small changes in local conditions, which means the design is continuously updated as people and conditions change (p.350).

Though improvisation is far removed from the more rigid structure of ISD, it is nevertheless, a high order skill. Improvisation does not abandon tradition, but extends and shapes it. Both Thiagi and I have significant experience in the use of the ISD model and know it from many dimensions: as instructional designers, project managers, teachers, professional developers and learners. This foundation is what allows us to ‘wing it’ and play with the rules not by the rules. This is the essence of design jamming.

In other words, the freedom to jam relies on the discipline of previous mastery of foundation knowledge and skills and significant experience in the domains in which it is applied. (Crossan & Sainty, 1997) However, this is not the ‘hard mastery’ of the clarity and control of the scientist or engineer–or the traditional instructional designer - but rather more akin to ‘soft mastery’…which is more like the give and take of a negotiator, artist…or bricoleur (Reiber et al., 1998, p. 35).

Summary

Improvisation is an appropriate design model for the fast changing environment of the online world for the following reasons:

• Small and incremental changes that can be effected quickly, allowing fast responses to user requirements.
• Improvisation provides high levels of feedback and closer contact between teacher and learner.
• Design jamming is a collaborative effort with a learning audience and brings a teacher/learner relationship back into the equation.
• Plans and routines are not the drivers, but the dynamic relationship with the customer.
• While improvisation won’t handle all the challenges of training provision, it extends the toolbox of strategies available to the practitioner.
• Improvisation does not abandon more traditional models, but shapes extends and enriches them. One can inform the other.
• Improvisation is trainable –it is not elitist, but elective.

There can be no better way to sum up the essence of our experiences with instructional design improvisation with email games, than to end with another complex game simply played. The following description by Kanter (1989 ) and quoted in Crossan et al (1996. p.21) captures what improvisation means in a complex world:

To some companies, the context in which they are now entered seems increasingly less like baseball or other traditional games and more like the croquet game in Alice in wonderland – a game that compels the player to deal with constant change. In that fictional game, nothing remains stable for very long, because everything is alive and changing around the player – an all-too-real condition for many managers. The mallet Alice uses is a flamingo, which tends to lift its head and face in another direction just as Alice tries to hit the ball. The ball, in turn, is a hedgehog, another creature with a mind of its own. Instead of lying there waiting for Alice to hit it, the hedgehog unrolls, gets up, moves to another part of the court, and sits down again. The wickets are card soldiers, ordered around by the Queen of Hearts, who changes the structure of the game seemingly at whim by barking out an order to the wickets to reposition themselves around the court.

Improvisation through open platform design is a complex game simply played. The key to improvisation is to play with the rules, not by the rules – or to create new ones.

References

Berliner, P. (1994) Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation. University of Chicago, Chicago IL

Crossan, M., Lane, H., White, R., & Klus, L. (1996) The Improvising Organization: Where Planning Meets Opportunity. Organizational Dynamics, Spring.

Crossan, M. & Sainty, B (1997) Improvisation as a Management Tool in Preparing Organization to Manage the Future: Issued by the International Federation of Accountants.

Gustafson, K.L., & Branch, R.M. (1997) Revisioning Models of Instructional Development. Educational Training and Development, Vol 45, N0 3, pp. 73-89.

Isenberg, D. J. (1987). The tactics of strategic opportunism. Harvard Business Review, 65 (March-April) 92-97.

Jasinski, M. & Thiagarajan, S. (2000a) Virtual Games for Real Learning: learning online with serious fun. Educational Technology, 40 (4), 61-63.

Jasinski, M & Thiagarajan, S. (2000b) Email Games. Paper presented at ASCILITE Conference, November 2000.

Kanter, R. (1989) When Giants Learn to Dance. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Reiber, L. P., Smith, L. & Noah, D. The Value of Serious Play. Educational Technology. November-December, 1998.

Reeves, T (2000) Enhancing the Worth of Instructional Technology Research through “Design Experiments” and Other Development Research Strategies. Paper presented at American Educational Research Association Conference, April 2000

Stacey, R.E. (1996). Complexity and creativity in organizations. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.

Weick, K. (1993) Organizational Redesign as Improvisation. In Huber, G., & Glick, W. Organizational Change and Redesign: Ideas and Insights for Improving Performance. Oxford University Press.

Weick, K. (1998) Improvisation as a Mindset for Organizational Analysis. Organization Science, Vol 9, No 5, September-October.