S3E5: Jeremy Tuttle ~ Answer prompted, Answer given

Show Notes

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Jeremy Tuttle is the Director of Learning Design for Niche Academy where he leads a fantastic team of creative people. He has designed instruction for asynchronous online delivery since 2016 and has been in the education space since 2009. While At Niche Academy he has overseen the creation of over 400 tutorials, and for his previous employer he wrote microcredentials on topics like Criteria and Rubrics and Formative/Summative Assessments. He has a Bachelors of Science in Digital Film and Video Production from the Art Institute of Salt Lake City, and he will graduate in Spring 2023 with an M.Ed in Instructional Design from the University of Massachusetts Boston. 

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What is Demystifying Instructional Design?

Instructional designers specializes in the creation of learning solutions. In this podcast, Rebecca J Hogue interviews instructional designers from a variety of different fields, with the goal of gaining a better understanding of what instructional designers do. The role of instructional designers varies across contexts including formal education, corporate sector, healthcare, non-profit, military, government, and more. Further the types of learning solutions created by instructional designers varies including learning programs, semester length courses, short workshops, eLearning, and job aids. Join Rebecca as she demystifies instructional design.

Welcome to Demystifying Instructional Design, a podcast where I interview various instructional designers to figure out what instructional designers do.

I'm Rebecca Hogue, your podcast host.

If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider subscribing or leaving a comment on the show notes blog post and consider helping to support the podcast with a donation to my Patreon account.

Welcome, Jeremy, to Demystifying Instructional Design, a podcast where I interview instructional designers about what they do.

My first question for you is going to be can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Absolutely.

And thank you for having me here, Rebecca.

I've listened to a few episodes and I love what I'm hearing from it and I'm so excited to join the space, join the conversation.

So my name's Jeremy Tuttle.

I'm the Director of Learning Design at Niche Academy or Niche Academy, depending on where you live or whether you call it a creek or a crick.

Niche Academy provides a learning management system and content creation tool primarily to public libraries.

But we can be used by anybody.

And my role within the company is providing learning materials, what we call tutorials, to our customers.

Awesome.

And can you tell us a little bit about how you got to where you are today?

Absolutely.

So I started my career back in 2009 working for a company called School Improvement Network.

And I started at the very bottom, very bottom rung of the ladder.

I was a transcriptionist, so the film crew would go out to a location, they'd film something, they'd bring it back as well before AI generated transcripts of videos.

So I had to sit down in front of that computer for four hours a day and type out what people were saying.

And fun fact, if you want to get better at typing, become a transcriptionist.

I started that job typing 30 words per minute.

I ended at 75 words per minute.

So highly, highly recommend.

As I was working there, I was getting a degree in digital film and video production and my plan was to move from that transcriptionist position to working on the film crew in some capacity.

And that's exactly what happened.

I graduated with my bachelor's.

They pulled me on full time and I became an assistant editor.

So the videos that School Improvement Network produced was professional development videos for teachers, specifically K through 12.

They go find master teachers, figure out how they were teaching their best practices, how they incorporated standards, all that good stuff.

So as I was editing these videos, I started like kind of hooking on to to the concepts.

It became interesting to me to see how a specific teacher would handle a certain situation or how they present information differently from a different teacher.

And over time, the higher ups at the company noticed that I was taking an interest and they started to feed that interest.

I started getting reading assignments and the first one that I got was, Why are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?

by Beverly Tatum. A fantastic book, fantastic read on the impact of race and education.

And once they saw that I actually engaged with the material, they decided to give me a promotion.

They promoted me to being a writer of the videos, and that was a really steep learning curve, trying to effectively teach teachers how to teach, though I've never taught myself and it's a really high bar and I spent the first year just learning as much as I could.

Luckily, I'd spent the previous five to six years observing teachers, whether it was through the transcriptioning, or through the editing process.

So I had a general, I absorbed that information over time, but it really took actually teaching to really get a grasp.

So I taught film to middle schoolers for two years.

It was through what was called a Discovery Program at a local elementary middle school.

And that that was a really fun time, not only developing my own curriculum for the class, my own materials, getting to talk with all the students, see them in real time, engage with the materials I provided, that I just I loved seeing that, loved seeing them become better filmmakers, you know, even though they were ages 9 to 14, I had a full range.

It was fifth to ninth grade in that class.

And when I did that, I realized maybe this is something that I could do more of.

And around the time that I finished with the class, there was a restructuring at School Improvement Network to where we were no longer just providing instructional videos.

We were going to become the learning experience team.

And as part of that transition, I then became a curriculum developer.

