2021 – Academic Plan Redux (ADDIE vs SAM – Planning well to adjust easily)

Just two weeks ago I posted my plan for the academic calendar this spring. Most of the areas have no real need for an update other than various levels of progress on them, but one has had to completely change.

During the fall I refinanced my house, and unfortunately found out how stunningly incompetent nearly everyone who works for Rocket Mortgage is at their jobs. My frustration level was so high that I forgot I had chosen to have the escrow check sent to me instead of rolling into the new mortgage.

I’ve only owned the house for 2 years so there wasn’t much in it. With that said, the amount was enough to cover paying off my Citi card, my new denture, and replace my personal PC (it was 4 years old, the battery was about to die, and the case broke last year). That means I had to figure out brand new semester goals while keeping my yearly goal in place.

While I was doing that, I saw an opportunity to follow a fairly basic design scenario where deciding which framework to use is part of the design process. In academia, the standard design model is ADDIE. If you’re rebuilding a course or program completely, or designing something new from scratch, you’re probably going to use ADDIE at least as a loose guide. On the other hand, if you’re doing a partial redesign, or assessing what you built and updating according to received feedback, you’ll use a more agile method like SAM.

That leads to a few obvious questions: What is ADDIE? What is SAM? How do you determine which one to use now?

What is ADDIE?

ADDIE is a five step process for designing just about any kind of product which has been used extensively in academia, especially as part of the instructional/learning design field.

A = Analyze

You start by assessing the project by trying to identify the needs and other examples of the product you’re designing. When my doctoral cohort helped redesign the M.Ed. program in our department, we did things like getting student and alumni feedback on the current program, evaluating other similar programs at quality universities, and interviewing faculty (both at our university and others) to get their suggestions.

D = Design

Once you’ve assessed the needs, you begin to design the new or updated product. At this stage you’re likely not building anything new, but focusing on combining what exists with the information and examples you’ve gathered to sketch out potential solutions. This might be combining or splitting classes, introducing new classes or removing existing classes, or simply throwing everything out and starting over.

D = Develop

This is where you start developing actual products. From the program redesign, this involved everything from restructuring the course plan to developing prototypes of new assignments and concepts for presentation to faculty and fellow students. This allows for some quick feedback, but almost all of these will be used in the new product or redesign.

I = Implement

You actually put the product out there. Whether it’s a client, or a faculty member teaching the first iteration of a newly designed course, this is where the rubber meets the road and you actually begin to see if what you made is any good. You’re not fully evaluating yet, but initial feedback will likely guide the “final” step of the process.

E = Evaluate

The form this takes will depend on the product and audience, but this should be a formal feedback process of some sort along with the designers revisiting the product to make adjustments if/where needed. In a redesigned college program, this got tied into both student and faculty course feedback after the new ideas or courses were first implemented.

What is SAM?

SAM is the Successive Approximation Model. The short version is that this is agile design for education and educational research.

Depending on the product, this could be your starting design model. In education, this hasn’t been popular in the past but it is gaining market share as a way to keep evaluating existing programs to help determine if major changes are needed without a full formal ADDIE process being undertaken.

You put together a new iteration of anything from introductory course videos and syllabus templates to the layout of a full degree program. Once that first iteration is implemented, you immediately begin evaluating feedback and designing the next iteration. On the research side of things, this has gone so far as designing research projects that include 3-4 iterations and at least that many papers as part of the proposal stage, and is usually referred to as either Design Based Research (DBR) or Educational Design Research (EDR).

Where does this fit with a quarter/semester plan?

I did a loose version of ADDIE to set up my yearly goals and develop the first semester objectives with strategies to accomplish them. Since the vast majority can’t really be completed early, they’ll go through a reevaluation near the end of April to set up for the summer. That leaves SAM, an agile redesign of one element of a larger design, as the easiest way to adjust on the fly.

My financial goals for the semester are done, and there are 14-15 weeks left in it. Instead of starting from scratch again, I took some of the ideas I had been bouncing around for potential future objectives and gave them a quick re-evaluation to implement them for the spring. Here’s what I ended up with:

Finance

Objective – Increase car payment to pay off early and avoid some of the interest charges.

• Strategy – Refinance car to lower APR (done – dropped 2.5%)
• Strategy – Use extra funds to make extra payments
• Strategy – Increase payment to $400 (payment is now $335)

Objective – Increase education funding to pay for Fall semester in full in case full amount is owed. Once complete, begin building emergency fund.

• Strategy – Increase monthly sinking fund deposit to $350 (currently $150)
• Strategy – Use entire tax return (if any) to fund envelope/bucket
• Strategy – Fully fund fall (likely $4500) then reduce to $150 again for spring 2022 (likely $1500 total)