Agile Project Management in e-Learning

Megan Torrance's ATD article Demystifying Agile in Instructional Design is an excellent think piece on agile in instructional design. A famous car company ended my relationship with them as a client in part because I said Agile and instructional design are incompatible.

I was wrong about that. But equally wrong is the wholesale, square peg in round hole effort by people in love with agile in software development to force e-Learning into the mold. 

Here's a summary of differences according to Torrance:

• Objectives and performance outcomes are as important as functions and features.
• Instructional designers (IDs) tend to work on multiple projects at once whereas software developers tend to work on a single project to the exclusion of all else. Even within a large project with several smaller projects that dovetail into it - it's still multiple small projects, each with tasks, each with a story, each with sprints. Not the same as software development whereby you're working on as single product or set of features for NOW.
• IDs are at the mercy of subject matter experts. They can't sit in a JAD session and work with a SME because the SME may have other, more important fish to fry. I've seen e-Learning developers swear they're going to have a talk with the SMEs manager. Sometimes that works. Sometimes it doesn't. Mostly it doesn't. When a topic is highly technical or there isn't any documentation to get an ID started they may not get far at all. That defeats the whole Agile methodology.

I'd like to add a few more differences:

• Non-academic content can be thought of as features and functions because that content is a bit more amenable to packaging in ways that are similar to software.
• Academic content is often more fluid or perhaps has objectives that are tougher to define. This causes issues when matching content to outcomes that are harder to define. The content doesn't match precisely or requires enhancement and that slows things down.
• Agile focuses on getting it done. Defining a project using stories nails down the project. Stories are tougher for some kinds of e-Learning for instance. How do you nail down say Improving Interpersonal Communications Skills. The stories might take in some but not all of the skills required for a learner because the stories are inadequate. 
• When we develop with inadequate stories in software features and benefits they can be worked out as you go along. If you produce a course that does not meet learner requirements in academia the consequences can be serious.

Demystifying Agile in Instruction Design, Torrance, Megan, March 7, 2018 https://www.td.org/insights/demystifying-agile-in-instructional-design

Ivanka Trump the Baker's Daughter

Ivanka Trump: the Baker's Daughter

 

Dateline: Saturday, June 6, 2020

 

Ivanka Trump May Not Be the Baker’s Wife, But She is the Baker’s Daughter

 

On May 28^th, President Trump tweeted, “these THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won't let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!”

 

On May 29^th, 2020, President Trump went to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center. The White House asserts that the President was there for a “tiny little short period of time”, less than a half hour, was the allegation.

 

This gave the impression the President had lost control of the area around the White House. Fact or fiction didn’t matter as the optics created were so very bad.

 

The French people affectionately termed their King, Louis XIV and his wife, the later “Austrian whore”, Marie Antoinette, the baker and his wife, and children.ˆ As with our President this irony would haunt them.

 

It was either Marie Antoinette or Marie-Thérèse, wife of Louis XV who said, “Illls n’ont pas de pain, qu’ils mangent de la brioche”. Which was translated, if they don’t have bread, let them eat cake.) The mistranslation plagues Marie-Antoinette’s memory to this day. “Let them eat cake” is certainly one of the most quoted phrases in history. You will see later why the irony, which abounds, fits the President, our “baker” and his “daughter of the baker” so very well.

 

The Baker Goes to the ‘Cathedral’

 

On Thursday June 4, 2020, President Trump and his advisors, partially at the advice of the Kusher’s made their way to St. John’s Church, a short walk from the White House compound. Sadly, the baker, as Louis XV, our own President Trump whose own minister of justice, his Attorney General, Barr, had remove the protestors.

 

This isn’t the first time a President has removed protesters. On July 28, 1932, US Attorney General William D Mitchell ordered veterans removed from all government property. Army Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur commanded a contingent of infantry and cavalry, supported by six tanks. It seemed heavy handed at the time, to remove the bonus army, and if this didn’t enable FDR to sail into the White House, it certainly gave him a wider berth.

 

The “Bougie” Protesters are Removed

 

On Monday June 2, 2020, Attorney General William Barr ordered the removal of protestors who had gathered near the White House, minutes before the President’s Rose Garden address. This ahead of fires and destruction that had occurred Sunday night and might have recurred during Trump’s speech.

 

 

 

 

The Baker’s Daughter and Her Ivory Bag

 

Presidential advisor Ivanka Trump had to have something to carry the Holy Bible in. After all she couldn’t simply carry it. And what if she needed her phone or something else? Whether a Kushner aid was at hand or not history will have to tell us. So could she have avoided the obvious faux pas or not?

Trump advisor Ivanka Trump Kushner brought the bible the president would use in her $1,480 Max Mara ivory bag to the event. As pepper pot gas was being hurled at protestors.

 

If people worry about Joe Biden’s obvious guffaws, they needn’t, because advisor Ivanka Trump Kushner, has topped the brioche with fine, French beurre (butter) and jam. Oh for the days of Freedom Fries, some conservatives lament.

 

Ivanka and her ivory bag

 

 

President Trump held up the bible in front of the closed church. Little wonder the photo op backfired. Bishop Mariann Budde, Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington expressed outrage because the fact that the President used the property as a backdrop for a photo op while protestors were being dragged off was not only bad optics for the diocese but went to the core of the reason why the protest happened in the first place. The heavy hand of the state had killed a black man. It didn’t need to be impressed that the black man once again was under attack.

 

The Gigantic Fire That Never Was

 

Protests resulted in a small fire in the basement level nursery of Ashburton House. The little fire wrecked the nursey room, but otherwise only graffiti resulted. The President falsely claimed the church was firebombed.

 

Herbert Hoover didn’t have a daughter with a designer bag. He didn’t have a complex history, he had men who were demanding they be paid for their service in WWI early. They were after all starving to death.

 

Instead of learning from another conservative millionaire that optics don’t matter if you replace them with worse optics, our current President seems oblivious. His daughter, the reasonable one, the relatively “woke” and perhaps liberal Trump, caught by a purse that in its gleaming white presence seemed to make things even worse. The fact that she pulled the bible from the purse was perhaps lost on Trump. Perhaps it was lost on most. Even CNN.com barely reported it.

 

The ill-fated Max Mara purse

 

 

Brioche Recipe

 

In honor of Mrs. Jared Kushner, brioche.

 

http://www.thefrenchlife.org/2018/08/24/classicbrioche/

 

 

 

 

 

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