I had to take on research.

responsibilities, had to start thinking about how you design for online learning, not just video itself.

Video can be a good part of it, but that doesn't necessarily make it the best piece to deliver something.

And from there I had a great nurturing environment.

Great bosses who saw potential in me that I didn't see myself, continued to feed me more books, and I wound up near the end of my tenure there developing a couple micro-credentials specifically on rubrics and criteria and formative and summative assessment.

Those two are my favorite ones.

And then the company got sold to another company and I lost my job more or less, so needing to go somewhere else.

I had been doing some contract work with Niche Academy writing tutorials for their public library customers.

They brought me on and a couple of years later we're where we are now and we're building, in my opinion, some of the best distance asynchronous learning materials that you can find.

And I'm super proud of the team that we have.

Can you tell me a little bit more about the Micro-credentials?

Like what does that entail?

What does it mean to say that you were creating Micro-credentials?

Absolutely.

Great question.

So the micro-credentials that we were producing at School Improvement Network specifically focused on discrete skills for teachers that needed more than just a small bit of information.

There was a lot of microlearning discussion rolling around at the time, and while we did provide Microlearning pieces, the micro- credential was meant to really pull a bunch of things together, create a solid understanding, and then also the credential part of the micro-credential, there was a credentialing process, so we weren't looking to produce a college level course experience, but something that if you had strung multiple micro-credentials together, it could equate to a college level course and the company provided assessors, creditors, all that stuff.

I can't remember the exact details of who was credentialing us, but it wasn't ourselves.

And the I'll talk about the formative and summative micro-credentials because that one was my favorite.

I'm one of the few instructional designers who hears the word assessment and I perk my ears and go, oh yes, you want to talk, you want to talk assessment.

I love it.

So that one was encouraging teachers to think outside of how they did traditional formative and summative assessment.

If you go back to your childhood years, it seems to be ever present, no matter how old you are, that the teacher would give you a piece of paper with a couple of questions.

You answer the questions that would be your quiz, and they would treat that as their formative assessment.

And then at the very end, there was either a test or an essay, sometimes a portfolio, but not too often.

And those are perfectly fine, suitable assessments.

But there's so many more ways you can get that across.

Get that information to yourself, get the information back to the students.

So we were encouraging our learners, the teachers, to apply different methods.

So the course material is focused on the difference between binary multiple choice questions if you have to go that kind of route.

And also when a short answer versus a long form answer would be better in a more qualitative assessment.

And then for summative assessments, really pushing more mastery based methods, portfolios being the strongest case or having them do a project, do anything related to the course material that would result in demonstration of mastery. And usually an essay, unless it's an English class, doesn't lead to that demonstration.

So, if you're in a shop class, make the thing you know, if you are in a social studies class, maybe it's a video, a documentary of stuff you found while doing your historical research, stuff like that.

At some point in time in your career, you decided to go back to school.

Can you tell us sort of how you ended up in a master's program?

Ah, yeah.

So in 2019, I'd been with Niche Academy for two years and we were getting to the point where I felt we were stable in what we were providing, but I didn't know what I don't know.

And I felt that there was a gap in my understanding.

I'd had a lot of hands on experience through the work that I did at School Improvement Network making the micro-credentials, but that was to a very specific audience with very specific standards and outcomes for what I needed to make, and I'd never explored beyond that.

And as I was building out the team at Niche Academy and seeing into the future in my directorial role, trying to make sure that we we were making progress, we're going somewhere.

I saw this giant mass of nothing where maybe there's something I'm missing and if I'm going to avoid it and make something that's less useful or not as good for our customers, we're not going to make the impact we need to make.

So I started looking around for instructional design programs, so they could fill in that knowledge hole in my brain.

And I stumbled upon the University of Massachusetts Boston program, and I loved it because of the focus on adult learners.

There's so many programs that focus on K through 12 student experience, and while that's very good and valid to learn, it just didn't apply to my application.

I have primarily adult learners.

I have learners from all over the nation, various levels of education.

I need to really understand how to present to adults in that capacity, because unlike students who are stuck in a classroom, I need to hook in and really engage an adult learner.

So I applied, got in, loved it.

First class was with you, Rebecca, I took 601 and 602 concurrently, that very first semester and boy was that a ride.

As soon as I finished those two classes, I knew this program.

The program was for me because it immediately filled in a couple holes.

The first one to come to mind is connectivism.

I had a solid understanding of behaviorism, a pretty good grasp on cognitivism, but connectivism never heard of it, didn't understand it at all.

So having that understanding really shifted how we presented the information that we were putting forth for our customers.

Instead of requiring learners to demonstrate understanding of everything put in front of them, we instead shifted to can they pull that information when they need it?

We have all the information here in the tutorial unless they're going to apply it day in, day out.

They don't need to have it in their working memory.

So how do we make it as easy for them to find it and connect to it and still be effective?

That was the main reason why I wanted to go back to school was get information like that and really pull it in.

And there are a couple other nuggets here and there throughout the program that have really stuck with me and really improved my practice.

And I'm so glad to have gone through the process.

Can you share another nugget?

I think that's fascinating to hear what were those key gaps in that understanding?

Because one of the big questions that comes up is, is do I do a master's program or do I just do a quick and dirty certificate?

Do I go to something like Idol courses?

Like, what do I do?

And one of the bits of advice I always give is you go to a master's program because you want a master's, right?

Because it you know, it is a bit of a journey, right?

Like it is that.

But I'm curious, sort of what were those those gaps that got filled?

Yeah, great question.

The structure provided by the master's program forced me to go through things that I probably wouldn't have done if I were doing a self paced environment.

One of the classes was research, of course, and the research it was taught by Carol Sharicz, a lovely, lovely instructor.

The the purpose of the course was to explore a problem in your organization or your life or something, and then deep dive into some research.

And at the time there were some feedback problems going on with some other people within the company, mainly in the process of providing feedback, not necessarily that feedback wasn't being provided or that the feedback was harmful, harmful or anything like that.

It was just more that the process wasn't particularly clear.

The outcomes of the feedback could have been improved.

So I dug into the research and as I was doing that, I stumbled upon a way of thinking about feedback that improved the way that I delivered it.

And that's the expectation of the person who's receiving feedback.

The way it was described was there are two kinds people who just want the answer, and the people who want to struggle through.

So I call it answer prompted, answer given.

So when you want the answer given, that's really great for things like structural engineering.

You have a team who's building a bridge.

They go to a civil engineer and they say, civil engineer, is there anything wrong with my bridge?

It would be really annoying for that engineer to say, yeah, something's not quite right.

What do you think could be improved?

The team there, the construction team's gonna be like, no, no, no, that's not my job.

That's your job.

Tell me what's wrong and we'll fix it.

Right?

They need the answer given.

And then the other side of the coin for answer prompted is think about a philosophy student.

You know, somebody who's going for the full philosophy PhD.

They've put their thesis together.

They turn it over to their advisor, and the advisor says, the way you are thinking about this issue is wrong and this is how it should be done.

Right?

Philosophy is notoriously not that way.

You know, you figure your own means of thinking and then there's basic structures.

Maybe you could do that with the grammar.

But when it comes to the idea you want to, you want to prompt the answer, you say something's not working here.

Here's what I think isn't working.

How might you address it?

Right?

So in thinking of those two different sides you have what people expect, what people want.

And for me personally, I want answer prompted most of the time.

I want I want to think through I want to truly understand what I'm doing.

But if I forget a period at the end of a sentence, I'm totally fine with somebody saying, hey, you forgot a period, right! Right there.

There it goes.

Thank you so much.

So when I was talking with my colleague about how to provide the feedback, it was creating that understanding because what he was doing was always just answer given everything was answer given, doesn't matter because you need help.

All right, here's the answer.

Just go, right?

And for for the people on that team, it was like, well, I guess I don't have a lot of autonomy.

I guess I just need to do it this way, no matter what.

So helping that person see and understand how they can do more answer prompted get get more creative responses.

Get them to think about what they need to do and that was a great help, great change in my practice and I wouldn't have had it had I not been in that research class.

Hmm.

That's fascinating.

That is actually quite fascinating.

So I'm going to go back to one of my sort of basic questions here.

What skills do you find most useful in what you do?

Ah.

What skills do I find most useful in what I do?

I'm no longer deep in the trenches or as deep in the trenches as I used to be.

So I recently designed a course for my capstone, but other than that, I'm probably not on on the front line making things.

So right now for my role, the most important element is project management.

Just making sure that the people on my team have things that they can work on that they're never sitting idle and that they always feel supported.

That's that's my biggest thing.

When I am designing, the biggest skill would have to be understanding how to structure the information so that it is as absorbable as possible.

Not not to throw shade on any other designer, but there are some courses that I've encountered where it's just kind of throw the information at the wall, and I know this information needs to be included, so I'm just going to put it in.

But there's not a lot of thought put into how it's sequenced, how how a learner would get from point A to point B to point C, It's just here's the information.

And in some some cases, the ideas are pretty disparate.

They're not too tied together.

So it kind of allows itself to do that.

But even in those cases, there are times where you need to think through, if I'm approaching this new topic, where do I start and how does that logically progress down the road?

Mmm...

Mmm.

Mmm.

That's great.

That's awesome.

So let's turn a little bit to... you hire instructional designers.

Do you have instructional designers on your team?

What are the things you look for when you're hiring an instructional designer?

Great question, and I'm going to give a very controversial answer.

I don't necessarily look for their skills in instructional design.

I look for their ability to write clear, coherent English.

That is the very first thing I look at.

And a big part of that is because the designer puts together all the materials that support the rest of the process and eventually gets shown to the customer.

So if they aren't able to clearly and concisely state something, it's really hard for me as as a leader to help other people see that and do that.

It's it's a somewhat ephemeral skill in my opinion.

It can be practiced, it can be taught.

But in terms of it being picked up and executed, in my experience, and maybe I'm not doing it right, it's it's difficult to teach that skill.

So that's the very top one.

Yeah.

And you know what's interesting is, my background, I actually did a certificate in technical writing, for just that reason.

Right.

Because you do have to, especially when you're creating online and e-learning stuff, you do a lot of writing and you've got to be good at putting it out there, saying it, but also like writing really good instructions and understanding how to make parallel bullet points and that kind of stuff.

So yeah, I think that I don't think there's any controversy at all in that.

But how do you find that out?

So as part of my interviewing process, or the hiring process, the first thing I do is I always say include a portfolio, or a written sample.

I need to see a written sample.

It can be provided in a portfolio.

Sometimes I'll be a little lenient and go with a cover letter, because a cover letter is theoretically written by the applicant.

And I just look at grammar, look at spelling, but I don't look at the substance at all.

That's the first thing I look for.

If I see grammar errors, spelling errors, I just I'm going to move on because I got other applicants who are meeting those standards.

It's a harsh reality as a hiring manager that you just can't put too much attention to everybody.

The last time I hired for an instructional designer position, I had 70 applicants.

And I don't have a HR team that'll go through and cull the the applicants down to, you know, these are who we think would be a good fit.

I have to do that myself.

So if I'm really critically thinking about all 70, it's going to take me a month to go through all those applicants.

So I really have to do a quick and dirty this is my baseline.

Is it there? Great.

Now I can engage my real critical thinking brain.

How were they applying the principles of ADDIE, SAM, whatever they have in their portfolio or their piece?

And how are they measuring learner outcomes, if there are any representations of that in the portfolio itself?

And that'll help me put together the list of who I interview.

So how does somebody stand out?

They've got a portfolio.

How... what do they do to stand out from the 70 other people?

Another great question. For what I look for, including a tiny bit of color in the resume...

It helps me remember what resumes I have looked at.

So do a little bit of styling on the resume, not too much.

Don't go adding like a paisley background and giant blocks of shapes everywhere.

Just just a little thing to help me remember that yes, I have seen this resume and cue me in to what I had seen in it before.

Education, great. Experience, great. For me.

I don't really look at the personal interests or the stuff like that.

I know that there are some people who say that that's a really good way of humanizing you, but also in some ways that can be a detriment.

Having that in, say, say I don't like Bocce ball and you love Bocce ball. Even if I'm not really thinking about it, it can in some ways the back of my head say I put a little distance between me and the applicant.

I try very actively not to do that, which is why I don't read them.

But little thing to be aware of with a hiring manager, if there's an element on it that they don't like personally, even though it has no impact on your your work as as a person, it might be there.

Another element that suggested to hiring managers is like removing the names off, of the applicants because people who have non-Western names typically are selected less.

That's not on you, that's not on your name, it's on the hiring manager.

So as part of my hiring practice, if I see a name I can't pronounce, I actively look at that resume because maybe somebody else didn't give them a chance, which means I get the chance of having a great worker who just happens to have a cool name.

I agree completely that it really is.

It is the hiring manager's responsibility to remove that bias.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

To actively remove that bias.

So what are the biggest mistakes people make?

That's a real good question and it's something that comes up a lot in my hiring process.

I state very explicitly for instructional designers to include the writing sample or portfolio for other people on my team, I have various other creatives.

I have illustrators, Video editors. I always say include a portfolio.

If you don't include a portfolio, I'm not considering you.

I'm sorry, it's there in the post.

It's a request, and I hate to think that I've passed up on somebody who would have been perfect for the position only because they missed that piece.

So read a job, posting through, figure out what they're requesting, and then after that bit, the next biggest mistake is probably overdoing it.

So during my hiring process, I ask the applicant to produce something for an instructional designer.